Word: supporters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Getting Pakistan to see both groups of militants - those who fight chiefly in Pakistan and those who fight chiefly in Afghanistan - as a common threat will test Obama's gifts of persuasion. The gap over perceptions and priorities could be narrowed with enhanced support for Pakistan's counterinsurgency capability. Organized to fight a different kind of war on a different border, the Pakistan Army is poorly equipped and trained for offensives against hardened guerillas, especially on terrain that favors the enemy's methods...
...What Pakistan needs is enhanced support for communications, observation and helicopter fighting capability," says a Pakistani military official. Pakistan also covets night-vision goggles - a controversial demand given the risk that the militants could seize them through ambushes. In other areas, however, the Pakistan army has spurned counterinsurgency support. U.S. military experts are not allowed to directly train Pakistani troops engaged in counterinsurgency operations and are limited to training trainers...
...Congress is also working through a bill that would deliver an unprecedented $1.5 billion a year of nonmilitary aid. The money will help support Pakistan's deeply neglected education and social sectors. (At the moment, the country only spends 2.5% of its GDP on health and education combined.) Pakistan also faces chronic electricity shortages. On his last visit, Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration's envoy to the region, pledged support. But that effort, along with proposals for a gas pipeline from Iran and Chinese-funded nuclear-energy reactors, will not bear fruit for some time...
...ethnic divide. In the August poll, Abdullah won a clear majority of the Tajik vote in the north; Karzai the Pashtun vote in the south. Abdullah's ties to the late warrior-poet, Ahmed Shah Masood, killed by al-Qaeda a few days before 9/11, help Abdullah's support in the north because Tajiks revere Masood as an exemplary leader who single-handedly held off the Soviets and the Taliban. On the other hand, Abdullah's Masood connection is a turnoff to many Pashtun tribesmen, who viewed Masood as just another troublesome warlord. It doesn't matter that Abdullah...
...presidential campaign and at the Summit of the Americas earlier this year, it may be because he's found that conservatives can still give him headaches over Cuba and the Latin-American left. Republicans are currently holding up key diplomatic appointments in Congress, for example, to protest Obama's support of leftist Honduran Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a military coup over the summer. (That issue may become more complicated with the news Monday that Zelaya smuggled himself back into Honduras...