Word: talibans
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...difficult the war in Afghanistan is - but also how it can still be won. Over the past nine months, Bravo Company, a 150-strong unit of the 1st Battalion 26th Infantry Regiment, lost seven men in the Korengal while trying to cool down a toxic cauldron of local insurgents, Taliban leaders, foreign jihadis and al-Qaeda members that has some calling this cedar-studded gorge the "Valley of Death." The villages of Korengal have had their losses too, but they are deaths mourned in secret. Elders say the Americans haven't killed a single innocent. The villagers claim...
Here success cannot be measured in territory gained, schools built or clinics opened. Irrigation pipes and water pumps are blown up by the insurgents as soon as they are built. The road the villagers so desperately want has foundered, with construction forbidden by a Taliban edict that no one dares disobey. It's a good day in the Korengal when an elder slips an oblique warning that one of the observation posts might be attacked that evening. Sometimes progress is so slow it feels like a stalemate, admits company commander Captain James Howell. But, he says, "if we can reach...
...pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
Honest Infidels Blindfolded and handcuffed, the man crouched on the ground, surrounded by Afghan soldiers and their U.S. Marine mentors. He had been found with insurgent propaganda and a Taliban flag and had a bruise on his shoulder - the kind the Afghan soldiers recognized from their days of carrying AK-47s while fighting Soviet forces more than 20 years ago. He said he was an illiterate shepherd, but he had a notebook full of writing. He claimed never to have visited Pakistan, but his mobile phone was filled with Pakistani numbers. Most likely, he was an insurgent...
...bomb coincided with a decision by the Karzai government, concerned about the environmental impact of clear-cutting, to ban timber exports outright. The valley's population lost its only source of income. Smuggling rings took over, bringing corruption in their wake. As it has elsewhere in Afghanistan, the national Taliban movement co-opted local grievances. (Taliban, these days, no longer refers just to the regime that once ruled the country; the word has become synonymous with any number of antigovernment forces.) Tribal elders say the fight in the Korengal is directed and funded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord...