Word: nato
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dusty hallway outside the medical center at the military base on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Conditions on the base are spartan and, amid mounting casualty rates, some of the young British soldiers serving there as part of the NATO-led mission complain their work isn't properly appreciated back home. They expressed these concerns during a July visit by the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband and, within the past two months, they have been able to make their case to a stream of visiting VIPs: Defense Secretary Des Browne...
...full international endorsement of the status quo in Europe. In such a conference, which would be attended by the U.S. and Canada as well as all European countries, the participants would pledge to respect each other's boundaries; they would also discuss a mutual reduction of forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. The security conference would be, in fact, an updated version of the 19th century Congress of Vienna, in which the nations of Europe and North America would seek to work out new security arrangements, even as the diplomats of Metternich's day sought...
Some 38,000 Afghan soldiers have been trained by U.S. and coalition forces since 2003, and many already accompany NATO troops on the ground. The U.S. and the international community have launched an ambitious plan to nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army (ANA), to 70,000; to build a fully functioning police force of 82,000; and to lay the groundwork for a National Afghan Air Corps by December 2008. But building a strong army in the middle of a war is a difficult undertaking. Much of the Afghan corps is young, illiterate and prone to desertion...
...hopes to salvage some success for its increasingly parlous enterprise in Afghanistan, that will have to change. At a time when U.S. and NATO forces have come under scathing criticism for civilian casualties--figures compiled by media groups and human-rights organizations indicate that since the beginning of the year, the number of civilians killed by Western forces is on a par with those killed by militants-- putting an Afghan face on the war has become an essential part of regaining the faith of the public. "All this anger about civilian casualties by foreign forces--it's just like Baghdad...
...from the U.S. government, may as well be a beacon for insurgent attacks. Several hundred ANA forces have died in combat since 2003, and a Taliban directive has decreed that ANA soldiers are infidels for their affiliation with the foreign forces. Insurgents prefer to target Afghan forces rather than NATO, knowing that the poorly prepared troops rarely drive armored vehicles and that they lack sufficient retaliatory firepower to mount a counteroffensive. The rising military death toll has made recruiting new soldiers even more difficult, says Colonel Karimullah, head of army recruiting in Kabul. "The boys themselves are not afraid...