Word: talibanize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your article "How The Taliban Thrives," you state that a local businessman, Hajji Lala Jan, was subcontracted by a local firm working for the German government--aid agency GTZ to build a road in Kunduz, in Afghanistan, and that Jan handed some cash to a Taliban middleman [Sept. 7]. We would like to point out that the project mentioned is not a GTZ project, and no one of that name has ever worked as a subcontractor for us. Neither we nor our partners make any payments to antigovernment groups. All of our projects are monitored very strictly...
...Today, new technologies - and leaders with new policies - have rescued Petrizzo's boyhood dream. The 28-year-old will soon be fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the skies, as one of the Air Force's first ground-based Predator drone pilots not to have started out in an Air Force cockpit. The change reflects a shift in Air Force thinking. Instead of carefully polishing and husbanding the service's costly F-22 fighters and their pilots for future wars, the Air Force increasingly is rolling up its sleeves and helping fight today's conflicts...
...August, President Obama laid out the rationale for stepping up the fight in Afghanistan: If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people. Obamas Af-Pak plan is, in essence, a countersanctuary strategy that denies safe havens to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with the overriding goal of making America and its allies safer. Under Obama, the Pentagon has already sent a surge of 21,000 troops...
...This is a sound policy. If U.S. forces were not in Afghanistan, the Taliban, with its al-Qaeda allies in tow, would seize control of the country's south and east and might even take it over entirely. A senior Afghan politician told me that the Taliban would be in Kabul within 24 hours without the presence of international forces. This is not because the Taliban is so strong; generous estimates suggest it numbers no more than 20,000 fighters. It is because the Afghan government and the 90,000-man Afghan army are still so weak...
...objections to an increased U.S. military commitment in South Asia rest on a number of flawed assumptions. The first is that Afghans always treat foreign forces as antibodies. In fact, poll after poll since the fall of the Taliban has found that a majority of Afghans have a favorable view of the international forces in their country. A BBC/ABC News poll conducted this year, for instance, showed that 63% of Afghans have a favorable view of the U.S. military. To those who say you cant trust polls taken in Afghanistan, its worth noting that the same type of poll consistently...