Word: nato
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...small talk with Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The longtime Danish Prime Minister and new Secretary-General of NATO likes to get down to business quickly. Meetings have to achieve something tangible, notes a colleague. In private briefings before he took on his new job at the beginning of August, Rasmussen was "very focused," says Fabrice Pothier, director of the European office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There's no bullshit. It's 'Give me some concrete, doable recommendations.'" Two days in, Rasmussen, who at 56 is just four years younger than the military alliance itself, headed to Afghanistan...
...Rasmussen's sense of urgency is understandable. He wants to remake the world's most powerful military alliance, born from the ashes of World War II and shaped by its frontline role in the Cold War, into something that's "relevant in today's world." NATO will continue to be the guarantor of territorial defense for member states, he says, but it must also become "a provider of global peace and stability" by targeting threats - terrorism, piracy - in distant lands. It needs to be more flexible and agile, and should work more closely and more smartly with civilian institutions like...
...Farrell and Munadi were captured by Taliban gunmen on Sept. 5 while reporting on the aftermath of a NATO air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers. The strike killed more than 90 Afghans and stoked outrage about the frequent deaths of Afghan civilians in coalition air attacks. Soon after the pair were grabbed, their newspaper opened up channels to Taliban commanders in Kunduz, the province in northern Afghanistan where the hostage-taking occurred. Officials from the International Committee for the Red Cross were in direct contact with the captors, according to a source familiar with the negotiations, as were sympathetic...
...British SAS team, which had one commando killed during the firefight, according to NATO officials in Kabul, flew off in a helicopter with Farrell but left Munadi's body behind. The translator's grieving relatives made the dangerous journey from Kabul to Kunduz to pick up the body. Munadi had returned briefly to Kabul during a break from graduate school in Germany and was working part-time for the Times, accompanying journalists on their increasingly dangerous forays out of the capital. (Read about roadside bombs in Afghanistan...
...relative stability it brings. Outside the capital, in the parts that haven't received the promised roads and schools and bridges, it is another matter. But all Afghans are furious over the high number of civilian casualties, especially the latest incident in which the Germans called in two NATO aircraft to bomb two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban - never mind that villagers were swarming the tankers for free fuel...