Why are Afghan troops shooting at us?

It is unclear what, precisely, motivates these attacks. Most seem sui generis, resulting from circumstances unique to their time and place, even if disgruntled Afghans soldiers must surely be following the examples of others. These attacks do not, at the moment, seem to be centrally or deliberately planned by any of Afghanistan’s insurgent groups. The NATO command in Afghanistan is quite insistent on this point. That fact, though, is precisely what should most worry U.S. and allied military leaders. Were the attacks the result of some kind of Taliban infiltration, the problem would thus be one of counter-intelligence. The alternative — that relations between Afghan forces and their Western partners have structurally deteriorated in fundamental ways — is a far tougher problem to address…

First off, U.S. and allied soldiers will begin — either consciously or unconsciously — to profile their Afghan counterparts. They will trust ethnic Hazara or Tajik Afghans more than they do Pashtuns, who provide the bulk of the Taliban’s fighters, and will thus exacerbate the tensions between allied and Afghan forces and among the Afghan troops themselves. U.S. and allied soldiers might also, if they are a little smarter, place trust in those Pashtun Afghans who are known to have lost family to the Taliban. It is very difficult for me, as a largely desk-bound analyst whose days in uniform are long behind him, to tell U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan not to do this. I can only urge them to beware of the trade-offs involved.

Second, even though this may seem counterintuitive, I urge U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan to remember that the only people who can truly protect them from green-on-blue violence are the Afghans themselves. If I were a U.S. officer training Afghan troops, I would now work doubly hard to build close and real relationships with my Afghan counterparts.