Reader claims Afghans killing US soldiers "has been going on for years”

A reader with an inside perspective responded to Chris Carter's column in late January titled ‘Afghan soldiers killing US soldiers…’ Carter is associate editor at The US Report. Carter began his column with this:

“Afghan soldiers turned guns on their US and NATO trainers more in 2011 than perhaps any other year, and the military organization running the war in Afghanistan has responded by choosing not to report details of these incidents.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission established by the UN Security Council in 2001 to secure Afghanistan, has opted to leave the announcements up to the respective nation whose soldiers are killed.”

The US Report recently received a response to Carter’s article, and the sender of the email has given us permission to publish it.

The message sender’s experience with the Afghan police originated when he served as an embedded trainer to them—he’s served in the same capacity with various branches of the military, US Customs and Border Protection and other government agencies. I kept the sender’s name private because of obvious potential damage to him professionally.

Here’s what this former embedded trainer to the Afghan police wrote in an email to TUSR:

“Chris Carter did a story on Afghans killing US Soldiers. This has been going on for years. In 2008 we had an incident in our team and 2 people were killed and several injured. One of the soldiers killed was a female Lt. There had been instances of spitting, and yelling and an escalation of events two weeks before it happened. We told them, our Intel/security guy told the unit, it was a reaction to cultural insensitivity and cultural violations and those two needed to not just stay away for awhile, they needed training and would need to go the unit to apologize. The unit blew us off.

Of course the response by the commander to the incident was to completely shut-down any interaction with the ANA [Afghan National Army]. The relationship between the ANA and that unit was never the same. Even teams with good rapport noticed that they were being treated differently.

There are many incidents such as this. I was in Afghanistan for 51 months. The [Sic]

What is sad is that the GPF does not listen to anything the Institutional Base or experienced teams have to say, we are all considered meddling pedants.”

Read the full text of  Carter’s column here at The US Report.

(Filed by Kay B. Day/Feb. 12, 2012)