TOP STORY: My, My, My Afghanistan

A Muslim worship center on one of the military bases in Afghanistan

In hindsight, maybe Kandahar Province wasn't as safe as I thought it was when I visited the soldiers of Decorah's 322nd Engineering Company in December.  

Forward Operating Base Walton is less than half an hour away from Camp Belambai, the base from which a 38-year-old staff sergeant walked to two nearby villages, opening fire and killing 16 people, including nine children.

Many columnists have said that the shootings could change the course of American foreign policy in Afghanistan.  But I agree with a few other columnists, who said that the recent burning of Korans by American soldiers will have a more serious impact in Afghanistan.  While the shootings, with their echoes of the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, are getting quite a bit of attention in the United States, in Afghanistan they are just more deaths in a country that has seen decades of warfare.  But the burning of the Korans strikes a chord with every Muslim in Afghanistan.

While I didn't have a chance to talk with more than a handful of Afghanis in my brief visit, I did see numerous examples of the importance of the Muslim religion in Afghanistan—even on the American military bases.

But all of this may be beside the point.  The Koran burnings coupled with the massacre have quite a few people concluding that the wheels have come off of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan.

That wasn't the feeling among soldiers when I visited in December.  Although most soldiers spoke carefully and tried to stay out of the political debates, soldiers who had been deployed to both Iraq in 2003 and to Afghanistan in 2011 said Afghanistan was a better situation than the "Wild, Wild West" they faced in Iraq.

But that was December.  Now it seems like if Afghanistan didn't start out like Iraq, it very likely will end the same way.