Analysis: Searching for truth in Afghan massacre
Afghan villagers pray during a ceremony for the victims of Sunday's massacre of civilians, in Panjwai, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, March 13, 2012. / AP Photo/Allauddin Khan
Analysis by CBS News Afghanistan consultant Jere van Dyk
(CBS News) The shooting apparently took place in Panjawaii (as it is spelled on my Afghan map), 15 miles southwest of Kandahar. The city itself (once a quiet, romantic oasis of canals, palm trees and fruit stands piled high, but no longer), is small. But the whole area for miles around is a vast warren of baked, single-story mud homes, and higher houses with holes in the sides, where they dry grapes. In between there are small plots of land, some with trenches where they grow grapes, and there are groves of pomegranate trees, and villages filled with cousins, large clans and tribal loyalty.
A former soldier, Graeme Woods, who has worked in this region, wrote a rather condescending article in The New York Times on Friday explaining how primitive these homes are - in part, it seems, to help explain why the shooter might have felt like he was on another planet, going through his "umpteenth spacewalk," in this "Potemkin village."
While the U.S. has characterized last weekend's massacre as an assault by a lone person, villagers said - and Karzai at least publicly seemed to agree - that they believed more than one shooter took part in the massacre. Karzai said the U.S. Army was impeding the Afghans' investigation.
Now this gets interesting. The West will not believe the Afghans, only the Americans. But be careful.
In 2006, I went up into the mountains where Pat Tillman was killed. I took a video and still cameras, the U.S. Army report (which Tillman's father gave me), and Afghan guides. I went over the terrain twice, in two trips, and read the report carefully. I interviewed every Afghan I could find who was there that day, separately, at different locations, never telling one that I was interviewing the other. Their stories, and the video, were different from the Army's report, especially if one includes what the U.S. soldiers who were with Tillman said.
As Mary Tillman's book "Boots on the Ground by Dusk" and Jon Krakauer's book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman" have shown, the U.S. Army, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal, did not tell the truth, to put it mildly.
Bales probably acted alone, but there may be more to this.
One of the houses has four rooms, a big house. Adults sleep separately from the children, if possible. They, like any couple, want privacy. The father was away. The dirt floors are generally swept clean and can even shine. The families would have slept on narrow wood cots with crossed rope bottoms and thin mattresses, or they slept on thin cushions, on the ground, or on kilims or capets.
The shooter must have dragged them or carried them from their cots, if they slept on them, and put them all together in one room. Karzai said it wasn't possible. I don't know, but how could the soldier do this without worrying about other villagers coming? But then, maybe he didn't care. Would other villagers have cowered in their homes, afraid, or would some have come out?
Yes, Afghans lie, definitely, beautifully, extravagantly. But in my experience they also more often than not tell the truth. We will see.
In my view this case offers two possibilities regarding the villagers: (1) They do not like American soldiers, for so many of them to say that other soldiers were present, meaning that as a rule they are afraid of them; or (2) that they were ashamed over not responding as Afghan men, and thereby let one person massacre their neighbors.
An Afghan delegation walks with locals after a memorial ceremony in Kandahar province, March 13, 2012.
/ JANGIR/AFP/Getty ImagesIn traditional Pashtun culture, in war one must protect women and children. It would have taken time, I would think, to move all the bodies, cover them and set them on fire.
In Islam, in Afghanistan, a body must be washed and cleaned when the person enters Paradise. Mohammad Atta washed himself before beginning his mission on 9/11. The bodies were burned, and thus desecrated. The assailant's act, to an Afghan, was thus beyond cruelty. Will those children now never be able to enter Paradise?
I have been told that the Taliban cut off heads (which they learned from al Qaeda) in part so that the victim cannot go to Paradise. The body is not whole. We shall see how the mullahs react.
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True. I've written extensively about how President Obama and the Democratic Congress contined the Bush Administration's white-wash of Gen. McChrystal's central role in the Army's cover-up of Tillman's 2004 friendly-fire death (for details, see posts at the feralfirefighter blog).
The best book I've read on the Afghan war is Michael Hasting's new book, "The Operators." He discusses both Gen. McChrystal and why he believes the Afghan war is the "wrong war, in the wrong place."
@joelycra: Thank you for the link to an Afghan news source with states their parliamentary probe concluded there were at least 20 troops, split into 2 villages. However, a later article states the Elders rejected the probe's assertion women were sexually assaulted.
These countries existed long before the US was even thought about.
Just their ideas of justice (beheading, stoning people to death, cutting off the hands of children for stealing bread etc,) shows how much they developed as a people.
Our goal in Afghanistan was to get bin-Laden.
Turns out our "allies?"; the Pakistanis'; had been hiding him for seven of the ten plus years we have had boots on the ground.
It makes no difference wether our troops leave Afghanistan tomorrow or in 2014.
The barbacic civilizations will return to their former ways the day after we pull out.
The U.S. soldier was not right in what he did, but working in circumstances where people boo you, insult you, kill you, threaten you, it becomes difficult to differentiate between a friend and a foe. Something must have provoked the soldier to take this extreme but unjustified step.
U.S.A. get out of Afghanistan and let Afghans and other arab people kill each other. There would be that many barbarians less in this world.
Whether or not there was a 2nd or 3rd man is trumped by the actual fact that there are other such ticking time bombs in Afghan and that no amount of training, counseling, punishment or whatever will stop them from exploding to. Their is no remedy except to withdraw and withdraw now. The culture within our troops was simply to survive, look after their buddies and then come home safe. Now, they have added contempt for the very folks they are supposed to win the minds and hearts from. That is impossible now.
I suppose the domestic cases must also be some kind of stress and should be excused, no?
Remember the big General had just "begged" his troops to not take revenge due to some deaths after the Koran burnings. I guess that plea fell on deaf ears ...