Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...children with distended bellies and thin arms. And there are guns and soldiers everywhere. The Vietnamese broke Pol Pot's control of the central state apparatus in 1979 and ended the general terror, but he and his troops simply melted back into the jungle to continue fighting. Countless other guerrilla forces were spawned. Neveu seems to have run with them all. He catches wounded soldiers on film as they are being dragged to safety, their eyes glazed and focused on a middle space beyond the camera. Is it 1973 or 1985? Violence in Cambodia is a continuum...
...until last week the Northern Alliance showed few signs of war readiness. Three weeks ago, near Mazar-i-Sharif, a rebel charge was turned back by a Taliban counteroffensive because the Alliance's four rival commanders failed to coordinate their attacks. In the north, the Alliance's loose-knit guerrilla bands are plagued by ethnic infighting, inexperience and customary drug use. The preferred narcotic is a potent, pungent hashish that is smoked by Alliance and Taliban soldiers alike from dinner until midnight. Alliance soldiers say they make up for their lack of Western-style military discipline with versatility...
...Taliban has not vanished completely; fighters loyal to Omar may attempt to strike back with guerrilla ambushes or die trying. So for now, at least, America's campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban will still be authored largely from the air. The U.S. plans to send another 50 to 70 warplanes to a base in Tajikistan. The number of AC-130 gunships, used to hover over targets and destroy them with devastating firepower, is rising from six to nine...
...Taliban." But their divisions are scattered, their hard-core fighters are few--Pakistani sources say 2,000 members, at most, of Omar's 50,000-strong force are still active near Kandahar--and the regime has been drained of the financial and military resources that once sustained it. "Guerrilla warfare will be all that they can do," says an Air Force general. "I doubt they can mount a counteroffensive." Even if the Taliban commits its leftover men and materiel to a prolonged guerrilla campaign, there is little or no chance the same movement can return to power...
...regional and global powers scramble to arrange a power-sharing formula for a new regime in Kabul, it's worth remembering that the Taliban are bloodied but not yet beaten - they've surrendered most of their territory without much of a fight, and could potentially regroup to wage a guerrilla campaign from the mountains. While they're unlikely to recover lost cities, they could sustain a low-intensity war for years. So despite the liberation of Kabul, it's too early to tell whether Afghanistan's agony is finally at an end, or simply about to open another chapter...