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Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is one of those remote towns even the flyovers don't fly over. But for decades its citizens' decency has matched the town's anonymity. Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell) takes care of the births and the ordinary illnesses; her husband David (Timothy Olyphant), the local Sheriff, keeps the peace with the aid of his Deputy, Russell Clank (Joe Anderson). Nice town, y'know what I mean? Until that day during a school baseball game when Rory Hamill strode out of center field carrying a shotgun he wouldn't put down, and David had to shoot...
...regain control of the streets, which were in the hands of criminal gangs and radical militias. With the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, the Palestinians trained five brigades (2,500 troops) of a new national-security force - with two more in the pipeline - and began training local police. "We started with Nablus, the most lawless city," says Fayyad. "Our policy was zero tolerance. Anyone who committed a crime was an outlaw, regardless of party affiliation." It seems to have worked. Nell Derick Debevoise, an American woman who works with an excellent pre- and after-school program in Nablus called...
When the operation got under way, it quickly became clear that only about 400 Taliban had dug in to fight. As in other such encounters between an overwhelming Western military and a local insurgency - in Iraq's Diyala province, for instance - the greatest threat to the troops came from roadside bombs and sniper fire. By Feb. 23, 13 NATO troops had been killed, as the U.S. total in the Afghan war pushed past 1,000. Estimates of Taliban casualties were around 120. Civilian casualties were low for such an intense offensive: 28 were killed in the fighting, though...
...have seen foreign forces defeat the Taliban in Helmand, then pull out, then repeat the cycle. The town of Musa Qala, north of Marjah, has twice been taken by NATO arms: by British and Danish forces in 2006 and by the U.S. in 2007. On both occasions, a new local government was created, and each time, the Taliban returned to murder those it deemed collaborators...
...prevent that from happening in Marjah, McChrystal is counting on his government in a box - a lineup of administrators who have prepped for months - to enforce law and order, provide basic facilities, build schools, create jobs and persuade local farmers to give up the poppy crop. But that's asking a lot from officials who have shown scant aptitude for doing a decent job elsewhere. McChrystal's plan calls for 80 prepacked governments to take root across Taliban-ruled territory over two years, but Afghanistan simply doesn't have that many clean, qualified and experienced bureaucrats, policemen, doctors and teachers...