In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

From the White House to the American Embassy in Kabul , American officials rushed to distance themselves from the actions of U.S. soldiers who posed for photographs next to corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents.Two photos of incidents from a 2010 deployment were published Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times. In one, the hand of a corpse is propped on the shoulder of a paratrooper. In another, the disembodied legs of a suicide bomber are displayed by grinning soldiers and Afghan police.Secretary of DefenseLeon E. Panettaapologized for the photographs, saying the behavior depicted in the photos "absolutely violates both our regulations and, more importantly, our core values. This is not who we are.... If rules and regulations were found to have been violated, then those individuals will be held accountable."White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the soldiers' behavior "reprehensible," and said President Obama wanted a full investigation.The NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. John Allen, and American Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who were alerted that the photos were coming, condemned the actions even before the photos were published online. Allen said U.S. officials were working with Afghan and international forces "to resolve any issues related to improper treatment of remains." Crocker called the actions of soldiers in the photos "morally repugnant."At the same time, Pentagon and White House officials expressed disappointment that the photos had been made public. The Pentagon had asked The Times not to publish the photos, citing fears that they would trigger a backlash against U.S. forces.Speaking to reporters during a meeting of NATO allies in Brussels, Panetta said:"This is war. And I know that war is ugly and violent. And I know that young people sometimes caught up in the moment make some very foolish decisions. I am not excusing that behavior. But neither do I want these images to bring further injury to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people."Davan Maharaj, editor of The Times, said the newspaper considered a Pentagon appeal to delay publication, and decided to hold off for more than 72 hours until military officials said they had taken security precautions against any retaliation."At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions," Maharaj said in an online discussion Wednesday. "We have a particular duty to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan."He added: "On balance, in this case, we felt that the public interest here was served by publishing a limited but representative sample of these photos, along with a story examining the circumstances under which they were taken."After the newspaper provided several photos to military officials last month, theU.S. Armybegan an investigation, saying the soldiers' actions violated Army standards. The photos were among 18 images of soldiers posing with corpses or body parts. They were provided to The Times by a soldier who served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2010.The soldier who provided the photos said he and others in an 82nd Airborne brigade were concerned about a lack of discipline, leadership and security that he said compromised soldiers' safety — and he cited the photos as one example.He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated. The brigade, under new command but with some of the same paratroopers who served on a yearlong deployment in 2010, began another tour in Afghanistan in February.There were no immediate reports of violence in Afghanistan in response to the photos. Many Afghans , especially those in rural areas, do not have Internet access or electricity. The country's main evening news broadcasts did not show the photos.Suicide bombers and insurgents who plant roadside bombs are widely despised by Afghans. Civilians are routinely killed or maimed by insurgents who detonate suicide vests or set out homemade bombs that kill indiscriminately.A recent United Nations report said the Taliban and other insurgent groups were responsible for 77% of fatal attacks against civilians last summer, most of them from suicide bombs or roadside explosives.Still, the taboo against desecration of the dead is strong in this religiously conservative country."We condemn Americans posing with dead bodies or body parts," said Najla Dehqan Nezhad, a member of parliament from the western province of Herat. ||||| WASHINGTON — A new revelation of young American soldiers caught on camera while defiling insurgents’ remains in Afghanistan has intensified questions within the military community about whether fundamental discipline is breaking down given the nature and length of the war. 
  
 The photographs, published by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, show more than a dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010. They seemed likely to further bruise an American-Afghan relationship that has been battered by crisis after crisis over the past year, even as the two governments are in the midst of negotiations over a long-term strategic agreement. 
  
 The images also add to a troubling list of cases — including Marines videotaped urinating on Taliban bodies, the burning of Korans, and the massacre of villagers attributed to a lone Army sergeant — that have cast American soldiers in the harshest possible light before the Afghan public. Accordingly, combat veterans and military analysts are beginning to look inside the catchall phrase “stress on the force” to identify factors that could be contributing to the breaches. 
  
 One potential explanation put forth by these analysts is the exhaustion felt by the class of non-commissioned officers that forms the backbone of the all-volunteer force: the sergeants responsible for training, mentoring and disciplining small groups of 18- and 19-year-old soldiers at the small-unit level, hour by hour, patrol by patrol. 
  
 Another factor, they say, may be the demands of a counterinsurgency strategy that has distributed small units across vast distances to serve at primitive combat outposts. Self-reliance required in isolation may promote heroic camaraderie. But the rugged terrain, logistical challenges and the in-your-face violence of the insurgency may also present great challenges to the noncommissioned officers in charge of these small units, operating far beyond the more consistent senior supervision in past wars. 
  
 Officers and analysts express concerns that some of these isolated units are falling prey to diminished standards of behavior and revert to what one combat veteran described as “Lord of the Flies” syndrome, after the William Golding novel portraying a band of cultured British schoolboys reverting to tribal violence when severed from society. 
  
 “Some of these incidents certainly seem to be the fault of a breakdown in leadership at the small-unit level,” said Andrew Exum, a defense policy analyst at the Center for a New American Security who teaches a course on irregular warfare at Columbia University. 
  
 “Where was the sergeant who is supposed to say: ‘Stop, boys. We don’t do that. We don’t disrespect the dead’?” said Mr. Exum, who led a light infantry platoon in Afghanistan in 2002 and then led a platoon of Rangers in both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. 
  
 Early reports indicate that the soldiers had been sent to gather fingerprints or retina scans for identification of the suicide bomber. Mr. Exum noted how the horrific experience of being ordered to interact with bloody, severed body parts of an enemy may cause soldiers to develop self-defense mechanisms — in particular dark humor around corpses. “But the line is crossed when you disrespect the dead body,” he said. “It’s one thing to have a psychological release valve, and another thing to take trophy pictures.” 
  
 Pentagon and military officials, noting that the proliferation of soldiers’ carrying camera phones has been involved in many of the cases, said that technology and a changing culture had presented new problems, as well. Troops have behaved badly since the beginning of warfare, of course. But now, those actions can be captured in real time, and spread rapidly without commanders’ control, via social networks. 
  
 Army officials said Wednesday that the service had guidelines and rules for photos — basically, “think before you post” — but they also acknowledged that social media are evolving so rapidly that regulations were not keeping pace. Rules are set by commanders at the company, battalion and brigade level, but those standards are sometimes ignored by small units in the field. 
  
 “Technology today presents definite challenges related to security and propriety,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, an Army spokesman. “In this case, these photos are probably a manifestation of the soldiers’ relief that this insurgent no longer posed a threat to them or their fellow soldiers. That cannot excuse what they did. We are the United States Army, and the world rightly has very high expectations that our soldiers will do what’s right. Clearly, that didn’t happen in this case.” |||||
American officials were quick to condemn the grisly photos of US soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan suicide bombers that surfaced yesterday. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the soldiers' behavior "reprehensible," while the US Ambassador to Afghanistan called them "morally repugnant," and defense chiefs promised a full investigation, notes the Los Angeles Times, which printed two of the photos after receiving them from a serviceman concerned about a breakdown in discipline. Analysts say this incident and other troubling recent cases point to a possible breakdown in leadership at the small-unit level, especially among isolated units, the New York Times finds. Military officials say changing technology also presents new problems. “In this case, these photos are probably a manifestation of the soldiers’ relief that this insurgent no longer posed a threat to them or their fellow soldiers," says an Army spokesman. "That cannot excuse what they did. We are the United States Army and the world rightly has very high expectations that our soldiers will do what’s right. Clearly, that didn’t happen in this case."