Top Talkers: The Morning Joe panel ? including NBC News' Andrea Mitchell and Jim Miklaszewski, Mike Barnicle, former DLC chair Harold Ford Jr., and former campaign strategist for Sen. John McCain, Steve Schmidt ? discusses U.S. and Afghan response to a U.S. soldier's shooting of 16 Afghan civilians over the weekend.
By msnbc.com and news services
The American soldier thought to have massacred 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan on Sunday was reportedly married with two children and had served three tours in Iraq before arriving in Kandahar in December.
A U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity also told the AP that the shooter was a conventional soldier assigned to support a special operations unit of either Green Berets or Navy SEALs engaged in a so-called village stability operation.?Britain's Sky News compared?that to a "neighborhood watch" project.?The 38-year-old was staff sergeant, The New York Times reported.
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The attacker left his base in Panjwai district early on Sunday and broke into the homes of local villagers, according to reports. Nine children and three women were among the 16 slain. Some of the bodies were also reportedly set on fire.? The BBC reported that the soldier was thought to have suffered a breakdown.
U.S. and NATO officials were anxious to make clear that the shooter was acting alone.
"This was not part of a night raid or any operation," the senior officer told The New York Times. "All the signs point to a lone person acting alone."
MSNBC military analyst Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) says the alleged shooting of Afghan civilians by a US soldier is a 'further unraveling' of relations between the US and Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, some residents said they believed there were multiple attackers, given the?carnage.
"One man can't kill so many people. There must have been many?people involved," Bacha Agha of Balandi village told the AP. "If the? government says this is just one person's act we will not accept it."
A senior U.S. defense?earlier official told NBC News that the alleged shooter was based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.
Taliban vows 'revenge' after US soldier kills 16 civilans in Afghanistan
Lewis-McChord's 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, sent about 2,500 soldiers to Afghanistan in December for a yearlong deployment. The brigade had deployed to Iraq three times since 2003; this is its first deployment to Afghanistan.
Home to about 100,000 military and civilian personnel, the base has suffered a spate of suicides among soldiers back from war. The Army is investigating whether doctors at Lewis-McChord's Madigan Army Medical Center were urged to consider the cost of providing benefits when reviewing diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Military discipline and the 'command climate' in Afghanistan comes into question after a U.S. soldier allegedly opened fire on sleeping civilians in Kandahar province. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.
In 2010, a dozen soldiers from the base were arrested on a slew of charges that ranged from using drugs, beating up a whistleblower in their unit, and deliberately killing three Afghan civilians during patrols in Kandahar Province. Prosecutors at Lewis-McChord won convictions against four of the five who were charged in the killings.
Suspect's base has history?of controversies
While U.S. officials rushed to draw a line between the shooting over the weekend and ongoing efforts of a U.S. force of around 90,000, the incident is sure to infuriate Afghans already suspicious of a Western military presence now over a decade old.
Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent, said the recent incidents involving U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan raised questions about what the military calls the "command climate."
"Are the?leaders there becoming a little slack perhaps in their discipline or enforcement of the rules?" he said on MSNBC. "U.S. military officials insist that this is not the case, but ... has the discipline eroded as forces prepare to withdraw?"
Last month, the burning of copies of the Quran on a NATO military base triggered violent protests across the country and a spate of insider attacks against Western soldiers.
US gives up control of jail where Quran was burned
In a statement Monday, the Afghan Taliban pledged to "take revenge" against the "sick-minded American savages," according to the AFP news agency.
"The American 'terrorists' want to come up with an excuse for the perpetrator of this inhumane crime by claiming that this immoral culprit was mentally ill," the Taliban statement added. "If the perpetrators of this massacre were in fact mentally ill then this testifies to yet another moral transgression by the American military, because they are arming lunatics in Afghanistan who turn their weapons against the defenseless Afghans without giving a second thought."
Msnbc.com staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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