Word: kabul
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...Every Afghan has a story about corruption. The electronics store owner in my old neighborhood in the capital, Kabul, hasn't had electricity for the past year, because he refuses to pay the $400 bribe required to secure a connection to the electrical grid. The scarcity of so many basic necessities allows petty corruption to flourish in many corners of the world without necessarily feeding an insurgency. But Afghanistan's corruption is intimately linked to a culture of violence. The driver of an Afghan friend was picked up one day by the police, beaten, stripped naked and left outside...
...formal commitment of an additional 1,000 ground troops to Afghanistan will come during next week's NATO summit in Romania. Those new troops are to join France's current contingent of 1,600. But while those currently in Afghanistan patrol the relatively calm area in and around Kabul, most or all of the new units are expected to be sent to the south of Afghanistan, where the reformed Taliban and their allies have strengthened. Indeed, deaths among Canadian combat personnel in the area have been so high that Ottawa had threatened to pull its military from Afghanistan if NATO...
...stepped Sarkozy, who in London this week explained his decision by warning, "We can not accept a return of the Taliban and al-Qaeda to Kabul. Defeat is not an option to us, even if victory is difficult." Few in French politics or public opinion disagree with that view. "Afghanistan is still linked in the French mind to the response to 9/11 ... (and) is still widely seen here as the right war" says François Heisbourg, a military expert and special adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris...
...lack of military capacity "restrains German foreign policy." The Bundestag has failed to debate the situation in the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur, he says, because it is nervous about feeling obliged to dispatch German troops to help out. Most Europeans acknowledge that if the current government in Kabul of Hamid Karzai is allowed to fail and the country returns to Taliban rule, the resulting instability could create new safe havens from which the Taliban and al-Qaeda could threaten Europe as well as the U.S. Yet it seems all too easy to ignore the consequences of Western inaction...
Unsurprisingly, the album deals largely with Costello’s experiences in Afghanistan. Second song “Masood” details the story of a 16-year-old whom Costello befriended during his time in Kabul. After the boy’s father died suddenly, Masood was left as the head of his family. The song’s lyrics, such as “I lied awake thinking of the hope that’s laid on me,” perfectly lay out the heartbreaking reality of this story and the situation in Afghanistan. Musically, the song...