Word: onsets
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...Post believe the Alliance is getting an opportunity to redeem its recent bad rap from the media. Military realities have made it a central cog of the U.S. war effort, the paper argues, and stepped up air support has raised the possibility of the Alliance capturing Mazar before the onset of winter. That "could provide the U.S. forces with a bridgehead or land corridor from Uzbekistan to ferry troops and supplies into Afghanistan, an advantage Pakistan cannot and has not offered because of domestic political constraints." The danger, of course, is de facto partition of Afghanistan, "a prospect no Afghan...
...strategic linchpin of Northern Afghanistan. Military strategists consider the capture of the city essential - both to prove the battle-worthiness of the Northern Alliance and also for the ultimate defeat of the Taliban. The capture of the city has also been deemed a necessary victory before the onset of Ramadan and winter...
...onset of winter may also hamper U.S. efforts to use helicopters in strikes and to deploy special forces - freezing rain reportedly played a role in bringing down the helicopter that crashed in Afghanistan last Saturday, and the weather last week restricted U.S. efforts to insert more commandos on the ground...
...Even if the Northern Alliance manages to cast aside doubts over its fighting ability and seizes Mazar-i-Sharif before the onset of winter impedes the prospects for ground warfare, the U.S. will have to do more of the heavy lifting itself in the campaign to defeat the Taliban. With Washington having been given the nod by Moscow, U.S. personnel are currently scouting airfields in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, not only as logistical bases for long-term resupply efforts in an expanded Northern Alliance-controlled slice of northern Afghanistan, but also as potential staging areas for a more substantial commitment...
...most ridiculous example of this solicitousness is the talk in Washington of hurrying the fighting so as to finish before the onset of Ramadan. We'd already limited air strikes on the first Friday of the war in deference to Muslim sensibilities. This is odd in the extreme. The Arabs had no compunction about launching the Yom Kippur War on the holiest day of their enemy--and during their own Ramadan. Indeed, Egypt celebrates the 1973 Yom Kippur War not just as the October War but as the Ramadan...