Word: mazar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Taliban may not yet be beaten, but they've suffered a serious setback that will substantially change the strategic equation in Afghanistan. The fall of Mazar appeared to signal a collapse of the Taliban's hold on northern Afghanistan, with Alliance troops quickly capturing two important towns to the north and east, and more importantly, almost immediately opening up a land corridor from the Uzbek border. That would allow massive shipments of humanitarian aid to be immediately shipped to hundreds of thousands of Afghans facing starvation on the northern plain. It would also allow the U.S. to ship tons...
...victory at Mazar-i-Sharif sets the stage for a de facto partition of Afghanistan into a northern arc controlled by the anti-Taliban alliance and a southern rump controlled by the Taliban. The main battle to take down the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network may lie ahead, but the Northern Alliance's newly won territory offers tremendous opportunity for the U.S. to intensify its campaign all over Afghanistan. The Pentagon's first priority may be to establish new air bases inside this zone, which can be used not only to resupply the Alliance and any expanded U.S. troop...
...Pentagon has been more upbeat this week than it has been for most of the past month. "The Taliban had very bad days yesterday and today," a U.S. official told TIME on Thursday. "The Northern Alliance is closing in and is making very good progress." A victory at Mazar-i-Sharif will be taken as a vindication of the strategy of heavily bombing the Taliban frontlines to weaken their will to fight...
...While the bombing clearly played a vital role in enabling the Alliance victory, there may have been other factors weighing on the Taliban's decision to retreat rather than make a stand so far north of the movement's Pashtun heartland. Many of the Taliban's fighters in Mazar were reportedly not Afghan at all, but hardcore volunteers from Pakistan, Chechnya and the Arab world. That, and the history of bloody massacres each time Mazar-i-Sharif has changed hands precluded the possibility of surrender, and the overwhelming hostility of the local population to the Taliban left them little chance...
...fall of Mazar-i-Sharif would be a body blow to the Taliban, although not a mortal one. The battle there turns out to have been a curtain-raiser for a showdown at Kabul. Still, winter's snows have not yet frozen the battlefields, and the Taliban has lost a city whose capture once confirmed its authority over almost all of Afghanistan. Even if the Alliance is unable to press their momentum at Kabul, the fall of Mazar is a signal that even if the Taliban manage to hold out for many more months, their best years are behind them...