Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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ArmorGroup North America • State Department personnel stationed in Kabul who are guarded by Animal House-emulating employees of will not be reassured by these photos...
Years of war and uncertainty have turned Afghans into masters of reinvention. Take, for example, Abdullah Laghmani, the late deputy chief of intelligence who was killed by a suicide bomber on Wednesday, Sept. 2, after praying at a mosque in the hills east of Kabul...
...career in the dreaded secret police of the former pro-Soviet regime. Then he switched sides, grew a beard and joined the Islamic warriors of the mujahedin. When the Americans chased out the Taliban, the ever adaptable Laghmani volunteered his unique set of skills to the new rulers of Kabul. His credentials as a new breed of Afghan democrat may have been questionable, as were a few of his interrogation techniques, but Laghmani's death is a severe blow to U.S.-led efforts to quell the rising Taliban and dismember al-Qaeda. (See pictures of fighting in Afghanistan's Kunar...
...Laghmani was the only senior Pashtun to hold a key intelligence post. Most are Tajiks from northern Afghanistan who know as little about the troubled Pashtun regions of southern and eastern Afghanistan as an Indiana farm boy would about gangs in the Bronx. Posted in Kandahar and then in Kabul, Laghmani had the contacts and the cunning to catch many Taliban involved in kidnappings, bomb attacks and drug-trafficking. Laghmani also was the CIA's most reliable Afghan expert on al-Qaeda. A former Afghan security adviser told TIME that Laghmani had knowledge of who within the Taliban were sheltering...
That sets the stage for tense relations between Washington and Kabul, a complication the Obama Administration doesn't need as it grapples with the Afghanistan problem. The most immediate flash point will come in a matter of days, when the election results are officially announced. Getting Abdullah to accept defeat will be hard: there have been widespread allegations of fraud. If the former Foreign Minister contests the results in the street - in the manner of Iran's Mir-Hossein Mousavi - that could set off an ethnic conflict between Karzai's Pashtun base and his rival's Tajik following (Abdullah...