What burning Qurans in Afghanistan tells us

We don't know yet why, exactly, a group of US soldiers at Bagram Air Base were burning Qurans and other Islamic religious texts a few days ago. Ignorance? Carelessness? A group of soldiers that wanted to express contempt for the faith (a view that's far from uncommon among soldiers and marines)?

The "why" doesn't really matter though.

With hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and inexperienced officers cycling through war zones over a decade, these sorts of things are the types of things that happen from time to time in war – just as the desecration of the bodies of dead Taliban happened and will likely happen from time to time, just as a poorly-led unit enraged at the loss of a comrade carried out a massacre and will likely happen from time to time.

That these things happen in war, and undermine missions that have been framed in terms of winning over local populations, is as predictable as the rain. As is the Afghan response to the Quran building yesterday and today.

This unthinkable sequence of events has proven fatal, first and foremost, to Americans serving in Afghanistan. As of this writing, six US troops have been killed by allied Afghan security forces, while seven were injured in a grenade attack launched by civilian protesters. On Thursday, two Americans were killed at a joint NATO-Afghan National Army base by a group of Afghans, including an allied soldier. This past weekend, two senior American military officers were shot and killed within the Interior Ministry in Kabul by an Afghan colleague, who was allegedly provoked, according to Afghan government sources, by the Americans' open mockery of the protests.