Word: peshawar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Haji Zaman spent years fighting as a mujahedin commander during the anti-Soviet war. But when the Taliban came to power, he scurried into exile in France. Now fortunes are shifting again, and Zaman has come back to the frontier city of Peshawar, Pakistan, to join others looking to grab power after the Taliban falls. Sitting in the shady, walled garden of his villa last week, Zaman said, "We don't need meetings and more meetings. Now we need practical action...
...install the broad-based, multiethnic alternative everyone professes to want. It didn't take the death last week of Abdul Haq--America's favorite ex-mujahedin--to convince observers that the political campaign was a mess. Last week the evidence was all too clear in the relative safety of Peshawar...
...Northern Alliance. Nor did a single so-called moderate Taliban attend. From Kabul, Taliban spokesmen jeered that the gathering was a bunch of self-seekers out to pocket American dollars. Even Zahir Shah, who stood to benefit most, inexplicably failed to send a personal representative. And the maneuvering in Peshawar ignores a harsh reality. When you ask four Afghan refugees who should rule their country, you get four different answers. Ghulan Sarwar, 50, favors the King. Mahmood Ayub, 25, says only the Taliban can maintain peace and proper Islam. He would go and fight...
...that U.S air strikes, carried out by one or two aircraft at a time, were not sufficient to dislodge the Taliban from their entrenched mountain positions. As the opposition pounded Taliban lines north of Kabul, more than 1,000 tribal elders, former mujahedin and other Afghan exiles assembled in Peshawar, Pakistan to discuss the post-Taliban era. The assembly agreed to invite the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, to play a moderating role and call a loya jirga, a grand council, to shape the country?s future government. But in a sign of the difficulty of building consensus, the king...
...rugged Afghan steppes and summits better than Haq, a legendary mujahedin guerrilla who lost his right foot to a land mine while helping rout the Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords in an anti-Taliban southern alliance. Because he was Pashtun--the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan and the Taliban itself--Haq was a precious asset to the U.S., which desperately wants an erosion of Taliban authority...