Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Everyone was wrong. This week marks the one-year anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Today U.S. warplanes still patrol the skies over Kabul, and American troops are certain to stay in the country for months, even years to come. But the combat phase of the war appears to be over. America's defeat of the Taliban was remarkable for its speed, precision and relative painlessness to Americans, judging by U.S. casualties. Beginning with the first U.S. bombing run on Oct. 7, American air power and a hodgepodge allied ground force--consisting of a few hundred...
...task of stabilizing Afghanistan--let alone rebuilding it--has been hampered by lingering rivalries and suspicions. Just last week, a misunderstanding between U.S. troops guarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Afghan soldiers loyal to Karzai's Defense Minister nearly ended in a shootout at the Presidential Palace in Kabul; after the Americans tried to detain an Afghan general, the two sides faced off with weapons drawn for several minutes, before Karzai's aides separated them...
...only four of the top 50 Taliban commanders surrendered or were captured; those four are now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has not been found, and is most probably hiding in Uruzgan province, shielded by true believers. But while the new government in Kabul has struggled to maintain order, Afghan officials and Western diplomats agree: the Taliban is virtually incapable of staging a comeback. Though hardly free from fear, the people of Afghanistan are, at least, free from tyranny--a liberation that would not have been possible without the aid of the U.S. military...
From last October through the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March, the U.S. dropped around 20,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Pentagon officials privately acknowledge that the bombings probably killed hundreds of Afghan civilians; Afghan officials and U.S. aid workers in Kabul claim as many as 3,000 civilians died. Many ordinary Afghans were willing to live with the air strikes during the war, knowing that they were aimed at defeating a hated regime and its terrorist guests. But much of the goodwill the U.S. built up by liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban's rule has been dissipated by mistakes...
...large presence in Afghanistan. The longer the U.S. stays, propping up embattled President Hamid Karzai while continuing to stage the dangerously scattershot hunt for bin Laden, the more Afghans will grow to resent the Americans. But with reconstruction efforts stalled and various warlords stirring up opposition to the Kabul government, the alternative is a return to chaos. And so in recent weeks the U.S. military has assumed the kind of peacekeeping duties that the Bush Administration has sought to hand off to the 5,000-person International Security Assistance Force. Last month Lieut. General Dan McNeill, the commander...