Word: taliban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long-term fix is to build a new Somalia. Nation-building is something the Bush administration initially shied away from in Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to regroup, and came round to in Iraq, with mixed and frequently bloody results. China provides a better model for nation-building in Africa, focusing almost wholly on the continent's commercial potential - and, as a byproduct, the stabilizing effects of poverty alleviation - by pumping billions into infrastructure in war-torn territories such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Angola is now stable, if horribly corrupt; Congo is still...
...military officers are already making clear that many of the additional 20,000 U.S. troops bound for Afghanistan in the coming year won't be headed to the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies are launching regular and deadly attacks against U.S. and allied troops. Instead, they'll be concentrated on defending the capital, Kabul, from Taliban attacks and also on reinforcing British troops in Helmand and other parts of the south. That will do little to assuage the criticism that the limited U.S. and NATO deployments in Afghanistan have left Afghan President Hamid Karzai...
...troop surge in Iraq may have helped restore relative security there, but the same period has seen a shocking deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan: the Taliban, which controlled 54% of Afghanistan in 2007, now controls about 72% of the country, according to a new study from the Paris-based International Council on Security and Development, one of the few independent groups that keeps full-time staffers in the country. That's why U.S. and civilian casualties have spiked in Afghanistan lately, after years of being eclipsed by the bloodshed in Iraq. There are currently about 32,000 U.S. troops...
...scattered the Taliban in the invasion launched a month after the 9/11 attacks but then turned its attention and resources toward Iraq. "As seven years of missed opportunity have rolled by, the Taliban has rooted itself across increasing swaths of Afghan territory," the independent report says. "The increase in their geographic spread illustrates that the Taliban's political, military and economic strategies are now more successful than the West's in Afghanistan. Confident in their expansion beyond the rural south, the Taliban are at the gates of the capital and infiltrating the city at will...
...authorities providing their own security - means the national government's security apparatus can be much smaller," Biddle says. The bad news, of course, is that many such provincial officials are little more than warlords, who often profit from trafficking in opium. The United Nations estimated last month that the Taliban and its allies - including some of those provincial officials - could clear nearly $500 million in the drug trade this year. If the U.S. and its allies need to find a way to bring home their troops while leaving behind a modicum of security, they may find themselves forced to settle...