Word: deserts
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...fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they prepared to be delivered into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan to begin a furtive ground war in which no one knew exactly what came next...
...surprisingly, the Taliban has a different story. A Taliban soldier, Abdu Rahman, 30, told TIME that two combat helicopters arrived before dawn Saturday in the desert 10 miles east of Kandahar. As one hovered overhead, a few commandos poured out of the second gunship. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had responded to the earsplitting whir of the choppers, were crouching in the darkness. "We were ordered to wait until the Americans came closer. But nobody listened. We were all firing," Rahman says. The American forces "flew off like sparrows...
...this tragedy must not prevent us from examining the way America has treated the world, and the way the world sees us, in the post-Cold War era. Terrorists are filled with uncompromising, blind rage, but their hate does not spring groundless from the sand of the desert. As human beings, we wish to divorce ourselves from these actions by thinking that such a disgusting attack can only be the work of brainwashed religious fanatics. And though religion may play a part, there cannot be any doubt that these terrorists hated America—including everything, and everyone, American?...
...Back on the border in Termez, ill-kept former Soviet tank firing ranges litter the desert. Broken barbed wire marks the outskirts of a separate military installation. Few people are on the streets. The banging of ripped corrugated iron against concrete supports is the only sound competing with the ever-wailing wind. In the bar room on the ground floor of the Hotel Surkhon, the town's lone oasis, a few young men are drinking beer and vodka chasers around the pool table. The melody, Things Can Only Get Better, booms from the audio system. It's a tenuous hope...
...must understand—that however much it may pain the goo-goos and Oprah-watchers to admit, our enemies are Islamic, and their ideology is rooted in Islamic traditions that stretch all the way back to when the first Muslim empires were carved from the Arabian desert...