Word: colonels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last year. In one area on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the focus of a peace pact signed last September, attacks from safe havens inside Pakistan have jumped some 300%. "The enemy is taking advantage of that agreement to launch attacks into Afghanistan," said Army Colonel Tom Collins, Eikenberry's spokesman...
...situation collapses for some other reason--loss of will in the U.S., say, or an unexpected Iraqi political meltdown, then the reduced violence will permit a more orderly withdrawal, if that becomes necessary, mitigating the effect of defeat on the U.S. military and potentially on the region." A retired colonel who served in Baghdad put it more bluntly: "We don't know whether this is a plan for victory or just to signal to Americans that we did our damnedest before pulling...
...Regular news reports of the rising military death toll has made recruiting new soldiers even more difficult, laments Colonel Karimullah, head of army recruiting in Kabul. "The boys themselves are not afraid," he says. "But it is their parents who make the decisions to let them join, and when they see all this on TV, they don't think it's worth it." Although legitimate jobs are still hard to come by in Afghanistan, where unemployment hovers around 70%, poppy growing and smuggling in many provinces is a much more lucrative undertaking...
...Adam Grim readies his men for a nighttime raid in Mekanik, a gritty neighborhood in southern Baghdad. The target: a suspected militia safe house. Grim's platoon won't be leading the raid, however. Instead, the Americans will be supporting Iraqi forces led by a wiry police commander named Colonel Salih Hashim. Hashim knows the neighborhood well and chose the target himself. Together the two men discuss the plan one last time. Hashim and his men will storm the house while Grim's platoon secures the street outside and provides cover...
...Mahdi Army and a Sunni militant group called the Omar Brigade, illustrates the U.S.'s dilemmas. The neighborhood had suffered months of killing between Sunnis and Shi'ites before U.S. forces found a solution: to make the murders stop, keep the cops, who were overwhelmingly Shi'ite, out. Lieut. Colonel Jeffrey Peterson, the U.S. troop commander for Mekanik, says, "Whenever we would talk to locals about [the violence], they always implicated the national police as starting it. I could never prove it. But the bottom line was--whether it was true or false--the people did not trust the national...