Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...stopped to toss candies to kids who were swarming around their humvees. Minutes later, an explosion tore through the crowd, killing five Afghans, including two boys, and wounding nine U.S. soldiers. The crowd quickly turned on the Americans, blaming them for the deaths. (See pictures of the war in Afghanistan...
...ways to avoid such unintended consequences, as that commander at Forward Operating Base Maizan in Zabul province noted, is to remember why foreign troops and internationals are in Afghanistan. "Winning hearts and minds," that catchphrase of counterinsurgency, can be easily misunderstood. The aim of Western soldiers in Afghanistan is not to win affection for themselves or their armies but to build support for the Afghan government...
...American people," as the project signs so proudly proclaim, but getting them to like Americans is not going to win the war. Success will only come when Afghans are willing to pay taxes to a government that is able to provide those services itself. Otherwise, the foreign endeavor in Afghanistan is destined to fail - when the donor spigot is turned off, local goodwill is bound to fade. Or worse, as in the case near Jalalabad, magnanimous gestures can all too easily be turned into an opportunity for grievance...
...that incident as well as the Jalalabad one underscore the U.S.'s failure to understand the local environment, much of it attributable to a self-centered approach to gathering and disseminating intelligence throughout the Afghan theater. A new report titled "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan," written by the top U.S. military intelligence commander there, slams intelligence failures (even before a Jordanian double agent detonated his suicide vest inside a CIA facility, killing eight personnel). The report says that intelligence-gathering systems are "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers...
...President Obama describe his plan for Afghanistan...