Hajj Samad, an elder of the Afghanistan village where a U.S. sergeant recently massacred 16 civilians, is concerned. Robert Bales, the sergeant charged with the killings, will likely be tried in the U.S. and the victimized community is worried such a trial will not bring him to justice.
“We want the prosecution of this American soldier in Afghanistan, not in the U.S., because he committed the crime in Afghanistan,” Samad said in an interview with Al Jazeera. “Why he is going to be prosecuted in the U.S.? If this man is prosecuted in Afghanistan, we will be relieved. If he is prosecuted in the U.S., we will be angry and it will remain a pain in our hearts.”
Given the news surrounding this case, Samad’s worries are understandable. Many stories focus on the reasons why Bales might be exonerated. U.S. officials and Bales’s attorney, John Henry Browne, have been suggesting that Bales has Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), even though he was not previously diagnosed.
Browne has even suggested that Bales is likely to get off in an American trial just because Afghanistan lacks the expensive investigative technology typical here.
“My first reaction to all of this is, ‘Prove it,'” Browne told Al Jazeera. “This is going to be a very difficult case for the government to prove, in my opinion. There is no CSI stuff. There’s no DNA. There’s no fingerprints.”
Recent news seems to suggest there is a double standard in terms of how Americans are treated when their actions, accidental or not, end up costing people in Muslim-majority countries their lives.
Doubtless, members of militant groups in Afgahnistan and Pakistan have suffered trauma of their own, and would likely be diagnosed with disorders like PTSD, if they had the luxury.
It is disturbing how we can guess whether a criminal will be described as a terrorist simply based upon whether or not he is Muslim. Recently, in Toulouse, France, 23-year-old Mohammed Merah admitted to killing seven in a crime eerily similar to Bales’s. Both crimes involved random shootings, and both of the murders were described as chillingly cold-blooded and methodical.
Before his death in a police raid on Thursday, Merah was not known for his piety as a Muslim, but for his delinquency and psychological fragility. Although there is no evidence Merah had ties to any larger militant group (except in his own delusions), he is called a terrorist in the media. No need for explanation. Nowhere in the American mainstream media is Bales called a terrorist, even though nine of his victims were children. Even though he is reported to have paused in the middle of his killing spree to make a pile of eleven bodies, five of them girls less than five years old, to light them on fire.
The Pentagon’s recent decision not to charge or even discipline any of the military personnel responsible for the accidental killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a November airstrike is also indicative of a double standard.
A U.S. military source told The New York Times, “We found nothing criminally negligent on the part of any individual in our investigations of the incident.” The U.S. military blames the killings on “battlefield confusion.” But the same investigation that led to the exoneration of involved troops concedes that the reason for the deadly misplaced airstrikes was a U.S. troop mapping error.
That these troops aren’t even going to receive a slap on the wrist suggests a lack of respect for the lives of Pakistani troops. According to the investigation, the air strikes were ordered in response to over-the-border shooting by Pakistani troops, which did not result in the death of any US troops.
The Pakistani army disputes this factually, saying that the U.S. was the first to fire. It is worth questioning whether an airstrike was an appropriate reaction. An airstrike 14 km off target is simply negligent, regardless of what military officials say.
This double standard for U.S. military, while arguably unsurprising, is highly damaging to the country’s reputation in the places where it matters most.
How can the U.S. government expect to find peace or even cooperation with countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan when it is constantly sending the message that it cares so little for the justice of their people?
Hannah Green is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at [email protected]
