Marine Unit Ordered Out Of Afghanistan Under Massacre Cloud

The AP reports that, according to a statement by an Army spokesman, US Special Operations Command has ordered that there be an investigation of Marines accused of shooting and killing civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan and that their entire Marine company be removed from the country to an undisclosed location.

In the March 4 incident in Nangahar province, an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into a convoy of Marines that U.S. officials said also came under fire from gunmen. As many as 10 Afghans were killed and 34 wounded as the convoy made an escape. Injured Afghans said the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away.

U.S. military officials said militant gunmen shot at Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties.

Hundreds of Afghan men held an anti-U.S. demonstration afterward and President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident.

Leto, the spokesman at Special Operations Command Central headquarters in Tampa, Fla., said the Marines, after being ambushed, responded in a way that created ``perceptions (that) have really damaged the relationship between the local populaton and this unit.''

``The relationship you have with the local population while conducting counterinsurgency operations is very important, and because the perceptions damaged that, it probably degraded the (Marine) unit's ability to fulfill those kinds of missions,'' Leto added. ``So the general felt it was best to move them out of that area.''

Somehow I doubt that Afghani civilians will trouble themselves to look at and decipher new unit designations before worrying that the Marines pointing guns at them might be psycho killers. This is a massive hearts-and-minds disaster for US forces and spiriting an entire company out of the country, to a secret location, will be interpreted as moving them out of reach of any Afghan oversight of the investigation - in other words, it smells like a cover-up even if it isn't.