Word: talibanize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...threat. Just a day before Asif Ali Zardari, during his inauguration ceremony, swore to protect his country's sovereignty, a U.S. Predator drone launched five missiles at a suspected militant compound near the border with Afghanistan. The compound belonged to Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most notorious Afghan Taliban commanders based in Pakistan and a Soviet-era ally of the CIA. The Predator strike missed Haqqani, but it did kill four midlevel al-Qaeda operatives, government and militant sources told the Associated Press. It also killed as many as eight children, one of Haqqani's wives and a sister...
...worldwide. The billions of dollars the U.S. has pumped into training and equipping the Pakistani military appears to have produced neither a capability nor a will to decisively tackle the problem. Many in Washington even suspect that members of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence spy agency are actively supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders and may be tipping them off about planned attacks. So while U.S. strikes on Pakistani soil may be controversial, the theory goes, they are the only option for tackling a threat the Pakistani security forces are unable to neutralize...
...need for a fundamental change. "You cannot treat the two sides of the border as two different war zones," says Jehanzeb Raja, a retired brigadier who served in the tribal areas. "The Pakistan Army's aversion to any Predator or missile strike into Pakistan territory to kill the Taliban is tactically defeatist in essence, and strategically flawed in concept," he recently wrote in a local newspaper. "The Pakistan Army not only lacks any worthwhile real-time surveillance capability to pursue multiple targets in these remote regions, it also lacks the means to destroy these through long-range precision weapons...
...reinforcements sent to Afghanistan would mean pulling troops out of Iraq. Petraeus evidently "doesn't think it's worth taking any more risks in Iraq to be able to shift more force to Afghanistan," said John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former Petraeus adviser. A resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has led both presidential candidates to call for sending more U.S. troops there...
...minimize mistakes, the Air Force routinely conducts "pattern of life" studies of Taliban leaders and other key targets, using camera-carrying drones to plot their travels for days or weeks. That enables U.S. planners to figure out when the targets can be attacked without jeopardizing innocent lives. But not all air strikes can be so meticulously planned; U.S. or allied units can call in sudden strikes when they find themselves in a firefight or stumble on a meeting of Taliban leaders. When civilians are detected, strikes are called off--and some insurgents capitalize on this. "Sometimes it's a conscious...