Trump framed US Afghan policy as pure killing, not nation-building

Evidence

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.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 520

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: The ‘not nation-building, killing terrorists’ line and Karzai’s rebuttal about Afghanistan as a weapons testing ground could anchor an essay on overt versus rationalized empire.

Related

• Karzai framed the Mother of All Bombs as weapons testing on Afghanistan (similarity 0.85)
• A former Afghan president framed US bombing as weapons testing, not counterterrorism (similarity 0.83)
• Spectacular violence can compel adversaries to negotiate on the imperial power’s terms (similarity 0.83)