Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last week, Clinton straddled both the past and future. She?s paraded an impressive stream of former Clinton Administration officials - including former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former Veteran Affairs Secretaries Togo West and Hershel Gober, former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark and, of course, her husband, President Bill Clinton - through Iowa while declaring herself an agent of change. "Somebody said at one of my events a little while ago, ?You know, it looks like it takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush,? and I?m ready for the job if that?s what it takes," Clinton said...
...elsewhere. And some Kosovo Serbs, who account for less than one-tenth of the population, are threatening to secede. But open conflict seems unlikely. Belgrade has ruled out a military response and instead is threatening to cut off energy and supplies to the province. Because of the current uncertainty, NATO announced that some 16,000 troops will stay in the region. Back in 1999, it took 77 days for NATO to win the Kosovo war; nearly nine years on, full peace still awaits...
...effective would these measures be in real life? An embargo was already tried, in 1999, after NATO forced Slobodan Milosevic to pull his security forces from the province. It was never enforced: bypassing controls and ethnic barriers, truckloads of smuggled Serbian goods still flowed into Kosovo, their passage greased by bribery. If Serbia does attempt to close the border with Kosovo, the trade would not stop: it would simply go underground, through the old and well-developed smuggling networks. The prices would rise slightly, but that would...
...battle to own Musa Qala is expected to be intense, because of its value to both sides. For the Taliban, there's major symbolic value in being able to hold a town in a country ostensibly under the control of more than 40,000 NATO troops and their Afghan allies. Musa Qala is also at the center of the opium industry, whose revenues fuel the Taliban insurgency, and its location near the mountains north of Helmand make it a useful command center for an insurgent army. For all the same reasons, it's important to NATO to dislodge the Taliban...
...problem for NATO, however, is that Musa Qala may be a very visible Taliban position, but it's only one of hundreds - by some estimates, today there is a permanent Taliban presence in more than half of Afghanistan, and NATO, struggling to expand its troop strength from reluctant European nations, is not well placed to roll it back. The breadth of the territory across which the Taliban now operates across southern Afghanistan all the way up to the capital reflects the extent to which the uncommitted civilian population is hedging its bets. With the harsh winter coming, Musa Qala...