Word: taliban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Qaeda Threat Requires a Ground War Obama made the threat of al-Qaeda's returning on the back of a Taliban victory the primary rationale for escalating the war in Afghanistan. But as many have pointed out, al-Qaeda doesn't need sanctuaries in order to plot terrorist attacks, and its leadership core is based in the neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan - which means that 100,000 U.S. troops are now being committed to a mission whose goal is to prevent a few hundred men from re-establishing a base of operations...
...then there's the problem that having masses of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for whatever reason, inevitably creates a nationalist backlash that fuels the insurgency - a problem that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had noted early in the debate. The fact that the Taliban is now effectively in control of as much as half of the country eight years after being routed by the U.S.-led invasion is a sign that the local population is at least more tolerant of an insurgency against foreign forces. Expanding the ground war may not solve this problem. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole...
...Afghan Security Forces Can Be Trained to Take Over the Mission The centerpiece of Obama's exit strategy is the training of Afghan security forces to take responsibility for fighting the Taliban, just as Iraqi forces have taken charge of security in Iraq. But Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq, and training may not be the decisive issue: although the U.S. has officially trained 94,000 Afghan soldiers, there's no sign of an effective Afghan security force capable of fighting the Taliban. Desertion rates are high - 1 in 4 soldiers trained last year, by some accounts...
...Signaling a U.S. Departure Date Creates Leverage Some critics suggest that by announcing July 2011 as the target date to begin a troop drawdown, President Obama has encouraged the Taliban to simply wait out the Americans. Supporters counter that by declaring that the U.S. commitment is finite, the President is forcing Karzai and the Pakistanis to take more responsibility for fighting the Taliban. That debate may be missing the point: everyone in the region is already acting on the assumption that the U.S. presence is temporary, knowing that America can't sustain a permanent occupation. One reason Karzai...
...Pakistan Shares the U.S.'s Goals The Obama Administration has stressed that its Afghan plan can't work unless Pakistan shuts down Taliban safe havens on its side of the border. But Pakistan has declined to do so, because its key decision makers - the military leadership - don't share the U.S. view of the conflict in Afghanistan. Months of cajoling and exhortation by U.S. officials have failed to shake the Pakistani view that the country's prime security challenge is its lifelong conflict with India rather than the threat of Taliban extremism, and the Pakistani military sees...