Word: taliban
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Klein's "The Mystery of the Surge" [Nov. 23]: President Obama stated unequivocally that victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is essential to U.S. national security. If this is true, why agonize over the corruption of Hamid Karzai's regime or the ability to effectively train the Afghan police and military? We must defend our national-security interests, whatever it takes. And if it takes more troops, so be it. On the other hand, if the mission is judged impossible, Obama has a sacred responsibility to get the troops out of that rat hole and devise...
...pegs it at $1 million per soldier per year, which works out to an additional $30 billion a year for 30,000 more troops. The Pentagon says it's half that. But a new study by consulting firm Deloitte makes clear that fighting inside a landlocked country where the Taliban has shut down much of the meager road network has drastically inflated even routine costs. The average U.S. trooper in Afghanistan requires 22 gal. (83 L) of fuel a day--but the cost of buying a gallon of fuel and shipping it to the deepest corners of the country averages...
...based groups traditionally associated with Pakistan's military intelligence organization, the ISI. Obama and his envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, have urged India to make concessions on the decades-old Kashmir dispute in order to help Washington's efforts to get Pakistan to finally deal with the Taliban. But little has been done to coerce Pakistan to crack down on extremists using its territory as a base for targeting India...
...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...
...While U.S. officials decry the distinction between the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, Pakistan's generals believe that their domestic Taliban insurgency will stop only once the Americans have left Afghanistan. But they want the U.S. to leave in an orderly fashion, on the basis of a political settlement: a deal negotiated with the Taliban that sees the Karzai government replaced or remade in a new arrangement that gives Pakistan-aligned Pashtuns far greater power...