Word: taliban
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...traders who were returning home overland from a business trip to Hong Kong. One, in a Harley-Davidson cap, showed me two toy remote-control U.S. military helicopters he had bought in Shenzhen for his young sons. Beaming, he professed his love for America. But he also applauded the Taliban and al-Qaeda and how they "looked after" his Muslim brethren. It's just such a paradoxical pose, at once insular and international, Islamist and secular, that befuddles those outside Pakistan's porous borders, and which is at the crux of Hanging Fire, a survey of contemporary art from...
...country that eschewed armed conflict for more than 50 years - who had persuaded themselves that their nation's role was solely humanitarian. Then in September, German forces called in a U.S. air strike in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan to destroy oil tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban. Some 140 people were killed, many of them civilians. That changed the perception of the mission among the German public and politicians alike. Franz Josef Jung, who was Defense Minister at the time of the bombing, resigned over the controversy, but other German officials declared that the event galvanized the country...
...when a suicide bomber detonated an SUV packed with explosives at a volleyball tournament, leaving more than 90 people dead. It was but the latest in an a steady stream of brutal attacks that have escalated along with the Pakistan Army's three-month-old offensive against the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan. And it reinforced a growing perception across the country that the government is in no position to mount a robust response. Stopping determined terrorists is difficult for even the most able governments, but analysts say that Islamabad - whose government is in growing disarray - has failed to take...
...painful fact is that the Taliban's growing influence in the countryside has severely narrowed the CIA's field of operations. And although no one has said as much, the purpose of al-Qaeda's attack on the CIA in Khost was to force it to retreat. The agency has vowed to fight on all the harder, and it will do so. But the attack in Khost will force the CIA to draw back farther and farther behind the wire in order to protect its officers. The CIA is a civilian organization that's not built to sustain casualties like...
...consequences of the Taliban's expansion are unmistakable. Shortly before the Khost bombing, the U.S. military chief of intelligence, Major General Michael Flynn, wrote in a report subsequently made public, "Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy." His report went on to say that U.S. intelligence is "clueless" and "ignorant...