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Press TV has conducted an interview with Bill Jones, Executive Intelligence Review in Washington, about the sentencing of US soldier Robert Bales, who was charged with the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers last year, to life in prison without parole.

- Has justice been served?

-Well, I think it has. Obviously even though this guy who was deployed many times, numerous times, more than probably should have went off the deep end, the seriousness of the crime really merited the most serious of punishments.

So, while he is a victim in one sense he certainly is the perpetrator and justice really demanded the full extent of the law, which I think that life imprisonment is quite suitable.

This is something that probably happens, maybe not to the same extent, but very often in the conditions of warfare that the United States is fighting now, a military, which is overstretched; wars that have become very long wars.

We had similar incidents that we know of in the Vietnam War and probably a lot more incidents that we don’t know of. And to the extent that the US continues somewhat of a policeman to the world you’ll probably have things like this happening in the future as well.

So I think the fact of it being made very public and the fact of the punishment that was dealt out to him I think also is a lesson to the people in authorities that if these policies continue, especially the over-deployment of the limited troops that we have at our disposal, these kinds of problems are also going to continue.

- Many blame the Afghan government for the crimes committed against the Afghan people. Just how much is the Afghan government complicit in the crimes against the Afghan people, such as this case?

- In this case I’m not sure that one can blame the Afghan government, I think there is a lot of blame to go along - the internal politics of Afghanistan itself are extremely complex and can be extremely cruel from both sides.

The US; however, has a policy of adhering to the laws of war; of training their troops. There are certain limits when conducting warfare operations and I think they try to adhere to that.

But when you have people going back three, four or five times on some of these long missions, you are going to have a great state of tension and there are going to be people who are going to break the regulations and maybe people like, I assume in the Bales case that he really went overboard and he just went on a wild rampage.

And those are the kind of things that the only way you can stop that is by beginning to launch policies away from the continual long warfare that is being conducted towards resolving these kinds of situations like in Afghanistan using diplomatic means.

And that of course would require adherence by the Afghan government of the same policy and perhaps they go overboard themselves in a situation, which they really don’t control.