Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...torn capital Monrovia to assess conditions for deployment of a battalion of troops. Elsewhere, the regional security organization ECOWAS announced that a contingent of 1,500 Nigerian troops would arrive in Liberia early next week to start the peacekeeping mission, and appealed to Liberia's president, indicted warlord Charles Taylor, to keep his word and take up asylum in Nigeria within three days of their arrival. But having been disappointed many times over the past month - by failed cease-fires, by the failure of the ECOWAS forced promised one month ago to arrive, and by the U.S. equivocating over...
...including supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar?who ran Afghanistan's ultra-orthodox theocracy from 1995 through 2001, when the group harbored Osama bin Laden and lent eager support to al-Qaeda. While maintaining close ties to al-Qaeda, the Taliban have also forged a deepening alliance with Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his fundamentalist, vehemently anti-Western Hizb-i-Islami party, which remains potent in eastern Afghanistan. Afghan government officials, including President Hamid Karzai, and members of the U.S.-led Joint Coalition Task Force have downplayed recent attacks. Karzai tells Time that the Taliban are not regrouping: "Any internal danger...
...Taliban's most dangerous ally, however, appears to be the warlord Hekmatyar. He, like the Taliban leaders, is a Pashtun with a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and a hatred for the Americans and Karzai. His guerrilla fighting skills seduced the CIA and Pakistan into giving him billions of dollars of support and arms during the Soviet occupation. In May 2002, however, the U.S. tried to kill him with a Hellfire missile strike, and coalition soldiers have launched several operations in his traditional strongholds of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces. A diplomat in Kabul believes Taliban leaders don't trust Hekmatyar, whose...
...lack of significant progress on large-scale, job-producing projects such as repairing the nation's horrendous roads. Meanwhile, the country continues to suffer from numerous potentially crippling problems: corruption and lawlessness are pervasive; civil servants often don't get paid; Karzai's power is largely limited to Kabul; warlords rule the countryside; the Afghan National Army is years from being a legitimate security force; and Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani is warning that the massive proliferation of poppy production threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state. Among many diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials, there is a growing sense...
...under the banner of the International Security Assistance Force, whose small numbers confine its work to the capital, Kabul. A number of U.S. legislators and South Asia experts are quietly warning that the security situation there is in danger of unraveling in the face of Taliban resurgence and internecine warlord conflicts, and that turning the situation around requires either expanding the terms of the U.S. deployment to stabilizing Afghanistan, or else significantly expanding ISAF. (ISAF has one advantage in that it has drawn on major troop contributions from NATO members that had opposed the Iraq war - Turkey, France and Germany...