Word: civilians
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...just boots on the ground. As part of its counterinsurgency strategy, the Pakistani military says it is taking the lead in eliminating the factors that helped the area fall to the extremists in the first place: poverty and bureacractic ineptitude and corruption. In Swat, it has set up joint civilian-military liaison cells, which bring together representatives of the military, provincial government and tribal elders. "There are so many reasons that we fell to them [the Taliban] and they took over, so many reasons," says Bakhd Zada, a tribal elder from Devlai, a town of some 30,000, 13 miles...
...longest-serving commanders in chief. "No credible criminal investigation can proceed in Pakistan," says Farzana Shaikh, a senior Pakistan analyst at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, "because that would mean going to the heart of the military and its intelligence arm. This is a weak civilian government. The military still calls the shots. That's the reality of Pakistan. Like many other murders, we are not going to get any answers any time soon...
...attributable to foreign assistance and thus reveals the necessity, rather than the irrelevance, of aid from its allies in facing the more numerous forces of its belligerent neighbors. Moreover, the more recent military conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza display Israel’s inability to stem attacks on its civilian population when restrained by its allies and world opinion from taking steps necessary to dismantle the terrorist infrastructures of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Crimson staff also incorrectly suggests that the U.S. has, over the decades, uncritically given Israel carte blanche to pursue its military objectives. However, it is in part...
...district governor who insisted on keeping his office at the battalion's forward operating base, rather than among the people. "And then the Afghan army regiment we were supposed to partner with was diverted to Helmand province, for the battle in Marjah," says Brown. And the so-called civilian surge - the civil and economic development component of the offensive, led by the State Department - arrived late and weak. "So the 1/12's been out there, pretty much alone," a State Department official based in Kandahar told me. "No Afghan military partner, a lousy relationship with the local government...
...troops. It's laughable. We can't fire warning shots. We can't even fire pen flares to stop an oncoming vehicle. If a guy shoots at you, then puts down his weapon and runs away, you can't fire back at him because you might harm a civilian." (See Joe Klein discuss why Stanley McChrystal was a 2009 Person of the Year runner...