Word: taliban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...session of Congress, telling Americans where to direct their rage. "Americans are asking, 'Who attacked our country?'" Bush declared early in his remarks. "The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda." (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...elaborate effort to peel back eight years of onion in hopes of finding the war on terrorism's lost inner core: the struggle against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda alone. That's the subtext underlying his new Afghan strategy. He's raising troop levels, but less to vanquish the Taliban than to gain the leverage to effectively negotiate with them - in hopes of isolating alQaeda from its Afghan allies. He's boosting America's means but narrowing its ends. The same logic underlies his outreach to Iran and Syria and his rhetoric about groups like Hizballah and Hamas. Obama...
...look quite so omnipotent. Insurgents in Iraq and now Afghanistan have learned how to throw sand in our war-fighting machine. Economically, our gaping deficits are making it harder to run the war on terrorism on a blank check. And ideologically, violent, illiberal movements like Hamas, Hizballah and the Taliban have proved that they have deeper roots in native soil than the Bushies assumed. At West Point, Obama said he would not "set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests." Bush never spoke in that language of limits...
...junked the phrase war on terror, not to mention Islamofascism. And the World War II and Cold War analogies have mostly ceased. Even in Afghanistan, Obama has sharply narrowed the U.S.'s goals. While still aiming to "defeat al-Qaeda," we're now trying only to "reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government." In other words, we'll tolerate Taliban control over large chunks of the Afghan countryside...
...most urgent and high-profile item on Obama's downsizing agenda is, of course, Afghanistan. For eight years, the Bush Administration lumped al-Qaeda and the Taliban together. It was the most obvious application of Bush's famous declaration that "we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." But now the Obama Administration is making exactly that distinction. "There is clearly a difference between" the Taliban and al-Qaeda, press secretary Robert Gibbs said recently. A host of Obama officials have insisted that the Taliban is a tribal and national movement...