Word: dusting
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...once again, bandit country. Cars on the empty mountain roads scuff up enough dust to be seen a half hour away. Around any turn a posse of hungry villagers or unpaid soldiers could wait with Kalashnikovs. Harried peasants live almost exactly as they did 500 years ago - beggared, illiterate, and isolated, hidden in fortress-like compounds with lookout towers and gun slits. Trust is nowhere on display...
...after weeks of ruthless American bombing, their will was breaking. A black cloud of dust hung over the city, kicked up by U.S. strikes. American special-ops forces joined the anti-Taliban forces commanded by Karzai and Ghul Agha Sherzai, and the merged units closed in on the city from the east and north. Sherzai's 700 men advanced as far as the Kandahar airport before encountering fire from Taliban and foreign Arab fighters making their last stand. During bombing lulls, Taliban soldiers hauled their dead comrades out of the trenches before ushering in new fighters. Those trying...
...overhead in a slow, white-tailed arc, Karzai was unperturbed. All morning U.S. bombers and fighter planes had been hammering Taliban positions several miles away at the Kandahar airport. Then suddenly Karzai's world blew apart. The mud walls of his office shook as if they were turning to dust, and the windows blasted in, cutting his face with flying glass. Just a few hundred yards away, a stray 2,000-lb. bomb from the American plane had slammed down. The same bomb killed three American servicemen, as well as seven Afghans, including two of Karzai's top lieutenants...
...University has agreed to update residents weekly on construction, to repave streets traveled by heavy trucks and to meet with residents regularly to handle complaints about noise, dust and other construction-related issues...
...This war in Afghanistan is about real estate. And now that the Taliban are vanishing into the dust, the battle is on for the choice symbols of power. Omar's house, with its sentimental frescoes of waterfalls and flowers and plastic bedroom chandeliers, may not fit Karzai's urbane, westernized tastes. But Karzai is canny enough to know the importance of destroying the Afghan myth of Omar, the one-eyed visionary who conversed with the Prophet Mohammed in his dreams. And part of that destruction involves camping in Omar's kitsch mansion, and letting a common sentry snooze...