Two minutes into this interview on the Newshour Colonel (Ret.) Killibrew of CNAS chooses to denigrate what he calls "intelligence soldiers" as opposed to "direct combat soldiers" (sic) in the matter of the Afghan photos of troops and Afghan police palying with the remains of Taliban fighters who accidentally blew themselves up while installing roadside bombs. Bomb installers do this with some frequency. The IRA were particularly prone to this accident. I remember one fellow who did himself in while mixing fertiliser and other "goodies" with a steel shovel on a concrete garage floor. Special Branch and MI-5 had a good chuckle over that.
Killibrew's insult is reminiscent of all the snide remarks I have heard in the US Army over the last half century about intelligence soldiers. In memory of my old comrades I must say that I have seen intelligence soldiers fight as hard as any infantry and I have never known them to murder civilians in their beds.
From what I can learn, that whole brigade (4/82 Div.) behaved poorly during that deployment. The were unhappy to have been ordered into the "mentoring" mode and that showed in their performance. pl
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-june12/afghanistan2_04-18.html
