Our fundamental failure to make any significant progress in over 7 years towards an even marginally functioning legal system in Afghanistan is the root cause of these men's actions. It is extraordinarily difficult to incarcerate captured individuals regardless of the evidence against them. The process is even more difficult than described in the article. Last time I saw the statistics, we hold over 23,000 prisoners in Iraq compared to only about 600 in Afghanistan despite a similar population and having been there for years longer. If not one of the very few placed in U.S. custody, 90% are released and the rest go to the humanitarian disaster that is the Afghan prison system. In prison, there is little opportunity for due process with Afghan courts incapable of processing the volume of cases required. Once imprisoned, many of the worst offenders, politically connected financiers and warlords, are often quickly released due to political pressure from various factions in the government. Worse, there are no efforts to reform, “retrain” or otherwise reduce recidivism or a return to the insurgency.

This has several effects. It taints the type of operation utilized to achieve desired effects on personalities. Since an individual of interest, once captured is likely only to spend a short stay in prison if at all, direct action operations are more likely to “kill” oriented. Inevitably, second and third order effects mount, civilian casualties result and intelligence is lost. In addition, a number of individuals with significant histories of insurgent activities and mountains of evidence are left to operate in plain sight. What’s left are prisons filled with low-level insurgents languishing with little hope of release, angry families, and the worst offenders free to fight another day. While no excuse for their action, I have little doubt that CPT Hill and his unit saw this first hand and decided that action was only possible at their level.