Word: sovietize
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...hills. Victory still requires one group of men to find and kill another. Technology can't do it all. "The cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve this problem," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week. In an assessment of the Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan written for the U.S. Army in 1996, a retired Afghan general and his American co-author were blunt. "A guerrilla war," they wrote, "is not a war of technology against peasantry. Rather, it is a contest of endurance and national will. The side with the greatest moral commitment will hold...
...excised from the final cuts in the days after the attack. The move, presumably, was to shield the public from having to think about the tragedy when they were supposed to be mindlessly enjoying an escapist bit of entertainment; instead, the editing smacked of the cold-war tales of Soviet bureaucrats erasing their out-of-favor predecessors from group photos. The public is tough enough to handle the past. A far braver decision was made by New York City-based alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Adams. His rollicking new song "New York, New York" has as its refrain the words...
...into combat in the warrens of fortified underground tunnels and facilities scattered all over Afghanistan, from the Taliban strongholds Kandahar and Kabul in the east to Herat, near the country's western border with Iran. Many of the tunnels and bunkers were dug during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union but have been upgraded since a U.S. cruise-missile strike against al-Qaeda in 1998. U.S. soldiers have the military technology, such as night-vision goggles and breathing devices, to operate in this underground labyrinth, and U.S. bombers have pounded the network. But U.S. troops could face fearsome resistance...
...enforced night-time curfew are some of the more obvious ones. The official Radio Shariat, its airtime already crowded with Taliban propaganda, has started broadcasting patriotic battle poetry. As if the scars of 23 years of fighting, triggered by the communist revolution in April 1978 and fuelled by the Soviet invasion of December 1979, weren't enough, the Afghans are now entering another indefinite round of suffering...
...reality staring us in the face was a whole village razed to the ground only because it was mistaken for an Osama bin Laden training camp or a Taliban ammunition depot. Khrum's location in the Torghar, where the Afghan mujahedeen had established several bases while fighting the Soviet occupation, brought about its misfortune. Villagers claimed these camps were no longer operational but obviously the Americans think otherwise - hence the repeated air strikes...