Word: sharif
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...will help root out al-Qaeda, and the people Karzai has sent out to build a coherent Afghan nation. Two weeks ago, both U.S. officials and Karzai's government were embarrassed by reports that Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum, who worked closely with U.S. special forces around Mazar-i-Sharif during the early part of the anti-Taliban war, might have suffocated Taliban POWs in shipping containers and buried their bodies in mass graves. Zadran is the Dostum of Afghanistan's southeast, an unsavory but necessary ally...
...MAZAR-I-SHARIF The country's most celebrated warlord, Uzbek ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM has long been a strongman in the north. Though he still commands some 7,000 troops, lately his influence has been eroded by the rising power of Tajik USTAD ATTA MOHAMMED, whose force of 5,000 controls much of Mazar. Sporadic clashes between the rival factions have been temporarily defused...
...perhaps most disturbing is the manner in which those who live in war zones often seem barely to notice the blood and destruction. I've rarely felt less comfortable than I did when turning up at the scene of a massacre of 300 Taliban in Mazar-i-Sharif last November, I was greeted warmly by the Afghan perpetrators, offered tea and, as the gagging stench of rotting bodies filled the air, asked with a combination of Afghan politeness and pride how I was enjoying my stay in the jewel of northern Afghanistan...
...suburb outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif last week, Dostum was in campaign mode. Next month the country will hold its long-awaited loya jirga, or grand assembly, which will choose a transitional government. Dostum relaunched his old political party, the National Islamic Movement. Known simply as Jombesh, the group has a platform that rests on secular democracy (despite its name) and respect for minority rights, which translates to a federalist agenda. Addressing a congress of 2,000 party functionaries, Dostum hit out at "extremism" and "fundamentalism." Read: the Islamic politics of Jamiat...
...months earlier; last week in Washington, Bruce Riedel, senior director at the National Security Council, revealed that the Pakistani army, without informing its own government, had mobilized its nuclear arsenal at the height of the conflict. Former U.S. President Clinton persuaded then-Pakistani Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif to withdraw his forces, ending what appears to be one of the closest brushes with nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis...