Word: afghan
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...Sheik Fuad Mohamed Shangole, a leader of an Islamist group known as al-Shabab (the Youth), which is fighting for control of the nation on the Horn of Africa, made a public declaration of allegiance to Osama bin Laden. If that summons memories of the old relationship between the Afghan Taliban and bin Laden, it should. Both Somalia and Afghanistan have been at war for more than a generation. Both wars have followed a similar progression: a toppling of the central government that was followed by years of warlord feuding (18 U.S. soldiers died protecting a U.N. mission in Mogadishu...
...battle against the Taliban intensified recently when NATO and Afghan forces launched the largest offensive since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan more than eight years ago. Fifteen thousand NATO and Afghan troops laid siege to the Taliban stronghold of Marjah. The center of Helmand province's opium-poppy trade, a major source of Taliban funds, Marjah had long been a no-go area for NATO troops. At the same time, in the Pakistani port of Karachi, a raid on a seminary by CIA and Pakistani intelligence agents netted Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's military commander...
...ahead of the long-trumpeted U.S.-led offensive. The Obama Administration has described the operation as a critical step toward lasting stability, but there's a high risk that the Taliban will melt back into Marjah once the NATO juggernaut pulls out and the area is turned over to Afghan administrators and security forces. Holding this ground will be the first true test for the newly minted Afghan army. A strong national army and police force are the linchpins of the Obama Administration's Afghanistan strategy, but until now, their efficacy and loyalty to President Hamid Karzai's government have...
Tehran and Islamabad had largely cordial ties until Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. By the 1990s, they found themselves facing each other across a post-Cold War battle line as Pakistan built up the Afghan Taliban, whose Sunni puritanism grated against Iran's state Shi'ism. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Islamabad allowed the U.S. the use of two military bases in Pakistani Baluchistan for counterterror operations. This predictably drew Iran's ire and deepened its fears of external forces conspiring to undermine its interests both at home and in Afghanistan...
Experts say Jundallah may have served, for a time, as a tool of strategic depth for Islamabad, much in the same way it has allowed the anti-Indian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban to exist in safe havens in Pakistan. "Rigi was a lever with which to have some leverage with Iran, a check Pakistan could cash in," says Bokhari...