Los Angeles Times - American Soldiers

Recently, the Los Angeles Times has released photos of American soldiers holding corpses of Afghanistan soldiers while smiling and holding their thumbs up. This is yet another issue for our troops in Afghanistan that will surely have an impact on the war there. These images show a huge decline of leadership and discipline in our troops. The actions of the troops are unknown but one editor of the L.A. Times believes that they did what is shown because "it reflects a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops". These actions also appear to be damaging for the U.S. troops. While the U.S. is trying to sustain a good relationship with the Afghanistan government before they leave them in charge of their country's security. This action makes the United States appear unprofessional. If these actions continue to occurring this country, it will become harder and harder for us to stabilize the country in time for 2014, when we hand it over.

Of course, you may be wondering what it means to be saying "these" actions. Actually, in the past 5 months or so there have now been four embarrassing incidents in Afghanistan for our country. Some of these included a video of the U.S. troops "urinating" on dead bodies of Afghani soldiers in the month of January. Also, not long after, many U.S. soldiers burned the holy book of Afghanistan's primary religion, the Quran. These events caused outbursts and protests from the Afghanistan soldiers. There was also third event that involved one man going on a killing rampage, killing 17 Afghani citizens in one night. And with this previous incident, all it is doing is ruining our reputation and ruining our relationship with Afghanistan, which is the last thing we want to be doing. With major goals accomplished in the war, all we had to do was secure the country and turn it over in 2014, but with some of our behavior, we are making it more difficult to do so.

I think that