Word: talibans
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...fact that he had to be buried in a secret location underscored the importance of Mullah Dadullah to the Afghan insurgency. Afghan authorities announced Monday that the Taliban's top military commander, slain in a weekend operation led by U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan, had been laid to rest in secret lest his burial site become a rallying point for resistance. They, together with NATO officials, hailed his death as a critical blow to a spiraling Taliban insurgency, and it will certainly be a welcome victory for a coalition that has been losing support as a result of the mounting...
...Replacing Dadullah won't be easy for the Taliban, in part because his own brutality may have eliminated a number of potential successors. "He killed the guys above him, so quite a lot of capable or respected leaders have disappeared in his move up the ranks of the Taliban," says a Western Intelligence official in southern Afghanistan. A possible successor, Ahktar Mohammed Osmani, was killed in December in an air strike. Another, Obaidullah Akhund, was captured in February. But it remains to be seen whether Dadullah's death will herald a breakdown of the Taliban's command-and-control structure...
...headed to war-shattered Afghanistan in 2002 with a few weeks of disaster-relief training and a suitcase full of moist towelettes. "I imagined I would spend the month there bandaging wounds, splinting broken limbs, clambering over the rubble, and helping people who were still hiding from the Taliban," she writes. "I didn't have any idea that I'd still be here five years later doing spiral perms and introducing the art of pubic waxing...
...Rodriguez and her school also encountered hair-raising setbacks. Though the Taliban had fled, fundamentalists threatened to destroy what they viewed as a school for scandal. Some of her students were beaten by their husbands. Water and electricity were elusive. Money dwindled. The Afghan government finally evicted the school, socked it with punitive taxes and seized its equipment. Meanwhile, bombs exploded on the street outside and neighbors were kidnapped. The book ends with the school shuttered, the students dispersed and Rodriguez unsure of ever reopening...
...that on its own is not a sufficient judgment on Tony Blair. He will forever be linked to George Bush, but in crucial ways they saw the world very differently. For Blair, armed intervention to remove the Taliban and Saddam was never the only way in which Islamic extremism had to be combatted. Far more than Bush, he identified the need to settle the Israel-Palestine dispute--"Here it is that the poison is incubated," he told Congress--if radical Islam was to lose its appeal. In Britain, while maintaining a mailed fist against those suspected of crimes, he tried...