Word: nato
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...days before launching the most ambitious military campaign of the Obama Administration, General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, convened a meeting in Kabul of 450 tribal elders and scholars from Helmand province. The general's objective: to build support for Operation Moshtarak, a massive offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Marjah. McChrystal ran through the military phase of the plan, which would involve 6,000 U.S. Marines and British soldiers and 4,500 Afghan troops and police. Then he described how these troops would protect the town while a "government in a box" - a corps...
McChrystal repeated the chieftain's words Feb. 18 in a secure video teleconference with President Barack Obama and his top advisers on Afghanistan and Pakistan. By then, the operation, by all accounts, was going well. NATO troops had encountered only sporadic resistance; much of the town was under the control of the U.S. Marines. British-led forces, meanwhile, had taken the nearby community of Showal. Some government in a box was already being unpacked. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...hesitate before heading to Pakistan for refuge. Meanwhile, the U.S. is being generous with its intelligence. Pakistani military sources say the U.S. has passed on GPS coordinates of the bases used by the Pakistani Taliban - extremist tribesmen who see Islamabad as their enemy No. 1, not the NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan - so that the Pakistani military under General Khan can hammer them with artillery or aircraft strikes. These sources say that several dozen American "trainers" are passing on intelligence on the Pakistani Taliban that was gleaned from the eye-in-the-sky drones...
Washington's newfound friendship with Islamabad could still fray over one particularly vicious Afghan clan. The NATO forces' most dangerous adversaries are the Haqqanis, who have sworn loyalty to Omar while operating semi-independently in the eastern Afghan provinces and also across the border in Pakistan. Since the days of the jihad against the Soviets, Pakistani spy service the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has kept close ties with the Haqqanis. Now the Pakistanis are resisting demands by Washington to clear the Haqqanis out of their lair in the Pakistani territory of North Waziristan. Pakistani officials insist they will...
...crucial that the Pakistani military remain close to the clan in order to preserve Islamabad's influence in Afghanistan. That is not a result the U.S. wants. The Americans blame the young Haqqani warlord Sirajuddin for the most lethal attacks, many of them by suicide bombers, on NATO forces around Kabul. U.S. intelligence suspects that the Haqqanis are sheltering dozens of al-Qaeda fighters...