Word: nato
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...seem paradoxical but Afghanistan and its neighbors can't afford a pullout or substantial reduction of combat missions by NATO allies. Western allies ought to refocus and realign their strategy by equipping Pakistan's armed forces meaningfully in their fight against rogue elements. Without concrete and sufficient support from Pakistan's forces, NATO and Western allies can't make headway in solving the Afghan puzzle. Imran Maqbool, Karachi, Pakistan...
...become conventional wisdom even among the U.S. and its NATO allies that stability in Afghanistan will ultimately depend on a political settlement that somehow involves most of those currently fighting under the Taliban rubric. So just as the U.S. chose to avoid the very election it had forced Karzai to accept and turned instead to brokering a backroom deal that would dilute the incumbent's authority, any political solution in Afghanistan will have be negotiated on the basis of the real distribution of power, rather than votes cast in an election staged in the heat of a civil...
...much of a shocker either - on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, the name Wali has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime because he has friends in the right places. Diplomats, counternarcotics officials and commanders from the International Security Assistance Force, NATO's military wing in Afghanistan, have all privately (and not so privately) expressed frustration with President Karzai for not reining in his brother. In fact, the people most likely to be shocked by the revelations are Americans back at home, who are already wondering why they should be sending more soldiers...
...forget that the CIA isn't the only organization with questionable people on its payroll. Since the beginning of the war, NATO has been bribing drug smugglers to let fuel pass through the Khyber Pass from Pakistan into Afghanistan. NATO payments, thousands of dollars for each truck, have to dwarf anything the CIA is giving to Ahmed Wali Karzai. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' offensive in Afghanistan...
...South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first lecture [Putin] ever gave me in Moscow was 'All these Eastern European...