The search for the mysterious “Afghan Girl,” whose haunting, green-eyed gaze captivated the world in a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine cover photograph, takes EXPLORER on a world-wide journey in an attempt to solve the case of a missing person. In January 2002, photographer Steve McCurry, who took the 1984 photograph and has been searching for the [...]

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The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important [...]

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As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.
The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity [...]

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British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban.
Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies.
The Ministry of Defence [...]

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In the 1930s, only few people recognized the dangers posed by Adolf Hitler´s book Mein Kampf, which clearly laid out his plan for the destruction of the Jewish people and the establishment for German hegemony across Europe. In a similar fashion, bin Laden´s objective for the restoration of the Caliphate is also as well-known – [...]

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America’s preoccupation in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has significantly undermined its influence in the Asia-Pacific region. Much has been written about how China has attempted to fill the “American void” in the Asia-Pacific and to reconfigure the region’s geopolitical architecture, but little attention is being accorded to Russia’s new power plays in the region, [...]

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President Sarkozy seeks a rapprochement with NATO while strengthening the European Union’s defense dimension. France’s allies, including the United States and Germany, have welcomed this. But Sarkozy faces strong domestic resistance to changing France’s relationship to NATO. By Leo Michel more…

The Third World War: Why NATO Troops Can’t Deliver Peace in Afghanistan
Trans-Atlantic Identity Crisis: NATO [...]

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The hundreds of drones cruising over Iraq and Afghanistan have changed war forever.
The UAV is the “smart bomb” of the Iraq War, the latest turn in the unending offense-defense spiral that characterizes the history of warfare. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model [...]

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The US military in Iraq had said its troops had found Chinese-made missiles which they believe were smuggled in by groups in Iran aiming to arm militants fighting US-led forces.
The US military has repeatedly accused Iranian-linked groups of training Iraqi extremists in the use of armor-piercing weapons known as explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs).
Afghan authorities had also [...]

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John Bolton gets it right as usual. This is not a preemptive attack on Iran, but in response to their meddling in affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
See Video…

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But out of the gloom comes some hope, in the dashing form of Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite the Bush administration’s unpopularity in Europe, the French president has gone out of his way to befriend America and wants France to rejoin NATO’s integrated military structure, from which de Gaulle withdrew in 1966. Even better, French forces hitherto [...]

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US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has sent a letter to his German counterpart demanding more German engagement in Afghanistan. Berlin has long resisted such demands, but the pressure to fight is mounting. By Susanne Koelbl and Alexander Szandar more…

Germany Says ‘No’: Berlin Rejects Washington Call for Troops on Taliban Front
SPIEGEL 360: Our Complete Afghanistan [...]

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The West has been battling the Taliban for years in Afghanistan. Progress, though, has been difficult to discern. The country may be too fragmented to pacify, but leadership has been lacking as well. By Susanne Koelbl in Bagram more…

Photo Gallery: Battling The Taliban
Roger Cohen: Afghanistan — A Once and Future Nation
The Discount War: ISAF Is [...]

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The illicit opium poppy industry is, according to a former minister in President Hamid Karzai’s government, “a pyramid structure. If ever there were a management prize for the perfect supply chain,” it would go to what generates from one half to two-thirds of Afghan GDP. He said there are “25 mafia dons at the top [...]

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The U.S. doesn’t have the necessary military manpower or fiscal solvency of its imperial predecessors in Iraq.
YOU WOULD HAVE thought 300 million Americans would be enough to rule the world � or at least a couple of medium-sized failed states. The population of Iraq is 27 million, that of Afghanistan 31 million. Yet the same [...]

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The growth of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), particularly the new applications for full membership are creating worldwide tensions similar to the standoff before the First World War.

The presidents of the six permanent member countries of the SCO - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - met in Shanghai on the [...]

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