Word: shuras
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...local Marine commanders. The Taliban had been driven out of town but were still lurking about at night, trying to intimidate the locals. Then he was greeted by the provincial governor, Gulab Mangal, one of the few Afghan officials with a reputation for both probity and effectiveness. A shura consisting of about three dozen tribal elders was waiting under a sheer nylon tent adorned with local rugs. Mangal made an opening statement, explaining that most of these elders had turned against the outlandishly corrupt provincial Afghan government years ago (Mangal's immediate predecessor had been caught with nine tons...
...local strongman, Ahmed Wali Karzai (the President's half brother); the Afghans will cobble together their own political solution, somehow. There will be some operations against the Taliban, mostly to prevent them from entering the city; indeed, U.S. troops may not show themselves in downtown Kandahar. "We can shura our way to success," a senior military official actually said. Really? Not if we're depending on the Karzai regime to deliver the governance goods. I must admit utter confusion; I've never heard the U.S. military talk so ... airily before...
...from domestic abuse. And it is pushing Saudis to discuss the notion of empowerment, formerly such a taboo subject that even the word was off-limits in newspapers. "The message is that women are coming," says Dr. Maha Almuneef, one of six women named earlier this year to the Shura council, a 156-person advisory body appointed by the King. "It's a good first step. The King and the political system are saying that the time has come. There are small steps now. There are giant steps coming. But most Saudis have been taught the traditional ways...
...activists, and the many others who would like more freedom, the pace of change remains painfully slow. Why, they wonder, doesn't the King snap his fingers and remove some of the more obviously absurd obstacles to equality? For all the publicity about the new female members of the Shura Council, for instance, they still don't have the voting rights of their male colleagues. "This is tokenism, it's insulting," says Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi, a columnist and assistant professor of women's history at King Saud University. "We are asking for full participation. All the doors that...
...border to kill American soldiers. These frontier Pashtun tribesmen, who once provided the Afghans with a steady flow of weapons, young fighters and suicide bombers, are suddenly too pinned down to give anything but a trickle of support. Mullah Omar and the other members of the so-called Quetta Shura, or military council, have stayed on the sidelines for fear of losing their covert support from the Pakistani military and the ISI, who hate Karzai and his northern allies and want to see the Taliban back in power and the NATO forces gone from Afghanistan...