Word: terrain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...still needs to define victory down. Afghanistan is bigger and more populous than Iraq, with harsher terrain and a literacy rate one-third as high. It has no real history of centralized government; a fictional border with Pakistan, which militants cross with ease; an economy based largely on drugs; and a leader who--although still popular in the U.S.--is widely considered a disaster at home...
...General Laurent Nkunda - initially formed in 2003 to fight the remnant Hutu genocidaires - advanced to within sight of the main eastern city of Goma and threatened to take the country. With the U.N.'s 17,000 soldiers outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer size and difficulty of the terrain it was meant to police - Congo is as big as Western Europe, without the roads - and the poorly paid and ill-disciplined national army disintegrating, little seemed to stand in Nkunda's way. That sounded alarm bells around the world. As well as displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Nkunda...
...India, and it's even less likely to happen in an election year. With India's flagship information-technology sector under global scrutiny, the government looks keen to salvage Hyderabad-based Satyam, the country's fourth-largest outsourcing company. "I am pretty sure the employees are on safe terrain," says James Agarwal, head of executive-search firm BTI Consultants India. "There is no chance the government will allow the company to go down. It is important for employees, for Indian corporates, for the government." (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Capturing Mullaitivu will not be easy. The terrain is dense jungle, and government forces will face the most experienced of the Tigers' cadres. Even if Mullaitivu were to fall, the Tigers could simply move underground, returning to the guerrilla tactics such as suicide bombings which made them famous and have contributed to the conflict's enormous death toll: more than 65,000 deaths since 1983. "Even if you occupy Kilinochchi, you're not going to defeat the LTTE as such," says Gajan Ponnambalam, a member of parliament whose party, the Tamil National Alliance, is sympathetic to the LTTE. "They...
Then there's also the fact that, like most military officers, Blair is a believer in tactical intelligence. Let me explain why that's problematic: During the last Gulf war, the Pentagon badgered the CIA for things like sand samples and stress limits of Iraq bridges, the terrain its Abrams tanks would roll across. Yes, that information was nice to have, but such requests diverted CIA resources from strategic intelligence. Rather than answering the question of whether Saddam had kept his weapons of mass destruction, the CIA sent its clandestine sources into Iraq with baggies and little plastic shovels...