Word: heartlands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strategy during the presidential campaign. When in trouble, he returned to his core issues of education and compassion. So this week, to leaven images of advisers clustered around mikes in D.C. briefing rooms talking about spores, Americans can expect to see Bush address the homeland threat from the heartland. He hopes to chart the progress that has been made so far, devoting one address to the success his team has had in drying up terrorist money sources. Bush is also looking forward to playing action President on the world stage by serving as host to French President Chirac and British...
...despite suffering heavy losses in various battles in the north, the Taliban appear to have retreated from Kabul rather than having been routed. That leaves the rump of the movement now heading for its Pashtun heartland, where the political-military equation is somewhat reversed - while the Northern Alliance was on home ground clearing the Taliban out of the north (and even, to some extent, Kabul itself), the south may be beyond its reach. The Alliance is composed primarily of ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, and is viewed with hostility even among anti-Taliban Pashtuns...
...While the bombing clearly played a vital role in enabling the Alliance victory, there may have been other factors weighing on the Taliban's decision to retreat rather than make a stand so far north of the movement's Pashtun heartland. Many of the Taliban's fighters in Mazar were reportedly not Afghan at all, but hardcore volunteers from Pakistan, Chechnya and the Arab world. That, and the history of bloody massacres each time Mazar-i-Sharif has changed hands precluded the possibility of surrender, and the overwhelming hostility of the local population to the Taliban left them little chance...
...fall of Mazar-i-Sharif would be a body blow to the Taliban, but not a mortal one. The city is far beyond the movement's traditional heartland, its capture having served as a symbol of the Taliban's ambition to rule over all of Afghanistan. Its fighting forces reportedly remain strong and resolute in the west, south and east of the country, and their will to resist appears undiminished. Still, the loss of Mazar-i-Sharif on the eve of winter would be a timely reminder that while they may well hold out for many months yet, time...
...Taliban in downtown Kabul, and the U.S. confirmed that its commandos had gone into an area near Kandahar to rescue resistance leader Hamid Karzai, who had been trying to rally local chieftains to the anti-Taliban cause. The fact that U.S. personnel could move into the Taliban's heartland to collect a resistance leader was cause for confidence; less so, though, the fact that Karzai needed rescuing in the first place. Pashtun warlords have plainly not defected to the anti-Taliban cause in anything like the numbers hoped for at the outset of the bombing campaign...