“It was as that search party was forming that we began to have indications of the outcome of his departure,” General John Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. He was talking about how an American sergeant walked off his base toward village homes where, allegedly, he murdered children and grownups, sixteen in all. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote more about the massacre yesterday, as did I.) General Allen declined to name the sergeant, in order “to protect the investigation.” He said that he didn’t know yet what role P.T.S.D. or the sergeant’s three previous tours might have played—those would be subjects for investigators. (CNN, citing a Defense official, said that the soldier had had a traumatic brain injury, “but was found fit for duty.”) There are dozens of other factual questions, before one even gets to the moral ones. Years of war and night raids make the narrative even harder to sort out.
First, in the early hours of Sunday, there was noise. “I told my son not to speak because the Americans are here,” an Afghan woman told the BBC. “They went next door and the first thing they did was shoot the dog. And then there was a muffled bang inside the room—but who could go and see?”
A mother using the word “Americans” to scare her child into silence is alone cause for reflection. And “who could go and see”? Despite the dark and noise and confusion—was there more than one soldier? A helicopter?—some Afghans in the village saw something. Here is what another woman told the BBC:
There was one man, and he dragged a woman by her hair and banged her head repeatedly against the wall. She didn’t say a word.
And Mohammad Zahir, age twenty-six, to the AP:
He was walking around taking up positions in the house—in two or three places like he was searching… He was on his knees when he shot my father…[My father] was not holding anything—not even a cup of tea.
Abdul Hadi, age forty, to the Times.
My father went out to find out what was happening, and he was killed… I was covered by the women in my family in my room, so that is why I survived.
