Word: helmand
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...year than at any time since 2001. After six British soldiers were killed in four weeks earlier this summer, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government hurriedly deployed an additional 900 reinforcements. In mid-August, a plan was announced to pull British troops out of some isolated posts in Helmand province. David Richards, the British lieutenant general now in charge of ISAF, says he will emphasize using his troops to create "zones of security." "I'm more likely to try to facilitate reconstruction and development than just fight," he says. "We can do more of that given our numbers." Perhaps...
When TIME visited one police unit in Helmand last month, the shortcomings were obvious. A number of policemen said they hadn't been paid in a year. Most did not have uniforms. Some had received a few weeks of training, others none at all. Though Taliban militants in the area have murdered aid workers and local politicians, torched schools and menaced teachers, the police say the U.S. has paid the area scant attention, essentially ceding territory to the insurgents. Haji Mosa Jan, the Gereshk district commander, says, "We used to patrol with one or two men" in Sangin...
...police attribute the breakdown in security to a plague familiar to law-enforcement officials around the world: drugs. Helmand's police oversee a sizable and dangerous jurisdiction--mountains to the north, desert and a long border with Pakistan to the south--in which opium traffickers and Taliban militants have struck up a marriage of mutual convenience. The province is the biggest opium-growing region in Afghanistan, which produces close to 90% of the world's heroin. While the U.S. and Afghan governments have announced measures to curb poppy cultivation, a visit to Helmand reveals how challenging such a campaign would...
...intelligence agency, which midwifed the Taliban in its early years, are conspiring with the religious parties that govern Pakistan's border regions to create a safe haven for Taliban commanders and a launching pad for attacks--including around 25 suicide bombings in the past six months--throughout Afghanistan. Helmand Governor Mohammed Daud told TIME he believes that Mullah Osmani, a Taliban leader, is recruiting and training fighters at the Girdi Jungle refugee camp in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, which abuts Helmand...
...focusing its energy on trying to stop the big drug traffickers. A Western counternarcotics specialist based in Kabul says he expects to see high-profile arrests in the coming months, in what will be the opening salvo against the drug trade's "command and control." Helmand's beleaguered police will get some relief when approximately 3,300 British troops take over for the much smaller U.S. contingent in Lashkar Gah. The reinforcements can't arrive soon enough. After the fighting on the way to Sangin subsided, about 50 policemen took up posts above a road south of town--the spot...