4 ideas
The victims were local leaders loyal to the new Karzai government who had been collecting Taliban weapons for disarmament. Faulty local intelligence had labeled them Taliban. The raid is a concrete case of a foreign force destroying the very people building the order it claimed to support.
After late 2001, most Taliban commanders and foot soldiers surrendered, went home, and sought accommodation with the new government. There was no organized insurgency left to fight. US counterterrorism operations kept hunting, detaining, and abusing these men anyway, which left many of them no safe option except to take up arms again. On this account, the insurgency was largely re-created by the campaign meant to defeat it rather than surviving it.
A foreign force with a mandate to find terrorists, but no local knowledge, creates a market for enemies. Local strongmen such as Jan Mohammad Khan supplied names to meet that demand, branding tribal rivals and business competitors as Taliban. US firepower then settled private feuds. The pressure to show counterterrorism results rewards whoever produces targets, not whoever produces true targets.
Viewed from the village, fighters and civilians do not choose sides by belief. They align with whichever armed actor can protect their family, land, and tribe at that moment, and they switch when that calculation changes. Reading a conflict as a contest of ideologies hides this and misreads shifting loyalties as fanaticism or betrayal. In fact they are rational responses to insecurity.