Word: buffer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Forty miles east of Tora Bora lies Pakistan's Tirah Valley, a semiautonomous tribal belt only nominally under government control. In the late 19th century the British established the area around and including the Tirah Valley as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and British India. The Pakistani government has never had an official presence there, and many of the tribesmen who rule Tirah are deeply conservative supporters of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But of late, Pakistani military helicopters have been buzzing over the frontier while soldiers patrol on foot. State-run Pakistan Television has broadcast pictures of locals...
...11th utterly destroyed the buffer that separated our most horrific and surreal imaginings from the realm of possibility. Our dark storyteller was given free reign in the world of the conceivable and, predictably, gas masks, Cipro and cell phones began flying off the shelves. And, imagining even more previously unimaginable images, the American public was loath to once again trudge down the jetway onto what they perceived as suicidal cruise missiles. Even now, the airline industry reports business around 40 percent lower than this time last year...
...failed Camp David summit between Arafat and Ehud Barak last year. While Barak wanted to negotiate an end to the conflict, Sharon is looking for what his aides call a "long-term interim settlement." To counter Israel's vulnerability, Sharon's advisers say he intends to insist on buffer zones both along the inside of the West Bank where it borders Israel and in the Jordan Valley. Advisers say Sharon is convinced that ground forces are decisive in war, and for that you need to keep hold of territory...
...Sharon's cabinet, meanwhile, has put strict limits on a plan by the Israeli military to create a "buffer zone" on the Palestinian side of the Green Line border that separates Israel from the West Bank. Israel's concerns are twofold: Not only is such an action likely to draw harsh international criticism and intensify Palestinian pressure on Arafat to avoid cease-fire agreements; it is also unacceptable to Israeli hawks as a de facto recognition that Israel's borders exclude the West Bank settlements...
...even without Israel imposing a "buffer zone" on the West Bank, Arafat remains in an uncomfortable position. Sharon insists there will be no discussion of political concessions before a cease-fire has taken hold, and he's dead set against any resumption of the Oslo process. But a cease-fire requires Arafat to rein in the militants, and he's unlikely to risk confrontation with the hard-liners of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even his own Fatah organization without a political prize to offer Palestinians as reward. After all, the majority of Palestinians polled in various surveys support violence against...