How mass killings by US forces after 9/11 boosted support for the Taliban

[rpannier]

The men of Zangabad village, Panjwai district lined up on the eve of 11 September to count and remember their dead, the dozens of relatives who they say were killed at the hands of the foreign forces that first appeared in their midst nearly 20 years ago.

Their cluster of mud houses, fields and pomegranate orchards was the site of perhaps the most notorious massacre of the war, when US SSgt Robert Bales walked out of a nearby base to slaughter local families in cold blood. He killed 16 people, nine of them children.

snip

Haji Muhammad Wazir lost almost all his immediate family, apart from his four-year-old son in the early hours of 11 March 2012. It was more than a decade after the twin towers came down, but they were the reason the US military was on his doorstep.

snip

The Taliban commander for Panjwai district, Faizani Mawlawi Sahab, said each mass killing drove more people into their arms, and the slaughter of 2012 provoked particular grief and horror. “Although some people were supporting us before, after this incident everyone joined or helped us in some way,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/10/how-mass-killings-by-us-forces-after-911-boosted-support-for-the-taliban

[rpannier]

1. Just to anger people more

From the article

The group had tried to negotiate a surrender in 2001, which the country’s then-president Hamid Karzai was eager to accept. But America’s leaders, still caught up in a hunt for Bin Laden that would last a decade, were more interested in vengeance than Afghanistan’s future.

“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld announced at the time, with a hubris that would be thrown into relief by the lives lost in Afghanistan over the next two decades and the money spent there.

snip

“The insurgency was not inevitable. There was a good chance for peace in 2001. Everyone, including the Taliban accepted they had been defeated. But the US and their Afghan allies persecuted and marginalised those who’d lost the war, not just Taliban but tribal and factional rivals of those who had seized power,” said Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

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Thank you President Bush and all the hawks out there

[rickyhall]

2. It's [ike we learned nothing from two world wars.

After WWI, the British & French punished Germany, combined with bankers breaking the world economy produced WWII. So we beat the Taliban, then punish the Afghans and the Taliban return with a vengeance. History repeats again.

[UpInArms]

3. I will always believe

That this was when we “lost” Afghanistan

US bomb blunder kills 30 at Afghan wedding

Mon 1 Jul 2002 21.23 EDT

American military officials were last night trying to explain one of their worst blunders during the nine-month war in Afghanistan after a US plane mistakenly targeted a house full of wedding guests, killing at least 30 of them.

The bombing happened at 1am yesterday in a village in the rugged and mountainous central region of Oruzgan, 105 miles north of the southern city of Kandahar.

Survivors of the attack said several guests had just fired their Kalashnikovs into the air, as is traditional in Pashtun wedding ceremonies. A US air patrol over-head wrongly concluded it was coming under fire and responded with devastating force.

… snip …

"There are no Taliban or al-Qaida or Arabs here. These people were all civilians, women and children."

An Afghan defence ministry official last night said more than 30 people had been killed in the attack, which appears to have gone on for two hours. The original death toll had been put as high as 120.