Word: talibans
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...movement came before dawn: villagers filed out of their homes and a few hundred armed attackers took up positions in people's parlors and bedrooms. At about 4:30 a.m. in the town of Want, which is part of Nooristan province in eastern Afghanistan, the attackers, believed to be Taliban, let fly their rounds and rocket-propelled grenades in four directions at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Command Outpost, surprising coalition soldiers and their Afghan National Army counterparts stationed there. U.S. and Afghan government forces returned fire, but the mud brick walls of the village houses absorbed the impact...
...just not enough coalition troops to get the job done. And most Afghans have a hard time believing that the ISAF can't control rising prices for food and fuel. They've seen or heard of laser-guided missiles falling from American warplanes with mythical precision, taking out Taliban caches while schoolrooms or hospitals immediately adjacent stood unscathed. And so, as popular Afghan logic goes, the only conceivable reason the ISAF hasn't swept the Taliban from the country is that it doesn't want to. Some of the most conspiratorial argue that the U.S. wants instability in Afghanistan...
Indeed, many preservationists see the WHC as instinctively reluctant to declare sites endangered without a go-ahead from the government involved. It's one thing to decry the damage earthquakes wrought upon the Iranian city of Bam, protracted civil war on the national parks of the Congo, or the Taliban's 2003 dynamiting of the massive Buddhas of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley. It is clearly another for the Committee to confront the frequently negative impact that unchecked development or mismanagement can have on sensitive locations...
...Failing State The most immediate casualty of the political shenanigans in Islamabad is the global war on terror. According to a report released by the Pentagon on June 27, Taliban militants in Afghanistan have regrouped after their fall from power and "coalesced into a resilient insurgency." That resilience, say Western military officials in Afghanistan, has a lot to do with their ability to find sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas along the border. The day before the report's release, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a press briefing that he had "real concern" that Pakistan was contributing...
...actions of their members. Justice follows the tribal code and is meted out by clan elders who consult in public gatherings called jirgas. It was an imperfect solution to a difficult problem. But when al-Qaeda leaders fled Afghanistan in the wake of the 2001 war on their Taliban hosts and took refuge in the tribal areas, it became downright dangerous...