Word: talibans
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...does it matter who rules Turkmenistan? The country is home to the world's fifth largest natural gas deposits. It also borders Iran, where a radical regime covets nukes, and Afghanistan, where the Taliban continue to fight NATO forces. The specter of increasing Islamic extremism in Turkmenistan endangers energy markets and raises the possibility of a further breakdown of regional stability...
...week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden...
...bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset...
...past year, to 27,000, a much bigger surge in percentage terms than is being argued over for Iraq. There are six times the number of soldiers as in 2002 when U.S. forces were staking out bin Laden in Tora Bora. Only now the enemy is not just the Taliban and al-Qaeda but also the proxy army of warlords that the U.S. helped enrich and empower--an army that America once hoped would be critical in the struggle against terrorism...
...over who's a friend, who's an enemy and how you can tell them apart. Drug enforcement officials claim Noorzai's capture as a major prize. Afghanistan is the world's largest source of heroin, and his arrest, says DEA administrator Karen Tandy, "sent shock waves through other Taliban-connected traffickers." But Noorzai was also a powerful leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring stability to a region that is spinning out of control. Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding the U.S. and the Afghan governments information...