Word: pashtun
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...Karzai won a comfortable victory in the October presidential polls, with 55% of the vote, but the process opened dangerous ethnic fault lines. Karzai was the overwhelming winner among his fellow Pashtuns, but he received less than 1% in the northern, Tajik-majority province of Panjshir. Washington can assist Karzai by speeding up the flow of foreign aid and by ensuring that it reaches the far corners of a country that has been ravaged by a six-year drought. With a little help from NATO friends, Washington must also extend the reach of the military civil-reconstruction teams into...
...specifically. Instead, they are patrolling the border against incursions by Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Rather than trek through the vast mountainous region hoping for a chance encounter, the U.S. command is now engaged in a slow but probably more effective tactic of trying to win over Pashtun villagers by digging wells and giving away tractors and generators. The hope is that someday a villager might trust the Americans enough to reveal some useful intelligence about bin Laden or other enemies...
...first place? The Taliban considers photos un-Islamic, making it difficult to identify its senior commanders. The Pentagon doesn't comment on its Guantanamo detainees, but a Taliban source tells TIME that Shahzada convinced his captors he had been picked up by their Afghan allies only because he was Pashtun, a rival ethnic group. Afghan minister Gul Agha Sherzai, who has helped battle the Taliban, insists that if Afghan officials had been allowed to vet Guantanamo captives, Shahzada would never have been freed. "We know all these Taliban faces," he says. Repeated requests for access, he claims, were turned down...
...McGirk: It may sound mediaeval, but Pashtun culture places a higher value on honor than on life. Al-Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas are believed to be living with local families, and some - particularly Uzbeks and Chechens - are said to have married into local families. In the eyes of the tribesmen, for government troops to go in and destroy the houses and force the families off ancestral land is a big no-no. What we're seeing is that because of harsh government action, a lot of tribesmen who couldn't care less about giving sanctuary to Zawahiri...
...Afghanistan. While U.S. forces are still trying to track down Osama bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda, the quarry is increasingly a resurgent Taliban. Two years after the government in Kabul was routed, black-turbaned militants are again stalking the dusty villages and towns of the Pashtun heartland. High-ranking Afghan sources tell TIME that the Taliban is trying to unite with the Pashtuns under one leadership. A core of 250 Taliban veterans is recruiting a fresh generation of young zealots from the refugee camps and madrasahs in the Pakistan border tribal areas. Tragic U.S. blunders like these...