Word: talibans
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These are examples of how kids go to school in Pakistan nowadays, owing to a ferocious campaign of violence by the Pakistani Taliban against schools all over the country that has left parents panicking, students uneasy and educators worried about whether they're doing enough to protect kids in the middle of a war. Schools have been turned into fortresses, and some students have made attending class an act of defiance. (See pictures of the tensions roiling Pakistan...
...numbers show the extent of the war on education by the Pakistani Taliban. At least 473 schools across Swat and Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been destroyed over the past two years. Militants recently blew up a 12-room state-run high school and health clinic for boys in Hangu district, a small area nestled on the border of North Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province. And they routinely blow up girls' schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province. Three have been destroyed in the past two weeks. (See pictures of suicide-bomb attacks...
...power of militant Sunni hard-liners as a setback. And Iran, which faces a drug-addiction problem of alarming proportions, shares the U.S. desire to curtail Afghanistan's opium trade. If anything, "Tehran stands to lose much more than Washington if Afghanistan reverts back to an al-Qaeda-infested, Taliban-controlled narco state," says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...historical allies among the country's ethnic minorities - the fellow-Shi'ite Hazaras and the Uzbeks and Tajiks - but also with the government of President Hamid Karzai. Still, some U.S. officials charge that the Iranians are hedging their bets and also building bridges to some elements of the Taliban despite their longtime enmity toward the movement. (Iran came close to war with the Taliban in 1998, when the movement murdered nine Iranian diplomats after capturing the northern city of Mazar e-Sharif...
...shared interests may no longer be enough to get Ahmadinejad to go along with Obama's plans in Afghanistan. "Many of the hard-liners who are today running Iran define their foreign policy priorities as that which is opposed to the United States," says Sadjadpour. "They may hate the Taliban, but they just might hate the United States more." Says Dobbins, who now heads the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy Center: "The best we can probably hope for is that Iran continues to do no harm...