Word: kandahar
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...well as six other languages. Over his Afghan tunic he often wears a double-breasted blazer. But his quiet, reassuring manner masks the determination of a man single-mindedly intent on ousting the Taliban. After two sessions with the Taliban commanders last week, he secured the surrender of Kandahar, a city Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar once promised his fighters would defend to the death...
...been carried out by Taliban agents. All but one of Karzai's siblings--he has six brothers and one sister--have built successful careers in business or academia in the U.S. Two Maryland-based brothers own Afghan restaurants in three states--named Helmand, after the province just west of Kandahar. Though he has visited the U.S. several times, on occasion meeting with high-ranking CIA, State Department and other government officials, Karzai has remained mostly in Afghanistan or in exile in Pakistan, embroiled in the tortured politics of his homeland...
Karzai has never shied from risks. On Oct. 7 he slipped inside southern Afghanistan, heading first to his ancestral village of Karz, near Kandahar. From there he set off to the mountains of Oruzgan province, recruiting tribal elders to join an anti-Taliban coalition. It was not long before the Taliban got on his trail. He escaped ambush and certain death by calling in U.S. forces to rescue him by helicopter. The U.S. says it whisked him out of the country; he insists he never left--perhaps concerned about being seen as too close to the U.S. Since then, Karzai...
Having secured the peaceful fall of Kandahar, Karzai is heading up to the capital, Kabul. "That's where my focus is now," he says. When he formally takes charge there on Dec. 22, he will find his 30-member Cabinet assailed by regional warlords who were elbowed out in Bonn. Top of the list: Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, who controls a big chunk of northern Afghanistan and who has already announced that the Uzbeks will boycott Karzai's government. Dostum is angry that the three most important government portfolios--Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs--went to his Tajik rivals...
...victory. Even as the Taliban's suicidal stragglers are being flushed from Kandahar and Tora Bora, some 1.4 million refugees inside Afghanistan face the double cruelty of hunger and homelessness just as winter stakes its annual claim. The situation was dire even before Sept. 11. Last winter 500 people perished from cold and hunger in the western city of Herat. Today about 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs in relief-work argot) are scattered among camps outside that city, with more returning from Iran daily. An estimated 6 million Afghans are what the World Food Program labels "food insecure"--increasingly...