Word: talibanize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most important obstacle to negotiating an acceptable compromise with the Taliban, however, is the fact that the insurgents - and a substantial part of the population - believe they're winning the war. That gives them no incentive to accept compromises offered by the government and the U.S. The purpose of the current U.S. "mini-surge" in Afghanistan, in fact, is largely to halt the Taliban's momentum, to create conditions, if not for victory, then for a stalemate in which growing numbers of fighters and commanders in the Taliban come to believe that they are unable to win on the battlefield...
...basic assumption of the U.S. political strategy in Afghanistan appears to be that the Taliban cannot be engaged from a position of weakness. Perceptions are exceedingly important in a warlord society with a long-established tradition of local commanders switching sides to back the force deemed most likely to prevail. It was that dynamic that explained the speed of the Taliban's capture of Kabul in a matter of months back in 1996. The same phenomenon saw its regime collapse even more rapidly when the U.S. invaded at the end of 2001. General McChrystal, in a recent interview...
When British forces entered Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 in support of the U.S.'s fight against international terrorism, the aims of the deployment seemed clear and the effort justifiable. But as the conflict against the Taliban rumbles toward its ninth brutal year, America's most willing partner is asking the toughest of questions: How does this...
...British forces recently completed a major offensive against insurgents in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province - Operation Panther's Claw - that cleared the Taliban from swathes of the area. Now British war planners have called for an increase in troops to hold the land gained in that offensive. A report due out later this month by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, head of NATO forces in the country, is widely expected to call for an even further increase of British commitment across the region. (Read TIME's interview with McChrystal...
...against a Conservative opposition bolstered by public discontent over the Iraq war, has indicated that his government will search for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. At a speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels on July 27, Foreign Secretary David Milliband urged military commanders to open negotiations with midlevel Taliban leaders in order "to separate hard-line ideologues who are essentially irreconcilable and violent from those who can be drawn into a domestic political process." (Watch a TIME video with Gordon Brown...