Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...recruit." But so far, the U.S. is failing to do that. With the possibility that Indian threats of retaliation over last month's terror attacks on Mumbai could force Pakistan to move its military to the east from the Afghan border, where it is currently fighting elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it is more important than ever that Afghanistan's central government be strengthened. The perception that warlords, protected by their influence and threats of violence, can commit crimes with impunity has rocked Afghan society, and threatens to undermine the very government that the United States...
...consensus within Kashmir - among government and intelligence officials, separatist leaders, local civil society groups and experienced observers of the Kashmir conflict - that there is no direct link between militants active in Kashmir and the ones who planned and executed the brutal Mumbai attacks. "It's like al-Qaeda talking about the Palestinian issue," says one longtime analyst of Kashmiri politics. "It's just a cover." And some local activists fear the Mumbai terrorists may have hurt the cause of Kashmiri independence. Says one: "People are not happy about having Kashmir being dragged into this...
...confined to having to defer to the military in all national security matters; he's had a hard time selling Pakistanis in general on the need to wage war on the extremists. The majority of his fellow citizens oppose cooperation with U.S. efforts against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Even after the Marriott bombing, Pakistan's parliament called for negotiations rather than force to be the dominant response to the militants...