Word: tribesmen
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...Allies still face a last, major hurdle on their way to conquering the Taliban's last outpost: they have failed to rally local tribesmen against the Taliban. Most of the U.S. hopes are pinned on former Kandahar Governor Ghul Agha Sherzai, best known for letting his commanders run riot in the city. From 1992 to 1994, they set up tollbooths every few hundred yards in the city and raped whatever young boys and women they fancied. Recalls one Kandahar resident: "They had dancing boys for their pleasure." These excesses - scorched into the minds of Kandaharis - led to the rise...
...Taliban restored order to Afghan cities, but it was order of a sinister kind. Most of the leadership and the fighters were Pashtun tribesmen from rural areas of the south around Kandahar. In some respects, the harshness of their treatment of women was their attempt to extend across all Afghanistan the primitive social order of their villages at home. And it allowed the leadership to claim that Taliban rule had conferred on its male warriors a new degree of authority. The nation was a shambles, but at least the women were firmly under control...
...tailed by Taliban operatives who captured him on Oct. 21 and, after hours of interrogation, shot him and two of his comrades. Six of Haq's men are still under arrest, along with 20 other supporters--dousing U.S. and Pakistani hopes of an uprising among the country's Pashtun tribesmen. Haq's execution, says a foreign diplomat in Islamabad, "will make any tribal chieftain hesitate before turning against the Taliban." Ahmadullah couldn't hide his glee. In a satellite-telephone interview with a Peshawar journalist, he exulted, "Anyone who tries to enter Afghanistan will meet the same fate as Abdul...
Karzai's foray into Afghanistan was more discreet than Haq's. On Oct. 8, Karzai spread word that he was traveling to Rome to confer with the aging King. Instead, Karzai and a group of armed and loyal tribesmen grabbed a sat-phone and headed into southwest Afghanistan, the Taliban stronghold. For weeks, Karzai met with tribal elders, probing what success an insurrection backed by U.S. firepower might have against Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Karzai eluded the Taliban until last week, when its network of spies picked up his movements along the mountain trails of Uruzgan. On Thursday, Karzai...
...that defies measure. In January 1842, after an adventure in Afghanistan, the British ordered the withdrawal of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers from Kabul. A week later, the sole survivor of the march, a field surgeon named Brydon, staggered into Jalalabad...The present generation of rebel tribesmen are hardly equipped to repeat such a feat. But, as a former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, Robert Neumann, has observed, "Foreign invaders have found it easier to march into Afghanistan than to march...