Word: talibanize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Obama is keenly aware of the limitations on what his reinforcements can achieve. "I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means," he told an interviewer on Tuesday. But more troops are needed simply to arrest and begin to reverse a perilous slide in NATO's fortunes in Afghanistan. (See "Hidden Afghanistan...
...With the Taliban growing in confidence and feeling the wind at its back, the bad news out of Afghanistan just keeps getting worse for the U.S. NATO commanders have long expressed frustration at the failure of the Pakistani military to prevent Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters maintaining sanctuaries in Pakistan from which they can launch attacks inside Afghanistan. But Pakistan's announcement on Monday of a peace agreement to accommodate the domestic Taliban insurgency in the Swat Valley suggests that an all-out war against militants on their soil is not what Pakistan's generals have in mind...
...Army General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gets his way, the total increase over the coming year will be 30,000. McKiernan has said he needs to beef up U.S. forces in Afghanistan to roll back a growing Taliban insurgency, especially before the presidential election currently slated for August. Indeed, U.S. officials say they have only 40% of the American officers needed to train the Afghan army to take over security duties at some point in the future But sending any additional troops to Afghanistan would require reducing U.S. troop levels in Iraq, and Obama has ordered...
...since the Soviets invaded, Afghans have become adept at accommodating themselves with the likely winner at any given moment. Right now, the trends are not moving in Washington's favor, and that fact is recognized by the Afghan citizenry. "There's been a major shift towards acceptance of the Taliban," military scholar Anthony Cordesman told a congressional panel last week. He noted that polling in Afghanistan shows "the number of people who feel the United States has performed well in Afghanistan has been cut in half in the last three years," from...
...Barmak seeks to show the human side of tragedy. In Osama, about a young girl in Taliban-era Kabul who poses as a boy in order to provide for her widowed mother, he highlights the plight of women under that draconian regime. His awareness of the human side of history was honed early on. At age 5 he was transfixed by a showing of Lawrence of Arabia at his hometown cinema hall in Kabul. He haunted movie theaters after that, taping together remnants of filmstrips to make his own films, which he would then show to his friends in tiny...