"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
User Login
Search This Site
Related Columns
Recent comments
-
4 weeks 1 day ago
-
12 weeks 19 hours ago
-
12 weeks 4 days ago
-
12 weeks 6 days ago
-
36 weeks 4 days ago
-
40 weeks 5 days ago
-
40 weeks 5 days ago
-
40 weeks 5 days ago
-
52 weeks 3 hours ago
-
1 year 18 weeks ago
Comments
You're right; it can't.
This story demonstrates how little the armed forces cares about it's supposed objectives in Afghanistan. What they care about is that they don't look bad. That's why there was so little effort to catch people who were undermining the political efforts of the US government (the ultimate objective of any war) and the combat efficiency of their own unit. Neither of these things matter, what matters to the army is not getting caught doing these things, or if it's impossible to cover up, making it look like it was the work of a "bad apple". You know how to tell if it's really a "bad apple"? Look at how afraid the perpetrators were of being discovered and how much they assumed others who saw suspicious things would ignore them. On both counts this isn't that.