In Afghanistan, these "Good War" rogues of Uncle Sam are apparently murdering infants, as the NYT somewhat shyly reports. Six paragraphs into the story, with no previous mention in the lede, no buildup, we are suddenly given this harrowing tale:
One day this month, an old man who called himself Syed Mohammed sat on the floor of his mud-brick hut in the eastern Kabul neighborhood of Hotkheil and recounted how most of his son's family was wiped out in an American-led raid last September.
Mr. Mohammed said he was awakened in the early morning to the sound of gunfire and explosions. Such sounds were not uncommon; Hotkheil is a Pashtun-dominated area, where sympathies for the Taliban run strong.
In a flash, Mr. Mohammed said, several American and Afghan soldiers kicked open the door of his home. The Americans, he said, had beards, an almost certain sign that they belonged to a unit of the Special Forces, which permits uniformed soldiers to grow facial hair.
"Who are you?" Mr. Mohammed recalled asking the intruders.
"Shut up," came the reply from one of the Afghan soldiers. "We are the government."
Mr. Mohammed said he was taken to a nearby base, interrogated for several hours and let go as sunrise neared.
When he returned home, Mr. Mohammed said, he went next door to his son's house, only to find that most of his family had been killed: the son, Nurallah, and his pregnant wife and two of his sons, Abdul Basit, age 1, and Mohammed, 2. Only Mr. Mohammed's 4-year-old grandson, Zarqawi, survived.
"The soldiers had a right to search our house," Mr. Mohammed said. "But they didn't have a right to do this."
Bullet holes still pockmarked Nurallah's home more than four months after the attack, and the infant's cradle still hung from the ceiling.
The day after the attack, a senior Afghan official came to the door and handed Mr. Mohammed $800.
"If you spent some time here, you would see that we are not the kind of people who would get involved with the Taliban," Mr. Mohammed said. "Anyway, what was the fault of the babies?"
The fault of the babies, Mr. Mohammed, was to be born to people who do not matter, who do not count, who are just so much roadkill beneath the wheels of the great Terror War engine, as it grinds through one country after another: mindless, heedless, omnivorous. The machine has a new driver now, but it is still headed in the same direction.