Well, there’s this:

In a statement Friday, the Taliban said it had attacked the Roots of Peace guesthouse because it was used by foreigners as a “church used to convert Afghans.”

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Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/taliban-attacks-western-guest-house-afghan-officials-say/2014/03/28/d28af42c-b681-11e3-a7c6-70cf2db17781_story.html
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But what do I know. I’m not worthy of posting here.

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This is non-responsive. Firstly, as the article you linked points out:

The nonprofit organization has no stated religious affiliation. Roots of Peace is a California-based group that has worked in Afghanistan for a decade helping local farmers cultivate vineyards and orchards. According to its Web site, the group has been working in Afghanistan since 2003 and has received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Secondly, also straight from the same article:

In recent months, there appears to have been a shift in Taliban tactics resulting in a more concerted effort to target foreign civilians in Kabul.
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After last week’s attack on the Serena hotel, which left nine people dead, two groups of election observers…withdrew their employees….
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In January, an attack on a popular Lebanese restaurant killed 21 people, including 13 foreigners. It came as a shock to expatriates here who were accustomed to dining at Western restaurants and attending parties at guesthouses. Attacks against foreign civilians were not unheard of, but they happened only sporadically.
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Then, this month, gunmen killed Swedish journalist Nils Horner as he conducted interviews on a busy Kabul street.

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Thirdly, your original theory was based on the Times’ speculation that the compound next door, a Christian charity/daycare, was the target. Now, even if that were true, there is no evidence presented that that building was a church, that the Christian charity that ran it was proselytizing to Afghans, or that the people there had otherwise been “insensitive”. And the WaPo reporting on the Taliban spokesman’s statement seems to imply pretty clearly that the Taliban stood behind the attack and were calling the Roots of Peace housing a church, which seems even more ridiculous. So all we likely have here is (shock) the Taliban lying, with an unsupported accusation of foreign-induced conversions being a reliable standby cover for attacks driven by less PR-worthy motives.
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Your reporting approach here seems to fit every new piece of evidence, even if it’s the opposite of what was originally expected, into the preconceived narrative. I think you should take a step back and ask yourself: “is there a way that a piece of the story could have come out that would have reduced, rather than reinforced, my confidence in this theory?”
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Fourthly, as I said above, pointing to some other example where foreign Christians are attacked purportedly based on their Christan-ness is not good support for the insinuation in the OP. That is that either foreigners’ Christian character or their “insensitive” behavior — to the extent you are willing to draw any distinction — are really a significant driver of attacks. You will find examples if you look for them. That isn’t testing the theory — testing the theory means trying to look outside of those examples to see if they do not comport to the overall pattern of targeted attacks (i.e., you need at least some attempt at a control). Otherwise your hypothesis is not falsifiable and just becomes a Christmas tree on which you can hang every new fact. The articles to which you link specifically talk about anti-foreigner violence as a problem across the board. What could be interpreted as a sign that there is no special pattern here, you choose instead to interpret as some kind of conspiratorial omission by journalists who don’t want to tell their audience that Christians were provoking violence against themselves.
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Fifthly, the main mechanism of the theory if your post is that Christians’ insensitivity (or the insensitivity of their existence) is sparking some kind of primal, spur-of-the-moment rage in Afghans who then open fire. And so the Roots of Peace example, whatever the intended target and however muddled the reasoning, is especially not applicable, as it was a coordinated assault and seige by four attackers followed by official Taliban talking points.
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Of course, you haven’t really responded to any of the substance of my criticisms, and you have every right to refrain from doing so. But it is unhelpful and petulant to warp my low opinion of your work here into a straw man calling you as a person “not worthy of posting here”. Doing so is just a way of settinig a ridiculously low bar for yourself — by characterizing my criticism that way, all you have to do to prove me wrong is type something vaguely factual or link to something containing the kernel of anything informative.
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Instead, I think you need to live up to a higher standard. I do not always agree with Emptywheel or Bmaz, sometimes they stretch, and sometimes they’re wrong. But they put on this site stories that contain a certain quality of research, fact-checking, perspective, and insight. This piece is a stark contrast to that, and I think that you have made other posts that also compare unfavorably to the standard of the site.
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You don’t have to take that as a challenge to do better; you can wholeheartedly disagree with my opinion. But I would urge you to do so maturely rather than trying to substitute sympathy for good research by mischaracterizing my criticism as an ad-hominem attack, since it clearly wasn’t.

your #20 marks you as a pompous blowhard trying to disguise that he had stepped in shit despite the overwheling smell on his shoes.

1. jim white was likely right on the facts. you were likely wrong. that makes the charges you made largely irrelevant.

2. rather than concede even the possibility you were wrong on the critically relevant facts, you construct a long-winded-winding argument that is an embarrassingy tortuous self-justification for being dead-wrong (as it were).

3. facts count.

when may we expect you to conceed HERE the relevance of the facts in white’s #16?

the person doing the killing knows the motive – personal or philosophical. you and i do not.

…which is why someone purporting to understand the cause needs to support that with serious evidence.

is it all that hard to accept that the dead were killed because they were some combination of foreign, american, medical, and religious missionaries?

Of course not (except for the “missionary” part, which probably is not a good word to use to describe them). But the whole point of White’s piece here is to single out one of those aspects and claim that it is much more important than the media are admitting. And he does this poorly.

is it all that hard to further acknowledge that persistent doing good can be repaid suddenly and violently and can have as a trigger the victims’ political or religious philosophy?

It’s very easy to acknowledge that such a thing “can” happen. This has little to do with whether White has put together any kind of worthy argument supporting the idea that that is what *has* happened here.

for me, the idea of missionary is welded to the idea of cultural arrogance and self-righteousness.

Then it is particularly important to examine claims that White is making about this organization before tagging them with the category “missionary” in your mind, thereafter attributing to them all of this baggage.

before i have permission to discuss the possibility such factors as these, embedded in the beliefs of their organization, doomed the dead medical worker and his guests, must i compile a police report and parlimentary findings confirming that?

White isn’t just “discussing the possibility”. He is overstating the relative weight of evidence suggesting that this is the case. And he is then taking that overstatement and using it to engage in a form of victim-blaming that would not be justified even if the underlying facts were well supported by the evidence.

and just to throw in a few more mights and maybes, what would you say if white were proven entirely right?

“well, jim you nailed the motive, but your reasoning was so bad ( by my standards) that you had no right to be right. and besides, victim-blaming is not nice, no matter the truth.”

This is exactly what ought to happen in that case. If somebody throwing two dice asked you to guess the outcome, and you said anything other than “seven”, it would be foolish to praise you even if you lucked out. And the victim blaming in the original post is morally wrong completely separate from the factual dispute about the killer’s motives.

Further, it seems more than a little silly that you defend White’s use of thin evidence by consistently downplaying the force with which he is making his argument. He is just “discussing the possibility” or “raising the question” or whatever when he has not done a good job weighing the evidence he has or gathering the additional evidence needed to test it. But when imagining that it may actually turn out to be a killing motivated by observing overt Christian worship, you switch into a mode where somehow White was heroically standing strong for this narrative and would be vindicated. It just doesn’t make sense.

when may we expect you to conceed HERE the relevance of the facts in white’s #16?

I feel like I addressed what was in that article at great length (in fact, such great length that you mostly just felt the need to criticise me for being long-winded). I don’t understand what substantive point your are making here — what “facts” you are referring to that I have somehow not addressed.

I literally do not understand what you are taking about. #16 was a link to a WaPo article that included a probably ridiculous Taliban claim that the secular Roots of Peace staff house was a church performing conversions. I then wrote a number of reasons why I don’t think this actually supports the OP. (No evidence of proselytizing by either RoP or the neighbors, article specifically cites wave of anti-foreign attacks equally including secular organizations, not a spontaneous attack, which is the proposed mechanism, still no moral support for victim blaming). Twice now, you’ve just made this blanket assertion that there is some smoking gun in there that I left out. I genuinely, seriously, have no idea what you’re referring to. If you want a response, you need to identify and explain the thing you’re taking about.

To be fair to A.C., he was responding there specifically to orionATL, and it’s often very difficult to know whether to take orionATL seriously–but as someone who doesn’t communicate very clearly–or as a troll.