Word: fight
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...play Mafia Wars alone. Your friends on Facebook (or whatever network you're playing on) who also play Mafia Wars make up your family. They help you with your business and fight with you and send you gifts. The bigger the family, the better for business. And you have a lot of business: you develop real estate, act as a hired gun and attack other players. The more money you get, the more stuff you can buy, like weapons and vehicles. The more stuff you have, the more jobs you can do and the more money you get. Round...
...Afghan dilemma in a single question: "How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?" The fact that there's no good answer explains the Administration's hesitation in committing more troops to the fight. Indeed, the objectives cited by Gates may function at cross-purposes...
...equip Afghans to do the job themselves. Obama reportedly rejected all four options offered by his national-security staff on Nov. 11 - ranging from a relatively light increase of some 10,000 troops, mostly for training purposes, to the 40,000 reinforcements requested by McChrystal to wage a counterinsurgency fight - because they failed to make clear how and when responsibility for the war would be transferred to Afghan forces. By doing so, Obama may have pointed to the elephant in the room. On present indications, the Afghan forces are unlikely anytime in the near future to be ready and willing...
...Afghan National Army (ANA) comprises some 94,000 troops, although even by the official numbers, only half of those are combat-ready. The reality of the recent U.S. and British operations in Helmand province, however, suggests that a lot fewer may be capable of being deployed to fight effectively alongside NATO forces, much less on their own. The desertion rate of troops trained in the ANA stands at 20% - and is reportedly even higher among forces deployed in combat. Afghan field officers are in short supply, and the top echelon of the officer corps is dominated by ethnic Tajiks...
Even if Karzai did a more effective job of governing, it's far from clear how many Afghans would be willing to fight their fellow Afghans in the Taliban. While poverty and corruption at the local level certainly fuel the resentment on which the Taliban capitalizes, it is not a protest movement against bad governance as much an insurgency rooted in Islamic and nationalist identities that challenges a political order installed and defended by foreign armies...