Word: kot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Noor Mohammad, commander of Zadran's men, stands guard at one of Zadran's checkpoints. Mohammad says he has just given an intelligence briefing to the Americans. Pointing up to the peaks to the south, he warns, "There are more al-Qaeda here in this area. After Shah-i-Kot, they went to the tops of the mountains." Pacha Khan Zadran is vain, grasping and irksome?but his help may be worth the aggravation...
...Pakistani intelligence officials, the first exodus came in November, when al-Qaeda fled into the remote Tirah Valley to escape the U.S. bombardment of Tora Bora. The second wave entered last March, during the allied forces' Operation Anaconda against al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan's eastern Shah-i-Kot mountains...
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Kakarak, the episode reveals just how tricky the war in Afghanistan has become. The U.S. may have won, in the accepted sense of the word, but the enemy hasn't surrendered. Since the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March, al-Qaeda and Taliban forces have split into smaller and smaller groups, which survive by mixing with civilian populations. That's exactly what a big, heavily armed superpower with a taste for making war from the air doesn't want; it makes the chance of accidents like Kakarak much more likely...
...over by a long shot. Last week more than 400 British Royal Marines from 3 Commando Brigade were helicoptered to 11,000 ft. up in the mountains around Shah-i-Kot in eastern Afghanistan for a five-day operation dubbed Ptarmigan (after a type of Scottish grouse known for its ability to camouflage itself and thrive at high altitudes). The objective: to sweep the area where Operation Anaconda, the biggest battle of the war, was fought last month. Though it was the third major ground search since the end of Anaconda, the Marines found previously undetected caches of ammunition...
Your map of the assault on the Shah-i-Kot Valley included a section with the heading "How the Battle Went Awry." Awry? Any battle in the past in which hundreds of enemy fighters were killed, compared with the loss of only eight of our own, is an overwhelming victory. As for the statement "One day, perhaps, Americans will tire of the slow drip of deaths...of the sort that old colonial powers like Britain and France once learned to endure," have you forgotten? We were savagely attacked by al-Qaeda and will not stop until we destroy them! MARTY...