Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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 in 1993, an episode that later became the subject...
...years, when it came to host countries, al-Qaeda seemed to prefer the inaccessible mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Somalia's flat, open scrub. The handful of jihadis based in Somalia staged international attacks: in August 1998, they killed 224 people in twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in November 2002, 13 people died after a car-bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel on Kenya's coast. But they attempted nothing on the scale of Sept. 11. Now there is a fear that their ambitions may be rising...
...garner support among ordinary Somalis. The U.N. has reported that al-Shabab receives funds and weapons from the Middle East and the Eritrean government. (Al-Shabab fights Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is Eritrea's archenemy.) But that support is small compared with the assistance that extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan have received from radical Islamists around the world. Finally, the risk that Somalia could ignite a wider conflagration across the Horn of Africa - sucking in Ethiopia, Eritrea and even Kenya - is real but, again, nothing like the one in Afghanistan's neighborhood. As U.S. ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger never...
...certain amount of trust in government is necessary to try to solve difficult problems--and difficult problems are pretty much what we'll be looking at for the foreseeable future: the national debt; the rising costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ability to solve these problems means asking people to make a sacrifice, which requires a spirit of compromise and bipartisanship. Only then will trust in government begin to rise, and only then will voters begin to respond. What I can't agree with is the notion, expressed by the Tea Partyers...
...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...