Word: general
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...change in tactics and command (McChrystal was brought in to replace Army General David McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June 2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade, which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan. Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of "assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda...
...replace the poppies and newly built roads to get such goods to market without paying bribes along the way. The best soldiers in the world can't manage every step of that process, which is why Karl Eikenberry, the new U.S. ambassador in Kabul and a retired Army lieutenant general who served twice in Afghanistan, says, "The military can help set the conditions for success. But it is not sufficient for success...
Unshocked, Unawed The new strategy, with its limits on actions that risk civilian casualties, represents a sea change in U.S. military doctrine. It was only six years ago that Air Force General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that a shock-and-awe strategy would bomb Saddam Hussein's Iraq into submission. That - and the tech-heavy force that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent into Iraq to stumble and falter for four years - hewed to the American way of war, one that was equal parts laser beams and hubris. But the military has rethought...
McChrystal's official career is 33 years long, but he has, in effect, been in the Army for all his 54 years - both his father and paternal grandfather were Army officers, his father making it to two-star general. After graduating from West Point in 1976 - 31 years after his father - McChrystal climbed the Army ladder. He's seen some tragedies. In 1994, McChrystal was a lieutenant colonel with the 82nd Airborne Division when a flaming F-16 jet plowed into a parked C-141 at Pope Air Force Base. The cargo plane's 55,000 gallons of jet fuel...
...nation of Indonesia went to the polls to elect the country's President. A final count has yet to be completed, but all signs suggest that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the incumbent candidate, notched up a resounding victory. Since winning the country's first competitive election in 2004, the former general has been a cool steward of Indonesia's young and often chaotic democracy, denting the country's grim legacy of corruption, cracking down on radical Islamist groups and rebuilding a nation that suffered the brunt of 2005's devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. SBY - Yudhoyono is widely referred...