Word: focusing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...International Security Assistance Force. Over the past few weeks President Karzai has vigorously protested such events of civilian casualties - on July 6 NATO forces bombed a wedding party in southeastern Afghanistan by mistake, killing 47. But today's lunch was neither the time nor the place to focus on civilian casualties, says Hamidzada, pointing out that the Senator's visit was more of an introduction to the country, and that such specific policy issues should be reserved for U.S. leaders. "It is Afghan tradition to welcome visitors and focus on the positive," he said...
...says, the best way to answer that question is by narrowing the focus of a vaccine study to see if it can do one thing: reduce the viral load in someone infected with HIV. If a vaccine can do that, it's worth looking at more closely to figure out how it does it. "Scaling back the trial to look at a single endpoint is a concept that a number of us have championed," agrees Wayne Koff, senior vice president of research and development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative...
...Obama has blamed a large part of Afghanistan's deterioration on the Bush Administration's focus on Iraq. "In fact - as should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain - the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was," he said in a major foreign policy speech on July 15th. "It is unacceptable that almost seven years after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on our soil, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 are still at large. If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region...
Playing to Our Strengths A smarter strategy would focus on two elements: more effective aid and a more limited military objective. We should target development assistance in provinces where we have a track record of success. Our investment goes further in stable and welcoming places like Hazarajat than it can in hostile, insurgency-dominated areas like Kandahar and Helmand, where we have to spend millions on security and the locals do not contribute to the project and will not sustain it after our departure. We should focus on meeting the Afghan government's request for more investment in agricultural irrigation...
...military strategy, meanwhile, should focus on counterterrorism - not counterinsurgency. Our presence has so far prevented al-Qaeda from establishing training camps in Afghanistan. We must continue to prevent it from doing so. But our troops should not try to hold territory or chase the Taliban around rural areas. We should also use our presence to steer Afghanistan away from civil war and provide some opportunity for the Afghans themselves to create a more humane, well-governed and prosperous country. This policy would require far fewer troops over the next 20 years, and they would probably be predominantly special forces...