Word: kot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...techniques provides rare insight into a process that, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, we urgently need to understand. This Man's Army (Gotham; 288 pages), by Andrew Exum, is a candid description of life in an ultra-hard-core Army Ranger unit in Afghanistan's Shah-e-Kot Valley, as well as a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on the philosophy of combat. Next month General Tommy Franks will release American Soldier (HarperCollins; 352 pages), which is said to be a colorful and at times unsparing account of his stint overseeing American and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The publisher...
From last October through the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March, the U.S. dropped around 20,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Pentagon officials privately acknowledge that the bombings probably killed hundreds of Afghan civilians; Afghan officials and U.S. aid workers in Kabul claim as many as 3,000 civilians died. Many ordinary Afghans were willing to live with the air strikes during the war, knowing that they were aimed at defeating a hated regime and its terrorist guests. But much of the goodwill the U.S. built up by liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban's rule has been dissipated by mistakes...
...doubt some of the talk is sanitized for a Western visitor. (A Talib in Tirin Kot refuses to point out his shop "because you'll tell the special forces.") Less restrained is criticism of the reconstruction effort. Shah says that despite Karzai's promises of new roads, schools, hospitals and a reliable source of power, none of these have been delivered in the Tirin Kot area, nor has work on them even begun. As a state, Afghanistan still has little to offer its people. This, perhaps more than loyalty to the former regime, could nurture existing threats. Almost everyone interviewed...
...case, it would be a mistake to think the hard-core Taliban have completely disappeared. Mullah Omar sightings have been reported in Uruzgan, and his devoted followers are still around. On one of Tirin Kot's two main streets, 15 or so men sit together on the platform outside a tea shop, looking as Taliban are expected to look. The turbans are almost uniformly black or white, as are the shalwar kameezes, the baggy trousers and long shirts that Afghan men favor. Eyes are shadowed with surma, a carbon-based paste, and the stares are unwelcoming if not hostile...
...dangerous for us to gather," says Sayfullah, who claims he was arrested and imprisoned in Tirin Kot but later released. "We live alone or in groups of two because if there are more, the government will think we are plotting something." They are clearly distressed by the new government, which they see as an un-Islamic, American puppet regime, and appalled by the return of movies and music to Afghan streets. Furthermore, Esmatullah says, "We hear on the radio that Americans are calling the Koran the book of terrorism. If this is true, there will be another holy...