Word: osama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...aircraft-carrier appearance two months after the invasion of Iraq gave the wrong impression about his and his Administration's assessment of progress in the war, he said. He then referred obliquely to mistakes in some of his own "rhetoric"; Bush has said that his vow to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and his challenge to America's adversaries to "bring 'em on," among other cavalier comments, were unhelpful, and that is presumably what he was hinting at here...
...Osama bin Laden is captured alive. Network news channels delight at their record high ratings. In order to provide the best coverage possible, CNN immerses John King in a giant touch bubble from which he highlights every possible outcome of the trial...
...occupiers wear out their welcome quickly in Afghanistan. Ask the Russians. Recall that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 seeking to protect a threatened client regime, but an armed resistance quickly rose up calling itself the mujahideen. One outsider who aided this resistance force was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Our CIA supported the mujahideen as well. Russian troop strength was eventually increased up to 108,000, and vigorous offensive actions were launched in the countryside, but control could never be established. The effort became a moral and political calamity. Over a decade 13,000 Soviet troops were...
...Afghanistan - the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win - has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the "Taliban." These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens...
...know what the mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions...