Word: binning
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Ousting the Taliban from power became a central war aim after Bush declared that the U.S. would "pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism" and the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden. As ludicrous as it sounds now, the Taliban commanders, for at least a few weeks last fall, seriously believed they had a chance. "We're waiting to fight the Americans--if they dare," blustered a general in Kandahar in late October. When a month of U.S. air strikes failed to break the Taliban's grip on power or kill its senior leaders, there...
...blow to al-Qaeda's infrastructure, thinned its ranks and reduced the network's ability to coordinate large-scale attacks. "Afghanistan is no longer a training camp for terrorists," Rumsfeld says. "The al-Qaeda that were there are either dead or captured or on the run." Before the war, bin Laden was believed to have amassed in Afghanistan a force of 12,000 foreign fighters drawn from the Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan who would battle the invading Americans to the death. Today, U.S. and Afghan intelligence officials believe only a few hundred hard-core al-Qaeda operatives remain...
Among those believed to be in hiding, of course, is the man the U.S. wants most. Bin Laden is "not just a cog in a machine that can be easily replaced," says a Pentagon official. "If he's gone, it could lead to al-Qaeda crumbling." The Pentagon's best chance to nab bin Laden came last December, when he was thought to be cornered in the craggy valleys of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. The American strategy was to enlist Afghan proxies to search the caves for bin Laden while U.S. warplanes pummeled possible sanctuaries from overhead. The scheme...
...twist to the military's success in driving al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan is that bin Laden and his top henchmen are now more elusive than ever. If they have relocated to a teeming urban setting like Peshawar, surrounded by innocent civilians, the U.S. would not be able to use its massive firepower to get them. That said, antiterrorism efforts in Pakistan have scored two big hits: the March capture of al-Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah and last month's arrest of Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni accused of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks...
From the start, the U.S. never had much interest in maintaining a large presence in Afghanistan. The longer the U.S. stays, propping up embattled President Hamid Karzai while continuing to stage the dangerously scattershot hunt for bin Laden, the more Afghans will grow to resent the Americans. But with reconstruction efforts stalled and various warlords stirring up opposition to the Kabul government, the alternative is a return to chaos. And so in recent weeks the U.S. military has assumed the kind of peacekeeping duties that the Bush Administration has sought to hand off to the 5,000-person International Security...