Word: spinnings
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Commander Mamabaidullah switches off the ignition and alights from his pickup truck onto the desert plain surrounding Spin Boldak, a chaotic Afghan town that borders Pakistan. Followed by four of his Kalashnikov-toting men, he walks briskly toward a graveyard where scores of bodies lie buried beneath mounds of dirt and clay. Mamabaidullah, who is responsible for guarding this stretch of frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, stops at the row closest to the border. With evident pride, he explains that they contain the corpses of Taliban militiamen killed by Afghan soldiers during a battle last month. These Taliban, Mamabaidullah says...
...Mamabaidullah's office overlooks one of this battle's front lines: Spin Boldak's main border checkpoint, a notorious smugglers' route from the Pakistani town of Chaman. Entering or leaving the country often requires no papers at all. "It's impossible to control," says Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai. It's also the Taliban's gateway to revenge. Following their ouster from Afghanistan, most Taliban leaders found sanctuary among fellow ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan's lawless Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.) regions. Pakistani authorities have arrested nearly 500 suspected al-Qaeda members, but Karzai...
...Khaksar, an ex-Taliban minister who later allied himself with the Northern Alliance, says Talibs are warned by their peers that "they'll be sent to Guant?namo" if they return. Or, he adds, "[the Taliban] pay people to join their jihad." Mullah Nik Mohammed, a Taliban commander captured in Spin Boldak, told his interrogators that he would have received $850 for detonating a bomb, double that if it killed a civilian, and $2,600 for taking a soldier's life...
After Atal Bihari Vajpayee resolved a half-century of animosity with China on a state visit to Beijing last month, the Indian Prime Minister's traveling press pack tried valiantly to find some balancing spin. Settling a dispute over India's eastern border with Tibet was all well and good, said a reporter at a press conference in Beijing, but what about India's most famous foreign resident, the Dalai Lama? A junior correspondent queried whether the aging Prime Minister would be around to complete New Delhi's rapprochement with Beijing. Another contrasted China's soaring economic progress with India...
...perpetrated by school kids against each other, provided an easy target for conservative politicians eager to blame pop culture for a youth-crime wave sweeping the country. The free publicity boosted Battle Royale to a stratum of box-office success usually reserved for cartoons and TV-drama spin-offs. The film raked in $25 million in Japan alone?a formidable haul, given the depressed state of the country's film industry. It went on to fill theaters in 22 countries (the sequel already has distribution deals in 28) and to achieve cult status among connoisseurs of cinematic cruelty. Oddly...