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In a shocking development a U.S. general was shot and killed outside of Kabul on Tuesday, who had served for over thirty years in the military and was leading U.S. efforts to stand up Afghan security forces.

The Washington Post reported that Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene of Falls Church, Va., was the highest-ranking member of the U.S. military to die in the line of duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was the deputy commanding general for the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and was making a routine visit to a training facility when he was fatally shot.

The Post continued, Greene, 55, was commissioned as an engineer officer in the Army in 1980 after earning an undergraduate degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. In addition to serving in Afghanistan, he had deployed to Iraq.

On Tuesday, White house Press Secretary John Earnest stated, “the President was briefed earlier today about a shooting accident that occurred – a shooting incident that occurred at an Afghan military academy in Kabul City earlier today.  More than a dozen coalition service members were killed or were wounded and at least one U.S. service member, a general, was killed.  The President called General Dunford earlier today to get a briefing on the latest available information in that incident.”

Earnest continued, “While we have made tremendous progress in disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda operations and leadership in Afghanistan, and progress in winding down U.S. involvement in that conflict, this shooting is, of course, a painful reminder of the service and sacrifice that our men and women in uniform make every day for this country.”

US News & World Reports reported that the resulting question is whether Tuesday’s attack represents a new surge in “green-on-blue attacks,” the military term for friendly Afghan forces firing on allied troops. The issue rose to the forefront of U.S. priorities in 2012 when a record of 44 such attacks occurred, killing 61 troops and accounting for 15 percent of all coalition deaths, according to the Long War Journal, which compiles these numbers.

“The Taliban have proved today they can infiltrate this force at will,” Vali Nasr, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told CNN. “The discipline we are seeking or that we are claiming is not there, and I think it is very difficult for the administration to say that everything is going according to plan, as if this is just an isolated incident and we can just leave.”

This is now another crisis already on top of all the other challenges facing the United States, but now the president will have to articulate what is U.S. strategy for the Afghanistan region in preparation for a U.S withdrawal.