Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could carry out a strategy as ambitious as reshaping the Middle East and changing unfriendly regimes without a degree of international legitimacy and cooperation to back it up. Though the Administration sought broad international assistance in Afghanistan, it largely shunned it in Iraq. As a result, while NATO forces are now relieving U.S. troops of some of the combat burden for fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, Americans continue to fight and die alone (with some backup from Iraqi troops) against the Sunni insurgents in western Iraq...
...Kabul had been patrolled successfully by thousands of NATO peacekeepers until riots five weeks ago, which shone a spotlight on the limitations of the fledgling Afghan security forces. The riots, which killed at least a dozen, were sparked by the crash of an American convoy into a crowd of civilians. "The speed with which the government lost control of the city and rampaging demonstrators were able to take over the streets signalled to the Taliban and others that Kabul's defenses were weak. Now they are taking advantage," said a Western security analyst...
...appeared in Kabul last week in a show of support for Karzai, while 10,000 coalition troops launched a fresh offensive against Taliban insurgents in the south. But few Afghans believe the threat posed by the resurgent Taliban is close to being extinguished--and some are doubtful that the NATO forces assuming control of southern Afghanistan will be able to hold the insurgents at bay. "In 2001 the coalition toppled the Taliban in two months. Why can't the coalition stop the Taliban now?" asks Agha Lalai Destagiri, a provincial-council member who lives in Panjwai village, 16 miles southwest...
...sign came last winter, when the state-controlled gas behemoth Gazprom shut off supplies to Ukraine for several days, in what the Russians described as a price dispute but Ukraine and many others took to be a crude political move to punish Kiev for embracing Western institutions such as nato. More recently, Russian government officials have talked tough with West European leaders, raising the prospect that they might divert energy supplies to China and the U.S. if the Europeans don't meet their demands for better access to Western markets, including ownership of some refining and distribution operations. The Russians...
...President spends so little time in France and Spain--the blue states of Europe--and so much in Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia, countries once behind the Iron Curtain where his odes to democracy are particularly resonant. Beyond just visiting, Bush has been pushing for the eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, which would give the map of Europe more of a red-state look...