Kabul demands local trial for US gunman

FT.com ^ | 3/13/12 | Matthew Green

[EBH]

The Afghan parliament demanded on Monday that a US soldier accused of killing 16 civilians, including nine children, be put on trial in Afghanistan as a growing tide of local anger added to the pressure on the US-led war against the Taliban.

The murders have triggered a new spike in anti-western sentiment just weeks after furious protests erupted after the discovery of burnt copies of the Koran at a US base.

US officials have rushed to condemn the killings and pledged that the accused soldier will face justice. The sergeant detained on Sunday is accused of going house to house in a remote community near Kandahar and shooting men, women and children.

The combination of resentment in Afghanistan and revulsion in the west has dealt a fresh blow to the Nato-led force struggling to convince Afghans and voters among troop-contributing nations that it is winning the war.

“Yesterday’s incident in Kandahar is inexplicable; it cannot be forgiven on any account,” said Shinki Karokheel, a member of parliament from Kabul.

Resentment has been building in Afghanistan for years over night raids by US and Afghan forces on homes sheltering Afghan insurgents and civilian casualties caused by wayward coalition air strikes...

[tet68]

Another possibility.
He may have been lured off base on one pretext or
another and then set up.
I just find it odd that we still don’t have a clue
to his identity.

[SunkenCiv]

If the Kenyan-born Muzzie agrees to this, impeachment is the best he’ll be able to do. He will be removed from office. Thanks EBH.

[fallujah-nuker]

And thirdly (and perhaps most important of all), there's always going to be a fear that this sort of episode is actually going to be far more effective in "winning" over in Afghanistan (whatever that is even supposed to mean) than any of the other nonsense the U.S. has been doing for more than a decade.

Sort of like the movie "Death Wish" where the NYC government was embarrassed by how much crime had dropped? Seeing what the guy did reminds of the movie "Patton," when Patton took command at the beginning of the movie. He found one guy sleeping, and told him to go back to sleep because he was the only guy who seemed to know what he was doing. If every GI who had been through Afghanistan had done the same, we could have avenged 9-11 a thousand fold, rather than this Sally Struthers nation building Kumbaya nonsense. Our 9-11 memorial should have been a wasteland of solitude where Kandahar once stood. The Pashtun are taking up good snow leopard habitat.