Word: desertions
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...every tale of courage in Afghanistan's bloody history, there is a corresponding one of betrayal, with loyalties that shift like the desert sands. That shift is beginning against the Taliban's leadership. Fissures are appearing in the Taliban ranks between hard-liners and so-called moderates, who privately believe that Mohammed Omar's refusal to hand over terrorist Osama bin Laden is akin to mass suicide. Says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani author and expert on the Taliban movement: "The U.S. threat is helping to divide the Taliban." Rashid says the Taliban's "fellow travelers," the tribal leaders...
...Chaman border, tribal leader Achakzai listens to a village cleric oozing messianic praise of the Taliban. When the mullah gathers his robes and exits from the dark, carpeted room into a courtyard of flies and the blinding white light of the desert, Achakzai says with a grin: "Once the Taliban falls, that mullah will be cheering the return of Zahir Shah." Loyalty is something the Taliban can no longer count on among all its fellow tribesmen...
...images. Ristelhueber instead chooses to focus on the vestiges of conflict--the remnants of troop movements, of battles, of actions taken and not being taken. She is particular fond, for example, of images of rusty cans and shells in the middle of a huge desert . (One is reminded often, in perusing the exhibit, of P.B. Shelley's timeless words from Ozymandias: "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.") Human suffering and become morally neutral in these photographs, as Ristelheuber deflates the concepts of good and evil, moving beyond...
...would be a great service. That way, there would be no fighting between America and the Afghans." On the road back to Quetta, we pass a Koranic school where kids have constructed a row of toy antiaircraft guns to take shots at imaginary U.S. warplanes flying out of the desert sunset. I hope the border guard gets lucky: it might allow those schoolkids to grow up without training their sights on real U.S. fighter jets...
...Mullah Mohammed Omar and suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden have houses there. "What are you waiting for?" a neighbor yelled at Barasna. "It's suicide to stay here." A turbaned Taliban commander in a Land Cruiser roared by, kicking up dust, heading for the moonlit road across the desert to Pakistan. "Look at the Taliban run," the neighbor shouted before running inside to pack his belongings. Later that night, Barasna, an energetic woman in her early 30s, donned her head-to-toe burka veil, padlocked her house and headed into the night with her husband, five children...