Word: commander
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...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 counterinsurgency 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 officers...
...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...
...that Blackwater guards like the five being presently indicted for voluntary manslaughter are, along with the almost 200,000 other defense contractors currently employed in Iraq, technically outside Iraqi jurisdiction until Jan. 1 of next year, should start to provide answers to these questions. Unfettered by the chain of command and court-martial and outside the reach of the nascent Iraqi government, these mercenaries, specifically commissioned to provide security instead of standard U.S. armed forces, went about for years almost totally free of accountability. It’s almost surprising that the 2007 shootings and the few ugly and baseless...
...task force led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recommended that President-elect Barack Obama create a dedicated interagency group that would respond to genocide by analyzing emerging threats and coordinating action with other nations. The panel, which also includes former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, recommended that the U.S. government invest $250 million in new funds for prevention and response...
According to the Journal, the University’s new 30-year debt will command interest payments of 3.375 percent above U.S. government treasuries—a widely used benchmark for risk-free investments. That figure is approximately twice the premium Harvard paid on 30-year debt sold two years...