Word: chieftains
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...Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government that would be founded largely on the Northern Alliance - the coalition of ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara former mujahedin warlords who had always fought the Taliban. A chieftain in the Popolzai tribe, Karzai was a prominent leader in Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, which is also the social base of the Taliban. Still, his power base was limited, and creating an effective government forced him to cut deals with all manner of unsavory characters...
...hero of the film is the unfortunately named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), who is the son of the stoic village chieftain, but inheritor of none of his physical prowess or impressive musculature. A thoughtful, contemplative sort, Hiccup does not quite fit in at dragon-slaying boot camp, where the motto is “Why read words when you can just kill the stuff the words tell you about?” This attitude is problematic for Hiccup, who has secretly befriended a dragon he has christened Toothless—a creature whose creepy cuteness is strikingly similar...
...engaged in hunger strikes to protest what he claimed was the guards' "disrespect to the Koran." Throughout his interrogation, he managed to hide the fact that he had been one of Taliban leader Mullah Omar's trusted deputies and a front-line commander against the forces of Northern Alliance chieftain Ahmed Shah Masood. Zakir duped his interrogators into believing that he was a nobody who had been dragooned into the ranks of the Taliban and who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden. All Prisoner No. 8 wanted, he told a military review board, was "to go back home...
McChrystal repeated the chieftain's words Feb. 18 in a secure video teleconference with President Barack Obama and his top advisers on Afghanistan and Pakistan. By then, the operation, by all accounts, was going well. NATO troops had encountered only sporadic resistance; much of the town was under the control of the U.S. Marines. British-led forces, meanwhile, had taken the nearby community of Showal. Some government in a box was already being unpacked. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
After a year of mostly grim tidings from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama could have been allowed a moment of satisfaction. But McChrystal's recounting of the Helmand chieftain's warning ensured that the mood in the White House's Situation Room during the conference call was somber. According to National Security Adviser Jim Jones, who was there, Obama added an exhortation of his own, using the idioms of counterinsurgency warfare. "Do not clear and hold what you are not willing to build and transfer," he told McChrystal, a maxim he had repeated often over the previous months. "You've heard...