Word: defective
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...foreign aid worker put it. Those fighters cut a secret deal with Alliance commander Rashid Dostum to allow Dostum's cavalry to pour through the Taliban front line. After that, the Alliance achieved its rout of the Taliban in typical Afghan fashion: by bribing Taliban commanders to defect...
...frontlines get further away by the day as local commanders defect from the Taliban in a domino procession. To the southwest, Herat has fallen due to a spontaneous uprising by the Shiite Muslim population against their Sunni Taliban rulers. To the south, Kabul and Jalalabad have gone. And now the fight is for Kandahar, where the Taliban was born and which has remained its administrative center...
...coup: catching Abdul Haq, 43, the Pashtun commander who slipped into Afghanistan two weeks ago to lay the groundwork for a revolt against the Taliban. Afghan sources tell TIME that Taliban spies dangled a juicy piece of bait in front of Haq: several regional Taliban commanders were ready to defect...
...Mazar will set off a string of rebel victories in the north, demoralize Taliban forces in the rest of the country and inspire wholesale desertions. Now that a major city has fallen, says Sirrs, "the momentum will start to turn against the Taliban." But those who don't defect will melt into their surroundings, lie low and wait to pounce. "The Taliban is unlike anything we've ever seen before," says a senior Pentagon official. "If you destroy the military capability of the Taliban and you take away 90% of its following and the rest go into the hills...
...Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. Some Taliban soldiers ran and hid, others switched sides. One Taliban commander on the front lines secretly arranged to defect with a few hundred of his men and agreed to let the Alliance through his line. The advancing rebels found another Taliban commander, Mullah Qahir, trying to avoid capture by snipping off his beard with nail scissors. He wasn't the only one. "From what I hear," said an Alliance...