Word: kabul
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...Drug Enforcement Administration is launching an urgent new initiative to confront the exploding Afghan heroin trade, which officials fear will generate millions of dollars for al-Qaeda-linked groups. Code-named Operation Containment, the DEA effort will open offices in Kabul and the Uzbek capital of Tashkent to monitor the bustling northern smuggling route to Russia. The agency's offices in Turkey are being expanded to intensify monitoring of heroin traffic to Western Europe. Stateside, FBI officials have established new narco-terrorism squads in New York City and other field offices, and are expanding domestic investigations into drug rings with...
...fear of failure in Afghanistan has lately prompted some hard new thinking in both Washington and Kabul. General Myers' candid remarks to the Brookings Institution suggests the Pentagon is trying to be more creative in its pursuit of stability in Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, flashed some atypical steel last week when he fired 15 provincial officials, all of them connected to powerful warlords, on charges of abusing authority, corruption and drug trafficking. Until now Karzai has avoided conflict with the various local potentates, who often ignore the national government...
Diplomats in Kabul say Karzai can enforce his announced purge only if the U.S. backs him. After all, two men on Karzai's list of wrongdoers--the intelligence chiefs of Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif--are tough characters whom the U.S. has used as proxies in the war against al-Qaeda. U.S. policy had been to avoid involvement in what it calls "green on green" fighting in Afghanistan: conflicts between militias at least theoretically loyal to the new government. But lately U.N. officials in Afghanistan say they have witnessed a sea change in the American attitude. The new stance...
General Myers also suggests there is growing consensus in Washington that Afghanistan's needs require a greater commitment from the U.S. In the strip of Afghanistan stretching from Kabul eastward to the Pakistan border, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are still potent, the principal mission of the U.S. must for now remain military, Myers says. But in the remaining three-quarters of the country, it might be time to "flip our priorities," he says, and make reconstruction paramount. "That's what we're debating right now inside government." Myers says rebuilding Afghanistan would not be "a U.S.-only effort...
These political developments only reinforce Taliban-style sexual policing that still exists in Afghanistan. Women in Kabul and surrounding provinces continue to wear burqas out of fear of reprisals. In recent weeks, four girls’ schools were attacked with explosives, five have been burned down and one was closed down. These were direct actions undertaken by fundamentalists who not only verbally and physically abused women for violating Islamic law but had also spent weeks beforehand passing out pamphlets that threatened parents with violence if they sent their daughters to school...