Word: tribal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...three times as many as in the previous year, Human Rights Watch reported, amid a dispute over civilian fatalities in an Aug. 22 attack. New video footage has prompted U.S. investigators to re-examine their initial conclusion that most of the strike's casualties were Taliban. One tribal elder offered to dig up victims' graves to prove their innocence...
Pakistan is in crisis. Islamic extremism has metastasized from the lawless tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan to Pakistan's cities. Terrorists tried, and failed, to assassinate the Prime Minister in the capital, Islamabad, on Sept. 3. The nation's economy is a shambles. And Asif Ali Zardari, the man who has just taken the helm of this nuclear-armed country, is a onetime playboy who has spent more time in prison than in government and who wriggled out of a 2006 corruption trial in Britain by pleading mental instability...
...also been its enabler. As the focus of the U.S.'s war on terrorism has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq and back again, there is a widely dawning realization that its central front is actually Pakistan. Here in the mountainous northwestern fringes of the nation, where a fierce tribal code values honor and the protection of guests, that Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants are thought to be hiding. From these tribal areas, al-Qaeda and remnants of the Afghan Taliban, protected by their Pakistani friends, have launched attacks into Afghanistan, dragging the U.S. and its allies into...
...coup, pledged to assist the U.S. war on terrorism. But not everyone was on board. Some in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency (ISI) played a double game, turning a blind eye when members of the Taliban leadership and al-Qaeda escaped to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the border with Afghanistan. FATA's ungoverned spaces provided the ideal sanctuary for militant groups on the run. Musharraf made a halfhearted attempt, at Washington's behest, to stop the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda from waging insurgency across the border. But that only inflamed tensions; the Afghan...
Pakistan's troubles may not be solvable by the men in uniform. "With the insurgency in the tribal areas, the situation has become much more complex," says career diplomat Humayun Khan. "The military may try to step in, but it may not succeed." Pakistan today, he says, "has all the ingredients of a revolution: poverty, injustice, instability, alienation, religious fervor and an incompetent government. If the parties don't work together to solve these problems, there is a real danger that the government fails completely...