LAST YEAR, I stood on a dusty road outside Kandahar Air Base, alongside an old man with a face as gnarled as his walking stick, and a little boy, who held his hand.
We squinted up at the NATO soldier in the gun tower.
“Pull up your shirt,’’ the soldier yelled in broken Pashto, tinged with a Polish accent.
The old man finally raised his loose-fitting top to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons. But the soldier still refused to let us inside.
The old man and the boy had come from Helmand Province - a risky, expensive journey - to ask for justice. US troops had killed the boy’s father, mistaking a farmer in a field for an insurgent.
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When the village complained, the US military gave the victim’s family a piece of paper that entitled them to compensation. But they could never figure out where to collect it, the old man told me. Each place they went sent them somewhere else.
Finally they were advised to go to Kandahar Air Base. They arrived, clutching the paper, but no soldier would let them get close enough for anyone to read it.
I have often wondered what became of that odd pair, and what their village thought when they returned empty-handed. Justice is perhaps the first casualty of war, and the futile search for it is one of the saddest sights.
I thought of them again after news broke that a US soldier in Kandahar province walked off his base in the middle of the night and killed 17 innocent Afghans as they slept. Will the US court martial that Sergeant Robert Bales faces in Kansas feel like justice to the Afghans who lost their wives, mothers, and kids? Will there be any attempt to translate the proceedings into Pashto so that Afghans can understand them, and will news of the trial filter back to the villages forever altered by the crime?
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The massacre in Kandahar came less than a year after CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot two men on a motorbike in Pakistan, apparently through the windshield of his car, perhaps after some kind of spy-vs.-spy chase. He, too, was eventually spirited out of the country, after John Kerry promised the Pakistani authorities that his crimes would be investigated. (So far, the only charges filed against Davis relate to him punching another man during an argument over a parking space in a Colorado shopping mall.)
What kind of justice can the victims of Bales and Davis expect from the United States? The US government has already paid out large sums to the families of the dead -- $50,000 each in Afghanistan and a reported $2.4 million in Pakistan. Do these payments feel like justice to the families of the people who died?
In Afghan culture, even if a murderer is sentenced to prison, sometimes “blood money’’ is paid by the killer’s kin to the victims’ to heal the rift and avoid a cycle of retaliation and revenge, according to Thomas Barfield, an anthropologist at Boston University and author of “Afghanistan: a Culture and Political History.’’
But it’s not just handing over cash, he said. “It’s a process that can take years. The honor of the victim’s family is restored by not only compensation, but an apology and an agreement from the community that something horrible has happened and it shouldn’t have been done.’’
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When he said this, I couldn’t help but think of yet another terrible shooting that has left families searching in vain for justice: the killing last month of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager armed only with a bag of Skittles, allegedly by a self-appointed neighborhood watch member who has not been charged with any crime.
If this had happened in Afghanistan, Barfield said, mediators from the community would step in and say, “A great wrong was done.’’
“If this guy in Florida were a Pashtun, he would have to say, ‘I erred.’ His kin group would be making compensation and saying ‘You lost your son.’ We don’t have anything like that in our legal system.’’
Even if Trayvon’s killer is arrested, few district attorneys would likely try to heal the breach between Trayvon’s community and the shooter’s.
It’s amazing that Americans still feel we have a monopoly on justice. We spend tens of millions of dollars to make the justice systems of Afghanistan and Pakistan more like ours. It never occurs to us that we might be the ones who have something important to learn.
Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @fstockman.