Word: binding
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...strategy: a decision to overlook poppy cultivation, even though the opium trade is a central prop of the Taliban. But an eradication program would suck ISAF into a grinding war with locals who have no other way to earn a living. All that leaves NATO governments in an awkward bind. They have had to acquiesce in the Pentagon's proposed drawdown of some 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan to ease pressure on its forces in Iraq, but their own elastic now seems fully stretched. "The Afghan effort is one people still very much support," says a defense official from...
...PROSPECT OF A HILLARY-FOR-PRESIDENT campaign has put much of the Democratic establishment in a bind. The early line is that Hillary would be unstoppable in a Democratic primary but unelectable in a general election. That bet would help explain the curious political subspecies I came across frequently in reporting this story: moneymen who are lining her campaign account even as they say privately they hope...
...down on fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success...
...Yasukuni left Koizumi in a political situation that Bush might recognize - what succeeds in domestic politics is wrecking the country's reputation abroad. And that leaves Abe in something of a bind. (Abe is a virtual lock to win next month's elections to lead Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, LDP, which would automatically make him Prime Minister.) If Abe visits Yasukuni after becoming Prime Minister, he could destroy Japan's best chance in years to repair relations with China and South Korea. If he decides not to go, he could be seen as kowtowing to Chinese wishes...
...escalating war is a result of two sets of miscalculations. Each side underestimated the other's fierceness and willingness to fight. So now the Israelis are stuck with a war on a scale they didn't plan for, and without an exit strategy. Hizballah is in a similar bind. At first, the Israelis spoke vaguely about the need to degrade Hizballah before ending their campaign. But as the battle escalated, so did Israel's expressed goals. Officials last week were demanding implementation of U.N. Resolution 1559, passed after Israel's 2000 pullout, which calls for disarming Hizballah and deploying...