{"id":14599,"date":"2012-04-03T07:29:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-03T15:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=14599"},"modified":"2012-04-03T07:30:30","modified_gmt":"2012-04-03T15:30:30","slug":"making-taliban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/03\/making-taliban\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Taliban"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/blog\/the-skeptics\/young-men-war-6721?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter\">Via Malou Innocent<\/a>, embedded journalist Neil Shea <a href=\"http:\/\/theamericanscholar.org\/a-gathering-menace\/\">writes in <em>The American Scholar<\/em><\/a> about the mistreatment perpetrated on Afghans by U.S. soldiers, which the media (including himself, he admits) never include in the war coverage. From shooting valuable animals and pets to demolishing a family&#8217;s house and physically abusing civilians, Shea wonders how many &#8220;Taliban&#8221; were created as a response to this treatment.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Many times I have watched soldiers or Marines, driven by boredom or fear, behave selfishly and meanly, even illegally, in minor ways. In a few searing moments I have wondered what would come next, what the men would do to prisoners or civilians or suspected insurgents.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;The soldiers of Destroyer talked about how their house searches had become demolition parties. They shattered windows and china, broke furniture, hurled civilians to the ground. Earlier that day, they had blown up a building.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In reference to an Afghan prisoner:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cI think he remembers we were the ones who fucked him up last night,\u201d the soldier said to Givens. \u201cI think he\u2019s starin\u2019 at you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFuck him,\u201d Givens said. \u201cThe only reason he\u2019s still alive is because the United States of America holds 25 to life over my head.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;&#8221;Yeah, <strong>we definitely made some Taliban out here<\/strong>,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was like a week-long Taliban recruiting drive. And we had fun doing it. <strong>I love recruiting for the Taliban<\/strong>. It\u2019s called job security.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Malou Innocent, embedded journalist Neil Shea writes in The American Scholar about the mistreatment perpetrated on Afghans by U.S. soldiers, which the media (including himself, he admits) never include in the war coverage. From shooting valuable animals and pets to demolishing a family&#8217;s house and physically abusing civilians, Shea wonders how many &#8220;Taliban&#8221; were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-14599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14599"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14601,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14599\/revisions\/14601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14599"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}