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...trade; Afghan officials put the figure far lower, from $80 million to $100 million. Even at the low estimate, says a Western counternarcotics agent, "that's still enough to fuel the insurgency for a year." Nearly all of the Taliban's drug profits came from Helmand province, and a big chunk came from Marjah...
Eventually the Taliban will want to return as well. Marjah is too big a prize - for its drug revenue and its propaganda value - to give up. Unlike the drug traffickers, insurgent fighters didn't have to go very far to hide from McChrystal's troops. Abdul Rahman Jan, a tribal elder and former Helmand-province police chief, points out that "hardly a single gun was captured by the NATO forces." He believes that many of the Taliban fighters simply moved back from their quarters inside Marjah's mosques and madrasahs to stay with their families. Wherever they are, the insurgents...
Each generation of media has an oedipal relationship with the last. New technologies are born - radio, TV, the Internet - and either kill what came before or render it less relevant. Just so for years, the story of big-network TV has been how it's slowly losing out to cable, video games...
...funny thing has been happening with big TV events of late: they have been dramatically and conspicuously not dying. The 2010 Super Bowl was the most watched U.S. TV show ever, surpassing the finale of M*A*S*H. This year's Olympics far outrated the 2006 Games. The Emmys, Grammys and Golden Globes all increased, and on March 7, about 41 million people watched the Oscars, 5 million more than last year. (See the top 10 memorable moments of the 2010 Academy Awards...
There may be plenty of reasons for the higher Oscars ratings: a blockbuster (Avatar) was nominated; there were twice as many Best Picture nominees; Twilight's dreamboat stars were trotted out like a big undead parade; and in a lousy economy, free TV is a cheap date. But another reason may be the likes of Twitter and Facebook - new media that aren't replacing TV but creating a new way to watch it. (See pictures of James Cameron's special effects...