Word: commandeering
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...20th century was not good to Europe's once mighty kings and queens. Old World royals lost most of their monarchical mojo, with their powers now limited to the purely ceremonial, as in Sweden, or to such roles as the Spanish King's command of his country's armed forces. The last absolute monarch left on European soil is Pope Benedict...
...gone the reformers' way. The two begums, as Hasina and Zia are known, still command huge swathes of support - and, after ceaseless political pressure from their cadres, both are now free from detention and contesting the upcoming polls. Initially, the caretaker government attempted to encourage prominent figures from civil society to form a "third way" to break from the country's two-party system. That project failed, as did efforts to weaken the begums' networks of patronage that assured their grip on power. After two years out in the cold, Hasina or Zia could very well snatch the reins again...
...Karachi, and in the Indian state of Assam. The two nations have much in common: they face domestic and international terrorists, separatist movements, and are both under pressure by the international community to play a mature and stable role in South Asia. Rather than letting non-state terrorist actors command our future, we must work together to productively combat these threats...
...some ways, Helmand province - which I visited with the German general Egon Ramms, commander of NATO's Allied Joint Force Command - is a perfect metaphor for the broader war. The soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force are doing what they can against difficult odds. The language and tactics of counter-insurgency warfare are universal here: secure the population, help them build their communities. There are occasional victories: the Taliban leader of Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, switched sides and has become an effective local governor. But the incremental successes are reversible - schools are burned by the Taliban, police...
...know what the mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions...