Deadwood in Kandahar City

From BruceR at Flit:

On the KC shooting

There are some conclusions one certainly shouldn't jump to when evaluating today's reports of the killing of the Kandahar Chief of Police in a gunfight.

One would be that there's anything unusual about this. Like Leonidas says about Sparta... "This. Is. Kandahar." As a policing environment, it has been for years and remains to this day highly volatile by our standards, often a home for rough, frontier justice: Deadwood with AKs. There's lots of armed men, lots of small arms, and lots of scores to settle. The insurgency bears the same relationship to this baseline that Indian raids did to the American Wild West: in that not all the social violence, perhaps not even most of it, is insurgent-driven. There's no reason at this time to believe the McGuffin at the centre of this tragic incident was anything more than someone "appropriating" somebody's car, or jailing somebody's brother for something minor even by Afghan standards. One shouldn't expect a sense of proportion in Kandahar City between the offense and the outcome in these things.

Another would be that any ISAF or OEF forces anywhere had the vaguest clue this was going to happen today, or were in any way complicit. It's simply highly unlikely that this was an attempt to "snatch" a high-value target or anything like that. Even if that sort of thing were going on, the last people Special Forces would use, or need to use, would be the kind of trigger-happy Afghans who would be likely to get into a gunfight with the Police Chief. If the U.S. special ops guys (or the NDS, or the ANA) really wanted somebody to disappear from formal custody, for whatever reason, friend or foe, there are other, quieter opportunities open to them for that sort of thing.

Another would be that because a lot of papers say "U.S. forces sealed off the area" after the event means that Canadians weren't involved, or possibly even the lead agency in the arrests of those responsible. Both Kandahari civilians and Western stringer reporters can tell Afghans from Westerners easily enough, but have extraordinary difficulty distinguishing Canadian soldiers from Americans, in my experience. In Kandahar City, there is little in the way of a uniformed U.S. presence, limited mostly to police mentors [more here]... odds are the Western forces responding were a mix of both nations' soldiers.

The only real question mark is who the shooters arrested will prove to have been employed by...

Do finish the post. Globe and Mail story here.

Update: More from Ghosts of Alexander and Registan (via The Canada-Afghanistan Blog).