'it is likely that those harboring terrorists were not exactly charitable in their attitudes toward US even before an attack.'

Bill the question has been asked elsewhere -

'If an omnipotent superpower Afghanistan invaded the United States, how many patriotic Americans would cooperate with an Afghan occupation and help the invaders kill American 'bad guys'?
How many American kids would be willing to die fighting the Afghani and other foreigners that have overwhelming firepower including terrifying all seeing drones in the sky firing missiles?'

Is one man's 'terrorist' another man's freedom fighter"?

However - back to the 'joke' and the reality behind it

An extract from a report by a female correspondent embedded with US forces in Afghanistan.


"We were doing a story on air strikes and civilian casualties, and I wanted the point of view of the soldiers dropping the bombs.
And that's what happened on our first night at Camp Blessing, the battalion headquarters in the Pech River valley in eastern Afghanistan.

We were inside the TOC – the tactical operations centre, which is like a big, classified PlayStation. The landscape comes to life on a movie screen by way of Google Earth and Predator drone video feeds. The Americans zeroed in on a few bad guys firing mortars from a roof.

One soldier joked that we were about to get our first glimpse of Kill TV. The screen flashed, bright static, as a 500lb bomb hit the roof. The mortar stopped. So did the men.

It was a snuff film. They call it pred porn.

Early the next morning we were in a Chinook, hugging the contours of the rocky peaks and then sprinting across the landing zone to avoid getting shot at. I found big, brash 27-year-old Captain Dan Kearney, dubbed the Lord of the Korengal Valley, in the well-equipped medic's tent.
On the bed sat a boy with blood-stained eyes, his face covered in gashes. He wouldn't or couldn't talk.
The villagers said he was wounded by the American bomb that also killed two women. Two more women were wounded and outside the gate, but the villagers wouldn't let them be treated because the medic was a man. The women could die, said the medic. The men still refused. "Welcome to my life," said Dan. Taliban attack his soldiers from the villages. He retaliates. Afghan women and children die.

"Pull out his eyes, apologise; apologise, pull out his eyes". The old, taunting rhyme bounced in my head as I looked into the eyes of an Afghan woman lying limp and frightened on a hospital bed down the valley in Kunar's capital. Attached to her was a nursing child.
The bomb had landed on her house, killing her husband. Her eyes moved behind me, seemed to tour the room; then, seeing no salvation, they lost focus. There were other wounded women in the beds. One had lost her husband a year ago in a feud, and now her teenage son had been killed in the bombing. She was asking the doctor, me, anyone who'd listen, "Who will take care of me?"

The doctor translated for them and then pursued me down the hall, urging me to tell the Americans to please stop bombing their villages. "It's too much, it's too much," he said.
He was young, with a creased, tired face and was craning his head to catch up with me. "Please tell them," he said. "They might listen to you. They won't listen to us."

I said that I would and I meant it, and I knew it would make no difference. It was as a 12-year-old girl had asked me five years earlier in Kandahar, squirming in her hospital bed. She'd been playing in the courtyard at her sister's wedding when gunships burst out of the night, killing her entire family. "Why do you bomb us and then come saying you're sorry?"