Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even with the Taliban's surrender of Kunduz supposedly a done deal, the fighting for the last holdout town in northern Afghanistan was fierce on Thursday. And the confusion on the battlefield offered important clues as to the nature of the power shift in Afghanistan over the past month. Earlier Thursday, the commander of the Northern Alliance's Uzbek forces to the west of the city, General Rashid Dostum, announced that he had secured an agreement from Kunduz's Taliban commanders to lay down their arms by Sunday. But Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni said from Kabul that cease...
...While the Taliban's rapid decline has cheered the U.S., it also ushers in a new phase of the war in which U.S. special forces conduct intense search-and-destroy missions against hard-line Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in southern Afghanistan on an increasingly murky battlefield. It's easy to see why Washington would be skeptical of any deal allowing safe passage for any Taliban fighters. Further south, the Taliban have often simply retreated and dispersed, handing towns and regions over to relatively friendly local Pashtun mujahedeen commanders who share their hostility to the Northern Alliance, and in some...
...agreed to appoint Tajik leader Burhanuddin Rabbani as president for one year. But Rabbani held on for four years, during which time the forces of Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar waged a vicious artillery campaign that turned the capital into rubble and killed thousands. Hekmatyar was sometimes joined on the battlefield by the Uzbek militia of General Rashid Dostum, a former security chief of the Soviet-backed regime. Eventually, with direct military support from Pakistan and financial aid from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban swept to power in 1996, vowing to end the bloodletting...
...Pakistani efforts to forge a Pashtun opposition to the Taliban are falling behind the battlefield advances. With the death last month of prominent Pashtun war commander Abdul Haq--who was betrayed and executed by the Taliban while trying to recruit tribal elders for a revolt--U.S. hopes are pinned on Hamad Karzai, a pro-Western Pashtun nobleman who is in southern Afghanistan, urging tribal elders to back exiled King Mohammed Zahir Shah...
...high command of the U.S. military, that was enough to elicit a few sighs of relief. The U.S. had yearned for a battlefield victory in Afghanistan that would vindicate five weeks of aerial attacks, bolster confidence in the Pentagon's strategy and puncture some of the Taliban's swelling resolve before winter sets in. While the Alliance's siege of Mazar may not have satisfied all those aims, it did give the U.S. campaign a welcome adrenaline jolt. And its significance ran deeper: in its quick betrayals and shifting tempo, primitive clashes and unanticipated results, the battle for Mazar...