The awful tragedy that occurred early Sunday morning in southern Afghanistan will be blamed, correctly, on a rogue U.S. Army sergeant who walked out of Camp Belambay and methodically shot to death 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them children.

This is not some horrible mistake. There have been too many of those in Afghanistan in the last 10 years. Friendly fire deaths. Civilians and allied troops killed by errant bombs or missiles. Even the numbskulls who decided last month to burn confiscated Qurans acted out of ignorance.

Sunday's incident appears to have been something different. A 38-year-old sergeant, an 11-year veteran with three previous combat tours, appears to have snapped.

It happens; other soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq have murdered civilians. Soldiers in all wars have committed terrible atrocities. An Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood in Texas shot and killed 13 people in 2009.

But to sneak out of a camp's guarded perimeter, carrying a rifle and wearing night-vision headgear, and hunt innocent men, women and children is not only an unspeakable individual and human tragedy, it also is an international horror.

America went into Afghanistan in 2002, as best anyone can remember, to drive out the Taliban government that had offered safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That part happened in fairly short order. But, as the nation was distracted in Iraq, the mission in Afghanistan morphed into nation-building in a place that's not really a nation but a collection of tribes, most of which owe little allegiance to the kleptocrats we installed in Kabul.

It was never going to work. As helpful as a stable Afghanistan would be as a bulwark with Pakistan and India, it was never going to work. As badly as both the Bush and Obama administrations wished it would work, and for all the hundreds of billions spent there, it could not happen.

The people in southern and eastern Afghanistan largely are Pashtuns, and the Taliban are Pashtun nationalists. The Afghan government is not Pashtun, nor are most of the security forces that the United States is training. You drive out the Taliban, and they hide out with other Pashtun and come right back.

The birthplace of the Taliban is the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province. Camp Belambay is in the Panjwai district. The Army had posted Green Berets, special forces soldiers trained for culturally sensitive missions, to Camp Belambay. The idea: Win a few hearts and minds, kill some Taliban.

Posted with the Green Berets were some troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash. Among them was the sergeant allegedly involved in Sunday's killings.

As it happens, senior medical officers from the base's hospital have been suspended for suspected failures to provide treatment for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Maybe it's coincidence, but a soldier with three previous combat deployments from a base with a terrible mental health treatment record was deployed last December to the last place on Earth you'd want him to be.

The Afghan government and people are outraged. The Taliban, of all people, are claiming the moral high ground. Nine Afghan children and seven adults have paid the ultimate price for America's arrogant belief that it could do the impossible with soldiers from whom it had asked too much.

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