During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today, U.S. Senator Susan Collins questioned Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the incident in Afghanistan in December 2010 that killed six American soldiers, including Private First Class Buddy McLain of Mexico. McLain and the others were shot and killed by an Afghan police officer who turned on them at an observation point near the Pakistani border.
During today's hearing, Senator Collins told Admiral Mullen "I understand how imperative it is that we build up those forces so that we can eventually leave Afghanistan. But I want you to know that I'm concerned that the focus on so rapidly increasing the number of Afghan National Security Forces is shortchanging the vetting of those recruits. What are we doing to better vet those Afghan recruits to ensure that tragic incidents, and attacks like this do not occur?" Senator Collins asked Admiral Mullen.
Calling the December incident a "tragedy," Admiral Mullen told Senator Collins that the U.S. military is moving very quickly to build up the Afghan National Security Forces while focusing on the quality of the instructors, and boosting the Afghan police training program, and that military leaders are focused on working to help prevent a similar incident in the future.
"That said, tragically, these things do occur on occasion. They did in Iraq, they do in Afghanistan. And while we will do everything we can to eliminate them, I would not sit here and tell you that we will be 100-percent successful with respect to that," Admiral Mullen said. "Every one of these is investigated thoroughly-every one of them. And, in fact, the one to which you refer I went through this with General Campbell specifically-what happened, what do we know about this guy, what was in the background and there wasn't a lot there with respect to his background that would have led him to specifically take that action to kill our six troops. So we take that, we investigate it, we certainly integrate that back into what we're doing-but it's a big challenge."
Senator Collins has asked both the U.S. Army and the Government Accountability Office to investigate the December 2010 incident in which PFC McLain was killed.