Word: terrain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...terrorism would have no obvious endgame. But liquidating bin Laden and his top al-Qaeda henchmen has always been the principal objective of the campaign. The war's chief salesman, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, reiterated on Friday that the U.S. has no territorial designs on a land whose terrain and people sent two empires packing in recent centuries. Once the U.S. decapitates al-Qaeda, the bulk of the American military force will pull out of Afghanistan. "All we need," an Air Force colonel told Time Thursday, "is for someone to point their finger in the right direction...
...What the Alliance does possess is an intimate knowledge of the terrain, a visceral hatred of the opponent and a war-honed knack for exploiting Taliban vulnerability. "These folks are aggressive," U.S. Marine General Peter Pace said Wednesday. "They're taking the war to their enemy--and ours." For the Alliance, the war's critical turn came early this month when U.S. B-52s began hammering Taliban front lines dug in near Mazar and Kabul and further north, along the Tajik border. Despite U.S. frustration with the Alliance's sluggishness, the complexity of waging war in an alien, booby-trapped...
TRIP WIRE Early-warning sensors that alert troops to unfriendly interlopers by detecting electromagnetic emissions or acoustic systems in rugged terrain...
...Taliban and, as important, a power player in any post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. From the start of the campaign, the U.S. has kept the Alliance, still the recognized government of Afghanistan, at arm's length. Knowing they needed the rebels' experience fighting the Taliban on its own terrain, the Americans promised logistical and material support, and seemed willing to factor in the Alliance in efforts to cobble together a post-Taliban government. But the U.S. shied away from fully embracing the Alliance. For one thing, Pakistan, the central U.S. ally in the region, is deeply antagonistic toward the warlords...
...These teenage and twentysomething sons of local farming families have homes within half an hour's walk from the ruins they've defended since the Taliban first took this terrain north of Kabul in late 1996. Their generals talk of the war on global terrorism but war doesn't get much more local?or personal?than this. "The Taliban has burned our fields, cut down our trees, destroyed our homes," growls Allah Mahmad. "They're making refugees of us, but we're refugees who have not forgotten how to fight...