Will Alexander Blackman's family now become targets for Islamists? There are ways of dealing with that. People's relatives are protected from organised crime to the sophistication of which this country's ragbag of wannabe Taliban does not compare in the tiniest degree. They are not always protected perfectly, but even so.
The only thing to be said about his trial, conviction and sentence is that they have all been by a court martial. Very few people are tried by both a judge who is an expert in the field, and a jury made up of such experts. 10 years is not a harsh sentence for murder. People get 30, and that is in the civilian courts. Not very often. But they do.
As for identifying him, well, he has been convicted and sentenced. He is now in prison. We cannot have people convicted, sentenced and imprisoned in secret. Everyone, including Blackman himself, is safer on account of his having been named.
But we all know who bears the greater guilt for this whole situation. Having run out of implausible reasons for being there, we are scuttling out of Afghanistan with absolutely nothing to show for our ever having gone into the place. That war has droned on, so to speak, for longer than any 18-year-old fighting it can possibly have had any consciousness of such matters.
In the meantime, we have also waged the flagrantly illegal and utterly catastrophic war in Iraq, and we have initiated an Islamist nightmare in Libya by taking out the bulwark against it, right there on the Mediterranean, facing Italy and France.
The perpetrators, and one in particular, have grown rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Law and morality have collapsed from the top down. A sergeant has been sent to prison, and that judgement has been made by those whose lot it is to make such judgements.
But that sergeant most certainly ought not to be the only person to be held to account, perhaps also by that means, if there is ever to be any justice at all.
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