Word: convoys
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...this? The question has echoed over the past two months as TIME and other publications have reported grim stories from Afghanistan that are at odds with Pentagon accounts of victorious strikes against the enemy. On Dec. 20, U.S. planes rocketed a convoy of tribal elders going to Kabul for the swearing-in ceremony of Afghan leader Hamid Karza and then chased the fleeing tribesmen into a village, killing 60, say locals. On Feb. 4, a Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile at a man who U.S. Central Command thought might be bin Laden. Villagers say the dead...
...targets are selected by dishonest men. Western diplomats and Afghan intelligence sources in Kabul say that until recently the special forces in eastern and southern Afghanistan have relied on untrustworthy informants who tricked the U.S. into sending in lethal air strikes on their tribal enemies. Both the Kabul-bound convoy and the Qila-Niazi wedding party, for example, were targeted by Pacha Khan, a former provincial governor, derided by one official as a "Pentagon-created warlord," who was using American munitions to take care of his own business, according to Afghan government sources and tribal elders in Gardez. Says tribal...
...That Saturday morning, the convoy headed east along a muddy, rutted road. Sabur was in the back of a brightly colored pickup; two Americans sat in the cabin, and another team of special forces followed them. As the truck splashed around a muddy bend, Sabur told TIME, "al-Qaeda opened fire on us with something big." In a mud-brick hut was hidden an antiaircraft gun or mortar. Munitions ripped through the cabin. Sabur took shrapnel in his leg. The convoy returned fire and called in air support. Three helicopters thundered up the canyon, blasting away at enemy positions...
...back. But the al Qaeda fighters regrouped at a high walled compound further down the road and off to the west. Again they unleashed heavy weapons fire; once more they were repelled. "When we'd finished all the Arabs were dead," says another mujahid who had been in the convoy that morning. But even this miserable ground had come at a price; a handful of government soldiers were killed and, according to the mujahid, so was one American. "He died right here," he says standing in a dip in the road...
...comes to issues like sex and education. The ban on women driving certainly limits Saudi economic potential. But what had been a long-standing cultural taboo became a seemingly irreversible religious edict in 1990 after a group of 40 women protested against the prohibition by driving cars in a convoy through downtown Riyadh. Abdullah has green-lighted a very limited population control campaign to address what may be the gravest long-term threat to stability, a birthrate unofficially put at 4.2%, one of the world's highest. (The population of Saudi nationals is 17.4 million.) Yet he fears the wrath...