After Falujah I'm prone to blame the MSM first ~ even if nothing at all happened ~ and we don't know that anything did happen.
Because it’s my brigade. I just came back from Afghanistan with them. Soldiers talk, and the talk isn’t good. So far this is the only group of Soldiers who have been accused or admitted to killing civilians, but there have been other bad incidents since we’ve come back, as well.
The commander got everyone riled up to kill, kill, kill throughout their train-up. There was barely, if any, interest in traditional counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, he was into counterguerilla. That approach is very enemy-centric, and could possibly work over there, but nobody else supports counterguerilla, only COIN. So, in order to maintain appearances, we ended up doing a half-assed version of COIN, and the Soldiers paid the price. We came out of there with a lot of casualties and a very bad reputation with the rest of the coalition forces we worked with. It was not a good year.