Word: taliban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spectacle of fierce fighting around a dusty Afghan town, with well-armed Western troops, backed by helicopters and Afghan allies, bearing down on hundreds of dug-in Taliban fighters, would seem to date from late 2001. The fact that it's unfolding this weekend at Musa Qala in southeastern Afghanistan - a full six years after the Taliban was first routed by coalition forces - is a reminder of how difficult the war is proving for the the U.S. and its allies...
...leave. "Who would have thought the 'evil empire' would collapse and, most astonishingly, that it would collapse without a single drop of blood from an American soldier?" He also has no remorse over his devotion to the Afghan guerrillas, many of whom later became Islamic warriors and formed the Taliban. "We were fighting the evil empire. It would have been like not supplying the Soviets against Hitler in World War II," he says. "Anyway, who the hell had ever heard of the Taliban then...
...quite. The pomegranates I enjoyed were shipped as part of a USAID-funded Alternative Livelihoods program. The idea, explains Loren Stoddard, head of USAID's Alternative Development and Agriculture program in Afghanistan, is to restore "some of the old trade routes that were broken." Since the Taliban regime fell six years ago, USAID has helped plant more than a million pomegranate trees, Stoddard claims, and this year Afghan farmers harvested between 33,000 and 44,000 tons (30,000 and 40,000 metric tons) of the fruit, of which some 1,102 tons (1,000 metric tons) were flown...
...Actually, don't do that. We don't have enough jobs as it is." Cairo nods at a young man serving tea with a prosthetic right hook. He also wears a prosthetic left foot. "That's not a landmine injury," Cairo says. The appendages were cut off by the Taliban. "I don't care if he was a thief. Whatever happened, he has paid." Even members of the Taliban have come to the center for treatment. "If you have been wounded, if you are missing a limb, if you are paralyzed, we don't care who you are," says Cairo...
...decades have not given the people of Afghanistan much to smile about. Since being invaded by the crumbling Soviet Union in the 1980s, the nation has seen the collapse of a puppet communist government, the ravaging of its lands by militant groups called mujahideen, and the rise of the Taliban, one of the most notorious regimes in recent memory. A beacon of light following years of darkness, the US-led invasion in the wake of Sept. 11 failed to bring peace to the blood-stained country, serving only to reinstall some of the same vicious mujahideen that tore Afghanistan apart...