Word: opium
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...assortment of dramatic new developments on the ground. Each had to be analyzed individually and then correlated with the others. There was the fraudulent election, which stripped the remaining clothes from the Emperor Karzai. There was a big mistake made by the U.S. military, sending troops to remote opium-laden Helmand province rather than to the heart of the insurgency in Kandahar. There was the vastly improved human intelligence collection on al-Qaeda, which has resulted in Predator strikes that have killed at least a dozen top terrorist leaders in recent months, according to the military. There was Pakistan...
...flank, which would probably lead to a massive refugee influx. As a Shi'ite state, it would see the return to power of militant Sunni hard-liners as a setback. And Iran, which faces a drug-addiction problem of alarming proportions, shares the U.S. desire to curtail Afghanistan's opium trade. If anything, "Tehran stands to lose much more than Washington if Afghanistan reverts back to an al-Qaeda-infested, Taliban-controlled narco state," says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...troops are not the solution. The highest priority is not military, but civil development," says Thijs Berman, a Dutch member in the European Parliament and head of its Afghanistan delegation. He says the best way the international community can help is to fight corruption and the resurgence of the opium trade. "Terrorism can only be fought with credible government, with developments the population believes in." (Read the full transcript of Obama's speech...
Even when the energy took a dark turn, the wave of emotion may have still served the interests of the 27-year-old Egyptian regime. "Football is the opium of the people," says Hossam el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger, journalist and activist. "Both Egypt and Algeria have been going through severe economic turmoil recently, in addition to political crises. What better way to divert the people's attention than a football...
...office that Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery). In addition, the U.S. military has made some serious strategic mistakes in Afghanistan this year. "Why are the Marines in Helmand?" General McChrystal asked at one of his first strategy briefings, I'm told. Helmand province is where the opium crop and a lot of the bad guys are. According to counterinsurgency doctrine, the troops should have been sent to secure the Pashtun population center - Kandahar city, which is now in the process of slipping into Taliban control. The military has been shockingly slow when it comes to matching...