Word: warlords
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Abdul Rashid Dostum, the thuggish Afghan warlord, would not seem a likely student of Abraham Lincoln. But there he was, echoing the Gettysburg Address as he spoke recently to a large political gathering in northern Afganistan. His speech was a booming appeal for a future that offered Afghans "government by the people, for the people." To accompany his new rhetoric, Dostum also has a new look. The powerfully built Uzbek general has shaved his beard - his thick trademark moustache remains - bought some new neckties and found a good tailor...
...lofty language, the dapper attire, even expressions of regret for making "mistakes"--all are part of an effort by Dostum, a onetime soldier of fortune whose name is a byword for a decade of warlord power, to resell himself to his compatriots and the world as a democratic politician and servant of the people in a kinder, gentler Afghanistan. Whether he and other warlords succeed in this improbable transformation is even more important to Afghanistan's future stability than is the fate of al-Qaeda remnants hiding out in the Pakistani borderlands. While the Bush Administration continues to make chasing...
...everyone is buying the warlord's new clothes. Dostum rose to power as a ruthless brawler, the Mike Tyson of Afghan politics. For a decade he moved in and out of alliances with almost every major faction on the Afghan battlefield - the Taliban included. His zest for brute strategy can be traced to his love for bozkashi, the traditional sport of the northern plains. It's not a game for the faint of heart. One team of horsemen battles to haul a dead goat to one end of a field; opponents struggle to wrest it back and drag...
...attrition for Germany’s natural resources. Suppose that Italy’s opposition leader was kidnapping children en masse and cutting off their hands if they refused to murder their parents and join his anti-government militia. Imagine that the Swiss government had fallen and a warlord from Geneva was stopping United Nations food rations from reaching a starving people. And imagine that such tumult was unfolding against a backdrop of an incurable epidemic—one that had already infected one quarter of the entire European population...
...turmoil. Without much effort or expense, America can mitigate the impact of all three. There is a significant possibility that those diamonds in your jewelry came from a cave in Sierra Leone, and were picked by a seven-year-old girl working as a slave to some warlord who then exchanged those diamonds for machine guns. The “blood diamond” trade that links Sierra Leonean children with American consumers is responsible for fueling a war that probably would have fizzled out five years ago if not for the diamond revenue. In Angola, the Unita rebels sustained...