Spectacular violence can compel adversaries to negotiate on the imperial power’s terms

Evidence

In Afghanistan, Trump initially continued Obama’s policy. US troops trained and helped the Afghan government and the military in their war against the Taliban. However, he broke with previous counterinsurgency thinking about “hearts and minds” by adopting a more aggressive approach. As he put it, “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.” In 2017 the United States dropped the largest non-nuclear weapon in history—the so-called “Mother of All Bombs”—on an ISIS facility. The attack drew criticism from Afghanistan’s former president Hamid Karzai, who declared: “This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons. It is upon us, Afghans, to stop the USA.” This attack was the largest bombing campaign since the start of the war in 2001. … In 2019, the United States was responsible for larger numbers of civilian casualties than the Taliban. Through the use of spectacular violence, Trump forced the Taliban to the bargaining table. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 532

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to ch10 claim already extracted about Karzai framing the Mother of All Bombs as weapons testing on Afghanistan.

Related

• Trump framed US Afghan policy as pure killing, not nation-building (similarity 0.83)
• Karzai framed the Mother of All Bombs as weapons testing on Afghanistan (similarity 0.82)
• A former Afghan president framed US bombing as weapons testing, not counterterrorism (similarity 0.81)