https://warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-soldiers-view-of-us-soldiers-in-afghanistan
Had a family member stationed on a shared base with americans. He could not say one good thing about them. Their base itself was shit, everything was just destroyed. The americans would comer over to his side of base all the time, because it was “cozy” (they had chairs that weren’t destroyed by some roided up grunt). The americans would pull out a big projector screen every friday, pull out barbeques and then watch live drone footage as they hooted and hollered. The meat was shit too. Not that the shitty base and the shitty meat matters at all, it’s just to illustrate that all the horrors inflicted upon the locals was so some could eat terrible food in a broken chair in an ugly home.
He had to participate in an operation once. Some local who was working as a chef on base was suspected of being an Al Qaeda member (he wasn’t). The briefing was 10 minutes, the captain had named the operation “Operation Fuck Shit Up”. The briefing was mainly just to get these overly aggressive dudes to be hyped about doing their “job”.
They went to were the afghani lived (a tent), which was a small settlement full of very chill people that all had jobs depending on the base. Instead of knocking or checking with family or anything, or just driving in a normal car like normal people to have a chat, they rolled out in a fucking tank. Then they cut his tent open (one cut for each individual) and destroyed the insides - The dude wasn’t home.
They then found him “hiding” (working at his second job) somewhere else, where they did indeed Fuck Shit Up. They beat up the guy, they beat up others at the place, they destroyed the interior.
The US had the highest rate of blue-on-blue violence, and it was very obvious why. He said they would pray that americans didn’t answer calls for help, because it would just make things worse.
I wonder how many accounts from the Taliban are translated into English? Would genuinely be a fantastic resource.
There was that list of grievances shortly after Taleban taking over. Pretty funny. “Me and my brothers used to ride freely in the sun, now we have to fix the office printer”
“After many tests, we find their teeth crumble from a smack with a rifle butt the same as anyone else’s”
yeah, a postmortem on their tactics would be a useful resource for every would be revolutionary