Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...assassination of a powerful local warlord willing to fight Mehsud is a blow to the strategy of the Pakistan security forces of turning local militia against the Taliban. It also casts fresh doubts over Pakistan's enduring habit of aligning itself with lesser-evil militants in order to tackle larger, more immediate threats. Recent history has shown not only that the policy has yielded poor results and sometimes backfired disastrously, but it's also at cross purposes with U.S. efforts in Afghanistan...
...tribesmen, as it did with Iraqi insurgents, "we can't afford to be seen as people who fight from afar, who don't even dare to put a pilot in our planes." The drones seem to be uniting militant groups against the U.S. and the Zardari government. Waziristan warlord Maulvi Nazir signed a nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military in 2007 and sent his fighters to battle Mehsud. But because he continued to mount attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he became the target of drone strikes. Enraged, he recently buried the hatchet with Mehsud and joined forces with...
...Washington A New Warlord in Afghanistan General David McKiernan is being replaced as the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan by three-star Army Lieut. General Stanley McChrystal. It's the first dismissal of a wartime general since that of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. The appointment of McChrystal, a former special-ops chief credited with orchestrating the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, signifies a more pointed, aggressive military posture in Afghanistan...
...recent appearance in Turkey as a good sign. Sadr surfaced in Ankara ostensibly to discuss the situation in Iraq with top Turkish leaders, including President President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is a predominantly Sunni country, many observers noted, and maybe the militant Shi'ite warlord was making a show of nascent sectarian reconciliation. "The attitude is good," says al-Jubouri, a member of the Sunni political bloc known in Arabic as Tawafiq. "But so far it's all talk, we need to see actions...
...Karzai underscored his disdain for U.S. preferences this week when he named as one of his running mates General Mohammed Fahim, a notorious warlord of the Northern Alliance. Washington had hoped to break the warlords' grip on power in Afghanistan; Karzai is for cementing the status quo. By way of consolation, the talk in Washington now is of bypassing Karzai as often as possible, working through approved members of his government in the capital and in the regions. But it's a potentially messy fix. Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. in Afghanistan finds itself fighting an implacable guerrilla...