Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...white mountains of Afghanistan are beautiful this time of year. Snow blankets the peaks from Kabul to the Khyber Pass, smothering the ancient smugglers' footpaths that lead out of the country and into Pakistan. With the arrival of winter, human traffic in the mountains comes to a halt and the terrain is enveloped in an otherworldly calm...
...from Kandahar, their last stronghold. Some skulked back to their home villages with the idea of starting new lives. Others, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, went missing. As a fresh power struggle raged in Kandahar and a new Afghan government prepared to take over in Kabul, the black turbans and medieval strictures of Taliban rule began to seem like a bad dream...
...promise of $20 billion in reconstruction aid to broker the deal in which Karzai will lead a 30-member interim cabinet that will govern for six months before a broadly-representative 'loya jirga' assembly is convened. The agreement also provides for an international security force to be deployed in Kabul, despite earlier opposition from elements of the Northern Alliance...
...Tajik Northern Alliance representatives at the talks also had to sidestep their leader, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, in order to cut a deal - one Tajik aide at Koenigswinter told reporters that Rabbani was old and ought to retire, but there is no sign that the man currently in charge in Kabul agrees. Most of the Pashtun warlords currently staking out their fiefdoms in the Taliban's old stomping ground weren't even represented in Germany, and there are a number of other warlords elsewhere who may feel snubbed...
...diplomats from the various factions, under the persuasive ministrations of the international community. But political authority on the ground remains in the hands of the various warlords and armies who filled the void left by the retreating Taliban. Even if the international community sends a peacekeeping force to Kabul, the country faces an uphill battle to shed a political culture based on Mao's dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel...