A NY Times reported went back and found a very different picture of a country that America faught for….
Then left in fucked up rush….
One of the stranger things about our travels was how freely the Taliban allowed us to explore. For most of the war, they had shot, bombed or abducted any foreigner they could find. Times colleagues had been kidnapped or killed.
Yet no matter where we were, if we produced our paperwork, we were granted access to places that few foreigners had ventured in nearly two decades: the other side of the war.
We spent nights in half-constructed buildings, in barren deserts and perched on the edge of raging rivers. We interviewed hundreds of people and surveyed more than 1,000 others about war crimes committed by American allies.
I often think of this moment in relation to Vietnam. In that war, decades passed before the United States engaged its former enemy. By then, parts of history were lost….
The Taliban didn’t win so much as the U.S. lost.
Time and again, we found, the Americans set the stage for their own defeat well before the Taliban marched to power in August 2021.
The United States empowered warlords and criminals to conduct the war on its behalf, individuals who inspired so much hatred that their very presence became a Taliban recruiting tool. This propensity was embodied by no one more than Lt. Gen. Abdul Raziq, the police chief of Kandahar Province.
Our reporting revealed that he and his men were responsible for Afghanistan’s largest known campaign of mass disappearancesduring the war.
The Americans turned allies into enemies.
By blindly trampling into places they did not understand, the Americans seeded hatred. Errant airstrikes not only killed innocents. They killed American allies — the very people who supported them the most.
In the rugged region of Nuristan, we traced the origins of one of the deadliest assaults on American soldiers. We discovered that American troops had created the enemies that they feared the most — and in places that they never needed to be….
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