Word: talibans
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...Rebecca Marsden, a 25-year-old cadet, says there will be no problem with that: "We can't wait to go to Afghanistan." But it's not just the Taliban that Sandhurst's alumni will have to worry about. As it prepares for a general election on May 6, Britain is having to come to terms with a grim reality: its armed forces are in a state of crisis. Soldiers are profoundly battle weary. Grim statistics tell one part of the story: 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009; 280 lost to the conflict in Afghanistan since...
...hard sell to soldiers who saw colleagues killed providing security last year for presidential elections stained by fraud and intimidation. Another key task, training the Afghan army and police to take over from coalition forces - the only plausible exit strategy for the coalition - is fraught with danger from Taliban infiltration, especially among police recruits. In November, five British soldiers mentoring police training were shot dead by a member of the Afghan national police. (See a TIME video with Gordon Brown...
...militants from Swat, which is in the North-West Frontier Province, as well as the South Waziristan and Bajaur areas along the Afghan border, the army remains engaged in battles in the Khyber district not far from Swat and nearby Orakzai, where the army claims almost daily double-digit Taliban kill figures (numbers that cannot be independently verified...
...area fall to the extremists in the first place: poverty and bureacractic ineptitude and corruption. In Swat, it has set up joint civilian-military liaison cells, which bring together representatives of the military, provincial government and tribal elders. "There are so many reasons that we fell to them [the Taliban] and they took over, so many reasons," says Bakhd Zada, a tribal elder from Devlai, a town of some 30,000, 13 miles from Mingora in the Swat district. "There's poverty, lack of knowledge, and we were misguided," he says. "We need to educate the people and we need...
...Swat, the military has surged ahead of an excruciatingly slow civilian bureaucracy. Soldiers are reconstructing roads, bridges, health centers, water systems and libraries across the valley. The Army has recruited and trained thousands of police officers, and rebuilt 217 of the 400 or so schools destroyed by the Taliban. It is also footing the bill, thanks to a nationwide voluntary contribution of two days' pay by the troops themselves, a move that raised more than 100 million rupees (almost $1.2 million). The military is also much more efficient. Lt. Col. Abbas points to the restoration of a historic hostel...