Word: talibanic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Responding to a spate of attacks by Taliban militants that killed more than 100 people in the first three weeks of October, Pakistan's government launched a new offensive in insurgent-plagued South Waziristan that it dubbed Operation Path of Riddance. Pakistan's army chief requested the support of the area's Mehsud tribe, whose members fill many of the Taliban's top posts. Thousands of civilians fled the region, where 30,000 troops were fighting...
...General George B. McClellan was the country's primary political battle; nor was the contest between Karzai and Abdullah the key conflict in Afghanistan. Instead, Afghanistan is in the grip of a civil war that pits a U.S.-backed political establishment, which includes both Karzai and Abdullah, against the Taliban...
...that light, the main legitimacy problem with the August vote was not the 1 million-plus fake votes that were cast mostly for Karzai but the 12 million-plus votes claimed by the Taliban. No one actually voted for the Taliban, of course, and its call for a boycott of the poll was enforced by threat of death. But whether out of fear, political choice or sheer indifference, 12 million voters - representing 70% of the electorate, compared with just 30% in 2004 - stayed away from the ballot stations. A runoff election was expected to see an even smaller turnout...
...cheated again and probably recognizing that he was never likely to win even a clean election against Karzai, made clear his intention to boycott the runoff early on. The runoff was unlikely to help stabilize the country or resolve its fundamental conflicts, and canceling it simply denied the Taliban another opportunity to demonstrate its strength by ensuring an even lower turnout. (Read "Karzai Declared President As Afghan Runoff Canceled...
...become conventional wisdom even among the U.S. and its NATO allies that stability in Afghanistan will ultimately depend on a political settlement that somehow involves most of those currently fighting under the Taliban rubric. So just as the U.S. chose to avoid the very election it had forced Karzai to accept and turned instead to brokering a backroom deal that would dilute the incumbent's authority, any political solution in Afghanistan will have be negotiated on the basis of the real distribution of power, rather than votes cast in an election staged in the heat of a civil...