Word: afghanization
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...officials are right, the Taliban might be hiding up to $3.2 billion worth of opium inside Afghanistan, potentially causing huge complications for NATO's decision this month to attack Afghanistan's opium laboratories and smuggling networks. If it exists, the drug stockpile would also have a major bearing on Afghan officials' tentative peace talks with the Taliban, which are favored by U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus and both U.S. presidential candidates...
...missing is based on simple arithmetic and market economics. The world consumes a steady 4,500 tons or so of opium a year, almost all of which comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan, where the crop earns about $1 billion a year for farmers, by U.N. estimates. Yet Afghan farmers have harvested far above world demand in recent years; last year's harvest was a record 8,200 tons and this year's crop dipped only slightly to about 7,700 tons, in part because the global food crisis sent the price of wheat rocketing, persuading many Afghan farmers...
Cross-border strikes are an increasingly common tactic by U.S. forces operating along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. U.S. missile-launching drones reportedly killed at least 20 people on Sunday in Pakistan's South Waziristan province close to the Afghan border, an area suspected of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Andrew Exum, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as founder of the influential Abu Muqawama counterinsurgency blog, suggests that the American action in Syria shows that the tactic may simply have been exported. "The precedent has already been established of crossing borders into...
...Afghanistan Violence Escalates Amid growing concern over the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, both Taliban sources and Afghan police confirmed that dozens of passengers aboard a bus in Kandahar had been killed. Six of the recovered bodies had been beheaded. While the Taliban has claimed responsibility for the deaths of 27 passengers, contending that they were Afghan soldiers, police chief Matiullah Khan Qaneh maintained that the Taliban had killed some 40 civilians who were en route to Iran in search of work. On Oct. 20, aid worker Gayle Williams, who had British and South African citizenship, was shot dead...
...Major General Cone recognizes that turning the Afghan National Police into a professional force will take years. Khalil is simply a minor player on the bottom rungs of a ladder that goes much higher. "Right now there are too many people who can pick up a phone and say to their man in the Ministry of the Interior, 'Call down and move 200 guys this way,' or 'look the other way on this,'" says Cone. "Reform will be essential to fixing the police...