Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...abiding commitment to NATO. But underneath the irony is real iron: the Minister has solid military facts to flaunt. In Pristina, she attended the formal handover of command of Kosovo's more than 18,000 NATO peacekeepers to French Lieut. General Yves de Kermabon. Then she flew to Kabul to meet troops under French Lieut. General Jean-Louis Py, who last month took charge of NATO's 10,000-strong peacekeeping mission there. Now there are roughly twice as many European troops deployed outside the E.U. and NATO countries as there were 10 years ago, according to Charles Grant, director...
...Luxembourg - assumed command of the 6,500 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the organization's first such deployment outside Europe. "I think there's a great deal of expectation for the E.U. to be here within a NATO operation," says French Lieutenant General Jean-Louis Py, Eurocorps' commander in Kabul. Py said the main task is to maintain peace as Afghanistan tries to hold its first presidential election on Oct. 9. Taliban rebels, bent on disrupting the process, have been attacking election workers for the past several months, and last week clashed with U.S. soldiers in the southern mountains. Security officials...
...tied up in drugs. The combined incomes of farmers and in-country traffickers reached $2.23 billion last year--up from $1.3 billion in 2002. Heroin trafficking has long been the main source of funds for local warlords' private armies, which thwart Karzai's attempts to expand his authority beyond Kabul. But the drug trade is becoming even more dangerous: U.S. and British counterterrorism experts say al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales. Antidrug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative...
...Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel stopped a small fishing boat in the Arabian Sea. After a search, says a Western antinarcotics official, "they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of drugs." In January U.S. and Afghan agents raided a drug runner's house in Kabul and found a dozen or so satellite phones. The phones were passed on to the CIA station in Kabul, which found that they had been used to call numbers linked to suspected terrorists in Turkey, the Balkans and Western Europe. And in March U.S. troops searching a suspected terrorist hideout...
...nail kingpins, shut down heroin-production labs, eradicate poppy fields and persuade farmers to plant food crops. If the drug cartels aren't stopped, the U.S. fears, they could sow more chaos in Afghanistan--which al-Qaeda and the Taliban could exploit to wrest back power. Miwa Kato, a Kabul-based officer for the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, puts it this way: "The opium problem has the capacity to undo everything that's being done here to help the Afghans." Few outcomes would please America's enemies more. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Elaine Shannon/Washington