Word: northern
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Alarmed that the nuclear-armed neighbors would return to the brink of conflict--it would be their fourth in 61 years--and undermine the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, the Bush Administration is pressuring Islamabad to crack down on homegrown militants. In response, Pakistani authorities have launched nighttime raids on several camps in and around Muzaffarabad, arresting at least 12 people. Among them: Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a top Lashkar commander named by Indian police as the mastermind of Mumbai. (A spokesman has denied that the group had any role in the Mumbai attacks...
...broader war. The soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force are doing what they can against difficult odds. The language and tactics of counterinsurgency warfare are universal here: secure the population, help them build their communities. There are occasional victories: the Taliban leader of Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, switched sides and has become an effective local governor. But the incremental successes are reversible - schools are burned by the Taliban, police officers are murdered - because of a monstrous structural problem that defines the current struggle in Afghanistan...
...seize territory, terrorize the population and, in some cases, even issue currency. The Taliban capitalized on widespread disgust with their savagery, eventually coming to power in 1996. The U.S., unwilling to commit large numbers of ground troops when it went to overthrow the Taliban government, relied instead on the northern warlords and their militias. In a grave mistake that was to haunt Afghanistan for years to come, many of those leaders were given prominent positions when the new Afghan government was formed, enabling them to claw back credibility that had been lost due to their abhorrent behavior in the civil...
...Maghferat Samimi has affixed the photo of a child to her mobile phone. But the two-and-a-half-year-old is not her daughter. She is a rape victim, one of scores that Samimi, a researcher with the Afghan Human Rights Organization, has documented in the country's northern provinces over the past six months. Witnesses to the child's abduction by a local militia commander - a person who would once have been called a "warlord" - have had their rape claim backed up by a nearby hospital, but the district police chief maintains that the child fell...
...crisis, with radical anarchists burning shops, cars, banks and even government buildings, including the Hellenic Parliament Foundation and the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic academy. Some 320 stores, 50 banks and a number of other civilian buildings have been damaged or destroyed in Athens, with another 100 stores in the northern city of Thessaloníki targeted. There have also been outbreaks of violence in several small cities and on the island of Corfu...