Word: mujahedin
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...worth remembering that Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government that would be founded largely on the Northern Alliance - the coalition of ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara former mujahedin warlords who had always fought the Taliban. A chieftain in the Popolzai tribe, Karzai was a prominent leader in Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, which is also the social base of the Taliban. Still, his power base was limited, and creating an effective government forced him to cut deals with all manner of unsavory...
...Hekmatyar earned his fearsome reputation first in the fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and then by shelling Kabul into rubble in a fight with rival mujahedin commanders. Having been forced into exile by the Taliban after they took over the country in 1996, he made common cause with them after the U.S. invasion of late 2001. The Taliban have always disliked Hekmatyar, and their loathing is shared by the many Kabul residents who saw thousands of innocents killed by his militia's repeated rocket barrages on the capital in his power struggle with rival mujahedin commanders...
...allow alcohol sales until 2006. Even those who disagreed with Wilson couldn't help but like him: the liberal columnist Molly Ivins wrote admiringly that he hadn't "an ounce of hypocrisy." Charlie Wilson's War, the 2007 movie about his work as the chief backer of the Afghan mujahedin who fought against the Soviets, opened with Tom Hanks, playing Wilson, in a hot tub with two showgirls--just as Wilson had specified in a 1990 interview. It's just as well they stuck to his wishes; nobody could have made up a character like Charlie Wilson...
...even the Soviets could not win with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and toured the mujahedin camps, befriending some of the guerrilla leaders who now live in Pakistan's tribal regions and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up American and Afghan forces. Ex - CIA officer...
Gates replied, "That's like going back and saying, 'If you'd known the mujahedin would morph into what they became, would you have supported them against the Soviet Union?' My view is, having done this for a long, long time, you never know. You make the best call you can with the information and judgment you have...