Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Qaeda - and imperil the security of U.S. forces in Afghanistan - more than a slide back into civil war. And the obvious fragility of the Karzai government in the face of an increasingly perilous security situation may force the U.S. military, despite its desire to steer clear of Afghanistan's warlord rivalries, to become increasingly involved in actions that involve neither the Taliban nor al-Qaeda...
...might have received bad intelligence from a local clan leader out to eliminate a few rivals. A similar situation developed last December, when the U.S. attacked an alleged al-Qaeda convoy. It turned out then that there were no al-Qaeda members present, and Afghans believe a local warlord deliberately misled the U.S. into killing his enemies...
Uruzgan is certainly a place that could confound an army. The province was a Taliban hotbed that sent hundreds of young men to fight for the regime. Mohammed Younis, the warlord in charge of the military compound raided by the U.S., was friendly with senior Taliban leaders; his son had close ties to Taliban Health Minister Mohammed Abbas Akhund, one of the movement's founders. A Kandahar official told TIME that Akhund and a few other Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding in the mountains outside Uruzgan. While it is possible that U.S. troops simply went to the wrong...
...former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said that the U.S. would find itself in a "bloody swamp." Amid the rhetoric was one sign of detente: after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell accused Iran of trying to destabilize the interim Afghan government, Tehran said it may deport an Afghan warlord who opposes the Kabul regime...
...raid on Uruzgan appears, ironically, to have helped Younis. A rogue warlord with strong links to the Taliban and opponent of the new government in Kabul, he saw his local opposition wiped out by U.S. forces - and appears to have inherited the most formidable arsenal in the district, to boot. Says Bari Gul, brother of one of the pro-government commanders slain in the raid, "All the weapons (collected at the school) have been taken by the commander who was ruling by force...