George Packer, who has covered America’s wars, on Sgt. Bales’s murders:

Just as it should be possible to stare at this nightmare without medicalizing or psychologizing it away with a few biographical details, it should also be possible to see its singularity and its context: a decade of war with no clear, measurable goals and no end in sight, fought by the tiny number of Americans who belong to our all-volunteer military. President Obama has recently been eloquent on the subject of war, its seriousness, its costs. But it has been in the interest of neither his Administration nor his predecessor’s for the electorate to think too much about the fighting on the other side of the planet. Politically, both Presidents have downplayed it—Bush by creating a false image of a clear moral cause demanding relatively little sacrifice, Obama by talking about it as little as possible.

So the fighting goes on and on without a national discussion, or a national investment. It’s easy for most Americans to go days without giving the war a thought. That’s a quieter, longer source of shame. It’s wrong to put the whole burden of a protracted war on so few people while the rest of us get a pass, though that didn’t make the massacre in Panjwai either inevitable or understandable.

Packer says we need an honest, thorough accounting of what went wrong in Afghanistan, one that spares no one, and takes into account the options facing US policymakers right after 9/11. It’s easy now to say we shouldn’t have tried to nation-build there. It was harder then. Remember, nearly everybody supported invading Afghanistan. That’s where Osama was. The Taliban government had given him refuge and support. There are so many difficult questions to be asked, and answered.

But to be honest, what I expect in the next few years is the willful amnesia that always comes with the end of unsuccessful wars. We will have a lot to forget, starting with Robert Bales.

Read the whole thing.