Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This is a side of Afghanistan that George W. Bush didn't see last week. Visiting the country for the first time, Bush spent five hours in the capital, Kabul, and hailed Afghanistan's progress since the ouster of the Taliban more than four years ago. The country has made strides: it has an elected government, newly paved roads, more children in school, the appearance of a few shopping centers in Kabul. But the improvements in the lives of many Afghans are tempered by the country's persistent insecurity, which is fueled by a rampant drug trade and a Taliban...
...without a hitch. Bush met with President Karzai to go over everything from the hunt against Al Qaeda to Afghanistan?s still heavy drug trade. Meanwhile, the First Lady met with female officials from the Karzai government to discuss health and education. Bush helped dedicate the American embassy in Kabul, joking with the new ambassador, Ron Neumann, whose father had also been ambassador to Afghanistan. ?There?s nothing wrong in a son following a father?s footsteps,? said Bush to laughter. Later he thanked U.S. troops at Bagram air base and praised Afghanistan?s transition to democracy. Before leaving Afghan...
...marchers in Kabul last week were in their teens and early 20s, the kind of zealous, energetic youths Westerners might have hoped would be clamoring for democracy or human rights. Instead, the cause of their protest was caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, first published last September by a Danish newspaper called Jyllands-Posten, which in the past two weeks have provoked Muslims around the world to denounce not just the offending illustrators but also French newspaper editors, Norwegian diplomats, U.S. troops in Iraq and peddlers of Danish food. In Kabul the protest signs read DEATH TO DENMARK and DEATH...
...sort, and protesters like those in Kabul have a message for the West: Get used to it. Across the Islamic world, daily demonstrations of varying size and intensity have brought hundreds of thousands into the streets--some driven as much by disgruntlement as by religious fervor, but many others motivated by genuine outrage at the perceived desecration of the most revered figure in Islam. Yet even for Westerners sympathetic to Muslims' right to vent their anger, the mayhem that marked the protests last week was as unsettling as the cartoons themselves. A day after mobs in Damascus torched the Danish...
...further six provinces to the 13 in which they presently operate; set up four new Provincial Reconstruction Teams or prts (the units that try to build civil administration in local areas); take some prts over from the Americans; and move the weight of the whole operation out of Kabul and the north toward the less stable west and south, where it will nudge up against the bigger U.S.-led counterterrorism operations in provinces like Kandahar and Zabul. By the end of this year isaf's "footprint" will cover 75% of a country whose security is, at best, precarious...