Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was charged (see Charge Sheet here) Friday with multiple murders and attempted murders.  Sergeant Bales, confined at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has not admitted the murders, for which he faces the death penalty.  Regardless, and seemingly instantly, his guilt is “understood” to be  established fact and whatever happened in the night there in Belambay, Afghanistan—along with an American Army sergeant’s life and future—has become fodder for speculation and spin.  This post collects a sample of the commentary from the astute to the bizarre.  I look for the day when we may know the truth.

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The truth about Sergeant Bales is unknown to us.

The press reports are damning, but the press reports—we all know—are hardly truth.  The mindless, lynch-mob mentality on display against George Zimmerman is something we all have to guard against.  Likewise, the public knows almost nothing about what Sergeant Bales did, or did not do, thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.

We are told that Sergeant Bales “snapped,” walked literally off the reservation, and murdered Afghan civilians in their nearby homes.  If so, his crime is “unbelievable.”

The press reports and the Army’s silence seem to establish as fact that Sergeant Bales murdered civilians in their sleep.  Like so many other instant press indictments of the day, let’s wait and see.  I have a feeling there is more to this then we are being told.

There are signs along the way, for those who will see.  We ignore them at our peril.  Sgt. Bales’ massacre of sleeping Afghan civilians is one of those—in huge, muzzle-flash lights and bloody video.  Before Bales, came all manner of other warnings to us.  (IEDs, Afghan allies shooting our people in the back, …)

In an eerie remembrance of the way the country backed away from the Vietnam War while leaving the troops to fight it out in the mud, we see public support for continuing combat in Afghanistan evaporating.

I want to be clearly understood, and have said before on this blog:

• It was right to go to Afghanistan to punish the Taliban for inviting bin Laden to tea and terrorism.
• It was smart to use Afghanistan as a base from which to run the Taliban and any other foaming-at-the-mouth terrorist wannabees through the western, allied, American-led meat grinder.
• It was a noble undertaking to try to carve a tiny time-slice out of history, in which the Afghan people might establish themselves in some form of Islamic liberty, if that is possible.
• It was a big mistake to hang around there.  We needed to get in; do it; and get out.  It’s that getting out part….

Our military forces have been going there now, for multiple tours of duty, for 10 years.  It is time to come home.

If you are not convinced, then consider this: if we had saved a war chest, from which to fund grand strategies, thousands of miles away, over a decade, then at least we could afford to stay.  We are broke.

Of course: We also need to be prepared to deploy crushing force anywhere in the world, on short notice.  State a mission that our armed forces can objectively accomplish; accomplish the mission; come home.

And, instead of wasting the whole country’s wealth, stockpile cash for the war we must fight.

And, if you are not yet convinced, I want to remind you of something.  Combat in Afghanistan began with smaller operations, and then larger infantry operations still with that lethal focus on hunting down and killing the enemy.  Victory was readily definable in most of these missions.  But, lurking behind the military’s skill and will to hunt and kill the enemy was a rotten base of political support back home.  Wired’s Danger Room contemplates how “victory” has become “drawdown” and the writer is pretty brutally honest about how false one of the two political parties’ support for our troops has been:

The Democratic Party reluctantly embraced the Afghanistan war as a cudgel against President Bush and the Iraq war; both of which are memories now. The Republican Party never turned the Afghanistan war into an ideological issue, which helps explain why the two conservative alternatives to Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, feel free to envision a faster withdrawal.

Romney has little political choice but to oppose whatever Obama decides. But Romney doesn’t emphasize Afghanistan on the campaign trail, except to say that he wants “victory,” something that few in Washington have ever bothered to define during a decade of war.

The military was able to rally a reluctant president to triple troop levels in 2009 and 2010. But judging from its paltry support, the brass may not be able to slow the drawdown.

Now would be a really good time to define “victory” in Afghanistan.  Or, just come home.  I am listening for some national leader to carry on a hot debate about how America will deal with the New Islamic Invasion over the next 200 years.

For, we seem to have no plan after Afghanistan, other than oppressing American citizens here.  Our leaders are arguing at the edges of the Islamic onslaught while they send our troops into the landing zone of No-planistan.