Word: taliban
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...pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
Tehran immediately blamed outsiders - the U.S., Great Britain and Pakistan - for Sunday's suicide bombing because it cannot admit that it has its own homegrown Taliban. Whatever Iran says about Jundallah, the ethnic Baluch group that claimed responsibility for the attack, it's an indigenous movement. The body of its financing comes from Baluch expatriates, many in the Gulf, and Islamic charities. Its weapons and explosives are readily available in the mountains that span the border between Iran and Pakistan. (Read "Pakistan: Behind the Waziristan Offensive...
...idea was quickly dropped because Jundallah was judged uncontrollable and too close to al-Qaeda. There was no way to be certain that Jundallah would not throw the bombs we paid for back at us. (See TIME's photo-essay "On the Front Lines in the Battle Against the Taliban...
...Even if the skeptics are correct and a military victory over the Taliban remains unlikely, the next best option - negotiating some form of compromise with the Taliban, involving shutting out al-Qaeda and some form of power-sharing with the elected government - would require convincing the insurgents that they can't win on the battlefield. Surging tens of thousands more U.S. troops into the Afghan theater may be necessary if the goal is simply to fight this one to a tie. (Logistical constraints, however, suggest that the surge may be more of a dribble, with the U.S. currently lacking...
...reinforcements, although the sweetener will be a promise to dramatically expand the training of Afghan security forces. But in the near term, the Afghan National Army (ANA) will be little more than a sidebar to the deployment of thousands more U.S. troops to hold the line against the Taliban. The ANA ostensibly numbers some 95,000 troops right now, but its capacity to fight the Taliban remains difficult to assess. It is certainly not immune to the political conflicts driving the insurgency; it is dominated by an ethnic Tajik officer corps viewed with resentment by Afghanistan's largest ethnic group...