Way to calm things down, Barry.
We should never have treated the Koran burnings as worthy of outrage or investigation. Now we’re about to bust five of our troops. They and their families will be permanently impacted by this, to say nothing of the six American troops murdered over the course of the riots.
U.S. military officials said that although the five service members will be reprimanded, it is unlikely that their names will be released or that their punishment will approach the severity of what some Afghans are demanding, including trial in an Islamic court.
“For the soldiers, it will be serious — they could lose rank. But you’re not going to see the kind of public trial that some here seem to want,” said one U.S. military official.
Another military official said: “What they did was careless, but there was no ill will.”
The lack of ill will does not matter. The obvious ill will of the Afghan troops who murdered ours doesn’t matter either, though it should. Some Afghan clerics need to be told to go pound sand.
Senior Afghan clerics, in a statement issued after a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, said: “This evil action cannot be forgiven by apologizing. The perpetrators of the mentioned crime should be put on a public trial as soon as possible.”
That isn’t going to happen, nor should it. The Afghan street may find our unwillingness to behead our own troops because they committed an accidental act that is not illegal under the UCMJ yet another excuse to riot and kill again.
They’re now demanding control of the very prison where terrorists were using the Korans to pass messages around. Let them have it, along with the rest of their country.
Afghanistan isn’t fixable. Things may calm down temporarily, then there will be another inadvertent incident, which will provide more excuses for our allies to turn on us and kill our troops, and more demands from the irrational cavemen who pass as clerics. Karzai will go on being his corrupt, duplicitous self until someone replaces him. That country simply isn’t worth our blood and effort.
h/t Hot Air
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