Word: tribalism
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...League game that afternoon were CIA agents who missed the biggest news from their patch for years. All summer, my father cycles to his office at the Ministry of Justice in the sumptuous Darul Aman Palace. He's there to help the ministry frame a written legal code from tribal law, but as the summer wears on, the work dries up. The ex-minister remains in jail. Soviet advisers hustle through the hallways. Colleagues politely cancel meetings. My parents remain calm, hoping that the new regime might tackle the poverty, illiteracy and sexism they see blighting Afghanistan. "Perhaps," says...
When ignored, history tends to repeat itself. Three decades after my father worked to build a codified Afghan legal system, a new generation of Americans are still trying to loosen the hold of pashtunwali, or tribal code, on Afghanistan's legal culture. The 2008 signing of a SOFA between Iraq and the U.S. had Iranian hard-liners once again warning against American imperialism. The treaty "does not allow the slightest grounds for the Iraq people's rule over their country and turns this country into a medieval colony for America," wrote Hossein Shariatmadari in the influential Iranian newspaper Kayhan. While...
...quoted in the local press were in Karachi on a shopping trip for washing-machine timers and other parts for triggering bombs. Most important among the trio of suspects was Ameer Mauawia, described by Pakistani intelligence officers as the commander of al-Qaeda's foreign fighters on the Pakistani tribal lands along the Afghan border. Mauawia is said to be a trusted and longtime ally of bin Laden's, whom he allegedly followed when bin Laden fled from Sudan in May 1996 to Afghanistan to set up his terrorist training camps...
...hundreds. Pakistani security forces also arrested two senior Taliban commanders in charge of operations in the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan. The Kunduz commander, Mullah Abdul Salam, was captured far from the Afghan border, in the central Punjabi town of Faisalabad. And according to Pakistani intelligence and tribal leaders, a missile fired on Thursday by a U.S. drone at a vehicle in Pakistan's tribal territory killed Muhammad Haqqani, the younger brother of Sirajuddin, a pro-Taliban commander who masterminded the suicide bombing at a U.S. base in December that killed seven CIA agents.(See pictures of Pakistan...
...than a symbolic figurehead for al-Qaeda and the many jihadi groups it has spawned globally. Day-to-day management of the operation is said to be handled by his No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was nearly killed in a drone attack in the Pakistani tribal territory several years back. Nevertheless, the capture of top Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders in Karachi may help solve the mystery: Is bin Laden still alive, and if so, where is he hiding...