Word: kot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nobody's seen Mullah Omar lately, but the Taliban and their supporters have a new icon. Saifur Rahman Mansoor, the youthful commander of the Shahi Kot fortress, has emerged as something of a celebrity among anti-American elements in Afghanistan since his men downed a U.S. helicopter and killed seven American soldiers Monday...
...slip the dragnet at Tora Bora last December, the American forces learned a valuable lesson: If you want to get things done in Afghanistan, do them yourself. That's why when it traced a group of some 500 suspected bin Laden loyalists to a cave network in the Shahi Kot mountain range in Paktia province, the U.S. last weekend sent 1,000 of its own men - together with 200 special forces troops from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark and Norway - to take a leading role in the ground offensive. Although the soldiers were accompanied by a similar number of anti...
...White House has long prepared the American people for U.S. casualties in Afghanistan, and these latest ones are likely only to stiffen domestic resolve to complete the war there. But the clashes in the Shahi Kot range are a sharp reminder of how much remains to be done, the perils that continue to face the U.S. mission - and the limits of technology's ability to make waging war safe for Americans...
...Pentagon believes there may be as many as 50 pockets of resistance like Shahi Kot left, and emphasizes that the campaign to eliminate remaining elements of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan will continue long after that place is cleared. It will be a hard, cave-to-cave fight that will probably mean more U.S. casualties. And the longer U.S. forces remain deployed, the greater the pressure will be to take on more of the "nation-building" responsibility the Bush administration has tried hard to avoid...
...America's attention may have moved on to talk of returning to battle in Iraq, but Shahi Kot is a reminder that the Afghan campaign is far from over. And that while technology will almost always sway the battlefield odds in favor of the U.S., there are no ground wars without casualties on both sides...