Both Afghans and Americans are exhausted of this war. And though the former have every right to be far more tired and angry about a conflict that has claimed so many more of their lives and that wages on their homeland, ultimately this story may horrify Americans more. If this is true, it's probably because we will be more surprised. For most Americans (though, sadly, far from all of us), the war only exists intermittently, and this moment is just a flash of a reality that Afghans have been living with for years. There is something far more grotesque to this incident than to all the others -- the air strike last year that killed seven, three of them children -- but if you're Afghan, how much of a difference would accidental versus deliberate really make?

The always-insightful Afghanistan correspondent Matthieu Aikins seems to suspect as much. "One reason why local reaction may be muted: Afghans tend to regard all 'civcas' incidents as criminal, not just 'rogue' ones," he wrote on Twitter, using the clinical military term ("civcas") for civilian casualties. "Some massacres we see as the 'necessary evil' of our allies, some we see as airstrikes gone awry, and others as rogue, criminal acts. But Afghans just see the blood of innocents, the dead bodies of their loved ones, and families torn apart."

The obvious lesson from this incident is that the war seems increasingly doomed, both because troops of the U.S.-dominated force seem to be paying for it so highly and because Afghans will likely only distrust us more (although there are many other reasons for the war's collapse that are not directly related to Sunday's killings). Even Newt Gingrich, who thinks the U.S. can replace Iranian oil and make the moon our 51st state, conceded on Sunday that the war may be "a mission that we're going to discover is not doable." (Although he also said this is because "we're not prepared to be ruthless enough.")

But perhaps there's a more difficult and more important lesson is an act that was committed by a U.S. soldier, a walking symbol of American patriotism, but that seemed to mirror some of the acts of the terrorist enemies we're fighting. Maybe some of those terrorists -- just some -- are not the one-dimensional "evildoers" we so often consider them to be. Maybe some of them have been driven in part by some of the wrong, unjustifiable, unacceptable, but ultimately human causes that contributed to the rampages at Columbine in 1999 or in Kandahar on Sunday.

It would not be easy for Americans to humanize an Afghan terrorist, and it would especially hard to empathize with his crime. But we've done exactly this with school shooters for years, and we will do it with Sunday's as-yet-unnamed rogue soldier, because we seem to understand that we have a responsibility to learn from what happened, however painful the process may be. Maybe it's time for us to try to understand the Afghans -- or even the Pakistanis or Iraqis or others -- who have committed similar senseless acts. If we did, we might not like what we found, but we would be better off for knowing. And so, one suspects, would they.

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