Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hunt al-Qaeda and its allies, and some 5,000 NATO troops staff International Security Assistance based in the capital. That leaves the Taliban and its allies to pursue the same strategy used by their forebears against the Soviets - take control of the countryside, and make it ungovernable from Kabul. Reconstruction efforts are slow and troubled, investors are staying away and the barbarians are rattling the proverbial gate. Despite two years under U.S. tutelage, Afghanistan remains a failed state. It's not costing the U.S. much in terms of lives and treasure (the Administration even forgot to put money...
While searching for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, U.S. special forces in Afghanistan routinely come across something they're not looking for: evidence of a thriving Afghan drug trade. But they're not doing anything about it, antinarcotics experts tell TIME. Several Kabul diplomats familiar with U.S. military operations say that while carrying out searches in eastern and southern Afghanistan--opium-growing areas that are also Taliban strongholds--U.S. soldiers have found hidden caches of narcotics, crude heroin-processing labs and convoys racing across the desert with bundles of hashish and opium, headed for Europe and Central Asia. "If these...
Antinarcotics experts in Kabul say the U.S. is making a mistake by ignoring the Afghan drug smugglers. Taking action against them would hurt the terrorists, they argue, since both use the same underground pipeline to move cash, guns and fugitives across borders. "I'm positive that the Taliban are heavily involved in drug trafficking," says Wais Yasini, counter-narcotics adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "How else do you account for the source of their money?" This year, after a bumper crop of opium poppies, say U.N. officials, Afghanistan became the world's largest heroin producer, with an estimated...
...from the Americans. Diplomats say many of the local commanders the U.S. military relies on for intelligence on al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to provide hired guns are mixed up in the drug business. "Without money from drugs, our friendly warlords can't pay their militias," says a Kabul diplomat. "It's as simple as that." --By Tim McGirk
...HAJI RASHID, elderly Afghan migrant to Holland, arriving in Kabul on the first civilian flight from Western Europe to Afghanistan since the Soviet Union invaded...