Obviously, I'm not on the ground so I don't know what exactly led the US forces in Afghanistan to blow up an entire village. But from here, without context but with some perspective, it sure does look like outright lunacy. If it were the first and last village where such a thing occurred, then I could just chalk it up to the general madness of war itself, and move on. But I think that the Pashtun nationalists, whether they call themselves the Taliban or something else, have inadvertently invented a significant new tactic. I don't see how the US doesn't get charged with the responsibility of clearing a village that the militants have booby-trapped. Typical villagers certainly don't have the ability to make a location safe. The Afghan central government doesn't have the ability, either, and training Afghans to do the job will take years. That leaves the US with the responsibility. But the US military certainly isn't going to risk soldiers' lives on manually disarming each and every device. So that leaves the mass destruction method, which works but tends to leave people homeless. And thus, I believe, the villagers will end up being mad at both sides, which won't help the US effort one bit.
We need to GTFO of central Asia.
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