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...officially out of recession but Europe's biggest economy is struggling to get back on its feet. Unemployment is creeping up and public finances are deteriorating. Germany's budget deficit reached 3.3% of GDP in 2009 and is forecast to rise to more than 5% of GDP this year - far more than the 3% limit set by European Union rules. Add in worries that Berlin could end up bailing Greece out of its own financial predicament (so far Merkel's response to calls for help has been a firm nein, though she has proposed a new European Monetary Fund that...
Marjah is just a scattering of dusty villages set amid 17,000 hectares of poppy fields. But its backwater appearance is deceptive: until last month, it was the hub of a dozen international drug syndicates reaching across borders as far away as Europe, Russia and the Far East. The U.N. reckons Marjah has the world's highest concentration of opium production. So Operation Moshtarak is more than a military offensive; it is also the biggest counternarcotics operation ever attempted. It marks a new emphasis by the White House and the Pentagon on choking off the Taliban from their drug funds...
...back of the military offensive to set up a new local administration - McChrystal's so-called government in a box. It has not gotten off to a promising start, though. Abdul Zahir Aryan, the man picked to be the district chief of the new Marjah administration, has a far-from-stellar record. He left for Germany in 1989 and bounced between odd jobs in hotels and laundries; according to U.S. and German press reports, he served four years in prison for the attempted murder of his stepson. (Zahir told TIME this was a "personal issue" that had been resolved.) Some...
...night, masked Taliban fighters appear at houses and threaten to behead people if they work with the government. The insurgents need the farmers to stick with the poppy. According to U.N. experts, last year the Taliban reaped nearly $300 million from the drug trade; Afghan officials put the figure far lower, from $80 million to $100 million. Even at the low estimate, says a Western counternarcotics agent, "that's still enough to fuel the insurgency for a year." Nearly all of the Taliban's drug profits came from Helmand province, and a big chunk came from Marjah...
Eventually the Taliban will want to return as well. Marjah is too big a prize - for its drug revenue and its propaganda value - to give up. Unlike the drug traffickers, insurgent fighters didn't have to go very far to hide from McChrystal's troops. Abdul Rahman Jan, a tribal elder and former Helmand-province police chief, points out that "hardly a single gun was captured by the NATO forces." He believes that many of the Taliban fighters simply moved back from their quarters inside Marjah's mosques and madrasahs to stay with their families. Wherever they are, the insurgents...