[ranprieur]

> Each time they would laugh afterwards, like they were just playing around, or like it was a big party or something.

Terrorists in TV and movies are never like this. They're always super-serious evil, like Voldemort, like nobody ever is in real life. I wonder how much violence could be prevented if Hollywood didn't give us such a bullshit view of human nature.

[woolvalley]

It seems pretty evil to me if you laugh about murdering humans like it's some sort of game.

[StavrosK]

Isn't that what all soldiers do?

[muzika]

No

[StavrosK]

I guess the Taliban are somehow different from everyone else and evil, then. It's the most reasonable explanation.

[watwut]

Surely there is middle ground between "all soldiers do it" and "no soldier except Talian ever done it".

While no army is composed of highly emphatic saints, armies differ in their general level of violence toward non-combatants, cruelty, how pleasurable they perceive killing and so on and so forth. Ideology and reward system have to do a lot with how army or specific unit behaves.

[StavrosK]

Sure, I just don't really subscribe to the notion that "they're brown so they must be evil". The data I have right now is "these soldiers were taking killing lightly" and, if I'm going to generalize from the data point, I'll generalize to "all soldiers take killing lightly" rather than "the Taliban specifically take killing lightly", since that makes an additional assumption that the Taliban are special.

[Nition]

Not to excuse them obviously but I wonder if it could have been a nervous laugh. Later in the article even the author had to cover his mouth in case he laughed during the ordeal. I know I tend to laugh myself when something really stressful happens, it's an awkward habit.

[jackgavigan]

They may have been high. The Taliban is known to have given suicide bombers drugs before sending them to their deaths.

[Sammi]

They were probably just pleased and proud of themselves because they believe they are fighting on the good side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU