Word: mujahedin
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...anyone who has been clinging to the notion that America can win this war the easy way, the fate of Abdul Haq should serve as a powerful antidote. Few knew how to fight in the rugged Afghan steppes and summits better than Haq, a legendary mujahedin guerrilla who lost his right foot to a land mine while helping rout the Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords...
...price the Uzbeks are extracting for basing rights is modest. They just want some assurance that the Americans won't drop the region like a cigarette butt, as the U.S. did after the Russian army was defeated by the Afghan mujahedin 10 years ago. Pakistan is a different matter. The support of Islamabad is vital because of Pakistan's links to the Taliban and its proximity to the war zone. But in return, Pakistan wants Washington to put the brakes on the Afghan opposition...
...missile strike against al-Qaeda in 1998. U.S. soldiers have the military technology, such as night-vision goggles and breathing devices, to operate in this underground labyrinth, and U.S. bombers have pounded the network. But U.S. troops could face fearsome resistance once they actually venture down there. A former mujahedin commander based in Kandahar told TIME that one possible target would be a mountain complex in southwestern Afghanistan, built by bin Laden as an al-Qaeda base because of its proximity to the Pakistani border. The camp is nestled in a canyon lined with gunners--reportedly Sudanese--who are fiercely...
...Like many young Afghans, Omar was forced to trade education for a warrior's life when the Soviet Union invaded the country in December 1979. In Omar's case, he left a seminary in Kandahar; his poverty-stricken parents had enrolled him there to become a cleric. Fellow mujahedin fighters remember him as a good marksman who disabled many Russian tanks with his RPG-7 rockets. He suffered several injuries in the war, including the loss of his right...
...mujahedin won, of course, and the demoralized Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989. But internecine battles between mujahedin groups in the mid-1990s plunged the nation into a seemingly never-ending civil war. Omar says he formed the Taliban after he was told in a dream that he should save the country. At first the Taliban numbered only 30, but within months it had swelled into a conquering force fanning out of Kandahar to take control of most of Afghanistan. Initially they were welcomed as peacemakers by the war-weary population, but with order largely restored, the Taliban...