Word: afghan
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...foiled terrorist plot is usually cause for celebration. But the Sept. 19 arrest of two Afghan-born men in connection with plans to bomb targets in the U.S. has left FBI agents frustrated. They had not intended to swoop on their prey quite so soon. Had an informant not tipped off alleged plotters Najibullah Zazi and his father Mohammed, they might still be free men--and useful assets in the hunt for terrorist networks...
...court documents, Najibullah Zazi, 24, who had been under FBI surveillance since a recent trip to Pakistan, rented a car and drove to New York the day before Sept. 11. The FBI alerted the NYPD to its investigation, and police officers showed his picture to Ahmad Wais Afzali, an Afghan-born imam of a Queens mosque and an occasional police informant. According to the FBI, Afzali then tipped off both the Zazis about the investigation. FBI agents, who had been monitoring the phones, knew their cover was blown and raided homes in Queens that Zazi had visited, seizing backpacks...
...This is a sound policy. If U.S. forces were not in Afghanistan, the Taliban, with its al-Qaeda allies in tow, would seize control of the country's south and east and might even take it over entirely. A senior Afghan politician told me that the Taliban would be in Kabul within 24 hours without the presence of international forces. This is not because the Taliban is so strong; generous estimates suggest it numbers no more than 20,000 fighters. It is because the Afghan government and the 90,000-man Afghan army are still so weak...
...Another common criticism is that Afghanistan is a cobbled-together agglomeration of warring tribes and ethnic factions that is not amenable to anything approaching nation-building. In fact, the first Afghan state emerged with the Durrani Empire in 1747, making it a nation older than the U.S. Afghans lack no sense of nationhood; rather, they have always been ruled by a weak central state...
...happen there. This is highly misleading. While violence is on the rise, it is nothing on the scale of what occurred during the Iraq war - or even what happened in U.S. cities as recently as 1991, when an American was statistically more likely to be killed than an Afghan civilian was last year. Finally, critics of greater U.S. involvement suggest that there is no realistic model for a successful end state in Afghanistan. In fact, there is a good one relatively close at hand: Afghanistan as it was in the 1970s, a country at peace internally and with its neighbors...