Word: afghanistan
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...responsible course, Obama echoed George W. Bush's fourth-quarter abandonment of free-market gospel. For both men, survival trumped ideology. In the process, however, the candidate of change became the President of continuity, a politically perilous position he has since reinforced, along with U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan. (See pictures of Person of the Year 2009 runner-up General Stanley McChrystal...
...view the promotion of elections as a cornerstone of Western foreign policy. The belief that liberty and equality "are chiefly to be found in democracy," as Aristotle wrote, is thousands of years old. But Western faith in the ballot box can sometimes seem blind and naive. Elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe have been accompanied by deadly violence. In 2006, an election in the Palestinian territories brought to power the Islamist militants of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.S. (See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME...
...always going to be a tough sell for Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. His government had pledged to withdraw 1,950 troops from Afghanistan by September - but he was going to renege on that promise and try to keep the Dutch contingent in the war zone through this year, flying in the face of Dutch political and public outrage. The result: on Feb. 20, after 16 hours of negotiations with his coalition partners in the Hague, Balkenende's efforts failed and with that came the collapse of his coalition government. New elections are expected within three months...
...Dutch government's collapse comes less than three months after U.S. President Barack Obama appealed to NATO allies to boost their Afghanistan troop numbers as part of a surge in the central Asian country. NATO asked this month for the Dutch mission to be extended beyond 2010. But Balkenende's coalition partners in the center-left Labor Party had already secured a pledge from the coalition's main party, the Christian Democrats, to pull troops out this year. Despite Balkenende's pleas, the Labor Party refused to reconsider. "A plan was agreed when our soldiers went to Afghanistan," said Labor...
Balkenende was scathing in his condemnation of Labor, saying it failed to understand the wider implications of an Afghanistan pullout. "When the Netherlands becomes the first and only country to say no to any activities, that will lead to question marks abroad," he said...