Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...arrive fast enough or in sufficient numbers. Afghanistan is a third larger than Iraq in size, and its terrain is a lot more difficult. Counterinsurgency expert John Nagl has estimated that there should be 600,000 troops--including Afghan ones--inside the country to quell the Taliban and al-Qaeda threat. Currently there are only about 65,000 coalition forces (including 33,000 U.S. troops) on the ground, in addition to some 70,000 Afghan army personnel--of whom fewer than half can fully function on their own--plus an ineffective police force. Iraq, by contrast, has some...
...once again celebrating Mass. But Hamad said he never could have done the job without the help of a local Awakening group that the government is disbanding, concerned that the loyalties of its members are uncertain. Hamad thinks this is a mistake. "Some of these people helped al-Qaeda [only] because they needed the funds," he said. "All they have known for four years is war. If the government doesn't treat them with respect and help give them jobs, they will go back...
...instead. Already, Obama has indicated that he approves the general direction in which Petraeus is heading. Unlike President Bush, Obama strongly supports nation-building in both Afghanistan and Pakistan; and, like Petraeus, he favors negotiations with some of the pro-Taliban tribes (at least those who are not al-Qaeda). Unlike McCain, Obama will not be reluctant to continue the current cross-border strikes, via Predator drone, against selected terrorist targets in Pakistan...
...their side," Kelly said. "We still have a certain level of foreign-fighter movement." He told Pentagon reporters via teleconference last week, "We're doing much more work along the Syrian border than we've done in the past," adding that Iraqi security and intelligence forces "feel that al-Qaeda operatives and others operate, live pretty openly on the Syrian side...
Cross-border strikes are an increasingly common tactic by U.S. forces operating along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. U.S. missile-launching drones reportedly killed at least 20 people on Sunday in Pakistan's South Waziristan province close to the Afghan border, an area suspected of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Andrew Exum, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as founder of the influential Abu Muqawama counterinsurgency blog, suggests that the American action in Syria shows that the tactic may simply have been exported. "The precedent has already been established of crossing borders into...