Word: warring
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...challenges of rebuilding an Afghan national army of any size - for the fourth time in 150 years - are daunting. Afghanistan, torn by war over a generation, has missed the computer revolution that most militaries now take for granted. The Hindu Kush mountain range splinters much of the country into isolated valleys run by warlords, marginalizing any central government authority. And as the 219th poorest nation among the world's 229, Afghanistan simply can't afford to pay for a big military. Afghan forces today are largely slipshod and corrupt, U.S. officers who have served with them say. Technically they seem...
...fact, say many U.S. officers, the Afghan mindset works against building a military force. Afghans have a "God-willing mentality" that "delays progress for all routine and major actions," U.S. Army Colonel Scot Mackenzie wrote in a study for the Army War College last year. Information is power, and senior leaders hold on to it tightly. They prefer faxes to e-mails because they like "paper in their hands, as opposed to data on a disk," Mackenzie said. Such tendencies freeze "subordinates into doing nothing until specifically ordered," he added. "Taking risk or initiative has historically been seen...
...office building on a stage lined with bureaucrats at 9:40 in the morning, when most Americans focus on coffee, not TV. In its wake, polls showed that somewhere between 60% and 70% of the country supported his plan to send more troops to fight a seven-year-old war in a distant desert...
...Just nine months later, Obama needed a bigger stage. Only 36% of Americans now think even more troops will improve the American position in this war, according to a recent CBS News poll, including just 17% of Obama's Democratic base. So the President's aides needed to upgrade the setting, interrupt the networks' prime-time lineups and tug a bit harder at the nation's patriotic heartstrings. (Read the full transcript of Obama's speech...
...announced that Americans were "heirs to a noble struggle for freedom," with a "resolve unwavering." But none of it really distracted from the difficulty of the task. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama had to come before the nation to explain that it was losing a war. "The status quo is not sustainable," he said, staring directly into millions of living rooms. (See pictures of life in the National Afghan Army...