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The British tried to mass murder the Afghans into submission in the First Anglo-Afghan War in the 1840's, but instead, the Brits only managed to enrage the Afghans into a frenzy of slaughter directed in the direction of the Brits themselves. A number of Afghan tribes had originally been allied to the British, but the Brits killed so many of their erstwhile "allies" that they pissed off the few people in Afghanistan who might have saved them. As a result, these proto-allies left the British to be slaughtered by the ferocioius Ghilzai (sp?) warriors, who utterly annihilated a British force of almost 20,000 led by General Elphinstone. The Brits then sacked the bazaar of Kabul-- again, hitting the assets of the few Afghans who still clung on with at least some tolerance for the British-- with the result that these once-tolerant Afghans left the British troops to be devoured as they moved out of Kabul, with Ghilzai hunters swarming onto the British like army ants devouring a grasshopper alive. The well-armed Brits leaving Kabul were hit from all sides by potshots from the Ghilzais hiding out in the huts and the bends in the road, while other Ghilzais set very evil traps and ambushed the British soldiers from all sides. Thus even the British "punitive expedition" to Kabul wound up being punished severely itself, while failing to extract even a hint of revenge against the Ghilzais who tormented them.
The British also tried the extreme cruelty tack against Spanish/local fighters in an invasion of South America during the early 1800's, a second war that opened up alongside the Napoleonic Wars as the British sought to take advantage of the fighting in Europe to conquer South America. They occupied many South American cities in two separate invasions and attempted to cruelly subdue the local populations, who might otherwise have been inclined favorably. But the South Americans reacted with rage against the occupation while the ad hoc Spanish and mercenary-led forces under Liniers and other officers moved in from their redoubts in the unconquered territory north and east of the urban centers in South America. They defeated the British twice and drove them out of the heart of South America for good. This was a world-changing victory, and it arose directly from opposition to the British, who were soon as cruel and arrogant occupiers. That's another reason why the American colonists fought the British so hard, why the Haitians also defeated a British invasion in 1793 and so on.
The point is, colonizers and occupiers, when they engage in cruelty and repression, provoke rage among the occupied peoples. The British learned this the hard way on many occasions, including after WWII-- the Israelis, Adenites, Egyptians at Suez all smashed and humiliated the British in wars that expelled them from their countries, while the Algerians and Vietnamese expelled the French in similar ways, despite tactics that approached even torture in Algeria.
The United States, Britain, Australia and Canada are now leading what are essentially colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're about to learn the hard way that we're against opponents who are too tough-- a lesson that we and the Anzacs should have learned from our defeat in the Vietnam War.
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