Word: missions
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Trying to rescue Muslim women is a French tradition dating back to the colonization of Algeria in the 1830s. Saving Algeria's veiled population was central to France's mission civilisatrice to bring the Enlightenment to Arabs. For French colonialists, the veiled Algerian woman was both a sign of resistance to French attempts to shape their society, and a rallying cry to redouble their civilizing efforts. "The Arabs elude us," fretted one general in the 1840s, "because they conceal their women from our gaze." In her brilliant 2007 book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott writes that...
...single senior government official attended. This is not surprising. The Kursk went down when one of its torpedoes blew up. Remembering this sort of self-inflicted tragedy would conflict with Soviet - and post-Soviet - myth-making about the power and glory of the Russian military. (See pictures from the mission to recover victims from the Kursk...
...that didn't shock me, but it reinforced things that I had been seeing. The other observation is that there has been a tremendous number of people here doing a lot of good work - and that means the ANSF, parts of the Afghanistan government, UNAMA [United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan], NGOs, doing a lot of good work - that said, I don't think it has been as well coordinated and unified as it needs to be successful. And so I wasn't surprised by that, but I was struck by the challenge of the task to pull...
...thing that surprised me about this was the level and energy and passion for this mission that I have seen among so many people involved, right after I was told I was going to be sent here. I started getting e-mails and phone calls from people I knew who wanted to come. And these were people who had been here before. Many away from their families for a long time. One of my aides, who had only six months before come back from a tough assignment in Samarra, Iraq - he volunteered to go. And the energy that I found...
...Germany's Afghan campaign is the subject of heated debate. Over the past few months, Germany, which usually restricts its troops to peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts, has found itself drawn into a bloody conflict. In the most recent reminder of how dangerous the mission has become, a memorial service was held in the central town of Bad Salzungen on Thursday for three young soldiers killed in an attack near Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, on June 23. They were the latest casualties of a war that has claimed the lives of 35 German soldiers. At the memorial, senior Cabinet ministers went...