Word: helmand
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...good in the first major offensive of President Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan. For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there. But other than in one limited area of fierce resistance, the fighting has generally been restricted to small-scale skirmishes in which few Taliban have been killed because most of the insurgents appear to have slipped away - as guerrillas tend to do when confronted by overwhelming firepower. More important to U.S. goals...
Even though he says it's too early to predict success, General Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is satisfied that the Helmand mission is moving in the right direction. "The operations are not aimed at the enemy force. They are aimed at taking away the population from the enemy," he told TIME. "What we are trying to do is change the dynamics in the area where we are operating." In order to do that, Marines are leaving their armored humvees and sitting down with village elders and tribal leaders to assess their needs...
...killing of Ajmal Nakshbandi provides a grim counterpoint to the Rohde story. In May 2007, the freelance Afghan journalist and translator was accused of being a spy, abducted and beheaded by the Taliban in southern Helmand province. The Italian correspondent he was working with, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, was later released in exchange for five militants and an undisclosed sum of cash paid by the Italian government. Another Afghan reporter working in Helmand, Abdul Samad Rohani, was killed last June while investigating a story for the British Broadcasting Corp. on illegal poppy cultivation. The Taliban, usually quick to claim credit even...
...meeting several of us had with Hanif Atmar, the Afghan Minister of the Interior, who had a dramatic map of his country on display, colored according to threat levels - a broad slash of red (highest level) running across the southern half, bordering Pakistan. Indeed, two-thirds of Helmand province, the prime poppy-growing area, was colored black, which meant it is in Taliban control. Helmand and its neighbor, Kandahar province, is where most of the 17,000 additional U.S. troops are headed. They will arrive just as the poppy crop has been harvested, the moment when many rural Afghans trade...
...There has been development, of course. But even success stories are full of problems. The U.S. has built new schools, but there are not enough teachers, and salaries are so low that nobody stays. On a trip to Helmand last summer I met a farmer who had been offered a water pump that would have enabled him to turn his desert-like property into a field of wheat and vegetables. He declined it, fearing that the Taliban would find out he had accepted a gift from foreigners and would execute him as a spy. (See pictures from Prince Harry...