Word: recentering
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...McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June 2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade, which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan. Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of "assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda" - are fighting alongside the Taliban. "There is no question but that the situation has deteriorated...
...Kindle (the newest model) are stocked by his wife with serious tomes on Pakistan, Lincoln and Vietnam. Right now, he is reading William Maley's 2002 book The Afghanistan Wars, a catalog of the long list of British failures in Afghanistan. McChrystal famously eats little during the day, recently only picking at an Afghan spread featuring four kinds of meat. To the chagrin of Afghans, who see drinking tea as an inalienable human right, he scrapped a morning tea break at a recent security briefing in Kandahar, and aides grumble, nicely, that he sees others' demands for lunch...
...regime has repeatedly charged that the recent unrest is a plot by foreign powers, particularly Britain, to orchestrate an uprising against the theocracy. On the eve of the pivotal vote, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei expressed concern about a "soft" or "velvet" revolution, the term originally used to describe the 1989 overthrow of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle...
Patrick Whelan, head of the Catholic Democrats organization in Boston, believes that the Pope's particular emphasis on bioethics may have been due to the recent uproar in the U.S. Catholic Church over the President's invitation to give the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. Some Catholic bishops opposed to the invitation because of Obama's stance on abortion and other ethical issues had hoped in vain that the Vatican would join the fray. "There was a feeling that [the Pope] didn't back them up over Notre Dame," said Whelan. "He wanted to show them that...
...verbal missteps, has a new opportunity with a like-minded Obama Administration to have more of a say on a vast array of foreign policy challenges. Among other issues touched upon was the West's relations with Islam, and the White House noted that they spoke about Obama's recent speech in Cairo directed at the Muslim world...