Word: pashtuns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Taliban forces ditching their guns and switching sides by the thousands, American commandos spent last week picking up bin Laden's scent?and nudging the six-week conflict toward a decisive climax. The Taliban faced devastation in its southern strongholds, and that shrank bin Laden's theater of operation. Pashtun operatives showered Western and Pakistani intelligence agents with information about bin Laden's hideouts. Pakistani officials told TIME that U.S. forces, working from reports that Taliban informants gave to Pakistani intelligence agents, have zeroed in on the Tora Bora region near Jalalabad, where bin Laden was thought to have sought...
...With Kabul in opposition hands and Kandahar, the regime's spiritual center, under siege by opposition Pashtun, the Taliban was on the brink of total collapse. But inside the Pentagon, joy was tempered by the grim knowledge of the threats to American forces on the ground. The pace and scale of the Taliban's retreat last week left U.S. special-ops troops scattered throughout a ravaged land that lacks a central governing authority. Dozens of warlords staked claims to their own pieces of turf, and in several cities, ethnic tensions held the potential for fresh violence. And even...
...hunt down the remnants of the al-Qaeda brass. Members of Britain's Elite Special Air Service regiment are said to be assisting American commandos in the manhunt. The Pentagon may still establish forward bases in Afghanistan to stage special-ops search-and-destroy missions alongside the Pashtun in the south and to secure humanitarian supply lines in the north. But American military planners remained leery of sending ground troops into the caves to root out the enemy in person. They would prefer to dispatch their far more experienced Afghan proxies to the enemy lairs if entry becomes necessary. Caves...
...most convincing sign that the Taliban had come undone. The swiftness of the regime's retreat from the north led some allied commanders to warn that the Taliban was conserving its forces and artillery for a ferocious defense of their southern citadel. But it didn't come. As Pashtun opposition forces encircled the city, the Taliban mustered no more than sporadic skirmishing. That, and the week's long string of northern defeats, convinced anti-Taliban Pashtun that they could take down the core Taliban warriors in the south and persuade the rest to switch sides; the prospect of Tajik, Uzbek...
...Taliban restored order to Afghan cities, but it was order of a sinister kind. Most of the leadership and the fighters were Pashtun tribesmen from rural areas of the south around Kandahar. In some respects, the harshness of their treatment of women was their attempt to extend across all Afghanistan the primitive social order of their villages at home. And it allowed the leadership to claim that Taliban rule had conferred on its male warriors a new degree of authority. The nation was a shambles, but at least the women were firmly under control...