Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much of a shocker either - on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, the name Wali has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime because he has friends in the right places. Diplomats, counternarcotics officials and commanders from the International Security Assistance Force, NATO's military wing in Afghanistan, have all privately (and not so privately) expressed frustration with President Karzai for not reining in his brother. In fact, the people most likely to be shocked by the revelations are Americans back at home, who are already wondering why they should be sending more soldiers...
...forget that the CIA isn't the only organization with questionable people on its payroll. Since the beginning of the war, NATO has been bribing drug smugglers to let fuel pass through the Khyber Pass from Pakistan into Afghanistan. NATO payments, thousands of dollars for each truck, have to dwarf anything the CIA is giving to Ahmed Wali Karzai. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' offensive in Afghanistan...
...Georgia and whether his wary allies can trust him to lead his country there. The stakes are high. This tiny country half the size of North Carolina is the rawest point of contact between the rising confidence of Russia and the eastward encroachment of the great Western alliances - NATO and the E.U. Yet the most crucial conflict may be the one within Saakashvili himself, between his enormous ambitions for Georgia and the impetuousness that could yet spoil his young democracy or bring more bloodshed to the Caucasus...
...South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first lecture [Putin] ever gave me in Moscow was 'All these Eastern European...
...scale back his demands for deep tax cuts in the coalition talks, and his demand to turn Germany into a nuclear weapon-free zone may have been agreed partly to assuage the sting of compromise. Merkel said that she would be seeking the withdrawal within the context of NATO, rather than as a unilateral measure. "We don't want to act in this matter on our own," she said. (See a pictorial history of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall...