Afghan City Falls Despite Troop Dispatch.......9 minutes ago

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=721&e=4&u=/nm/20040408/wl_nm/afghan_dc

KABUL (Reuters) - Forces of a renegade adviser to President Hamid Karzai overran the capital of a northern province of Afghanistan (news - web sites) on Thursday, creating a fresh security headache for the government and its U.S.-led foreign backers.


AP Photo
Slideshow: Afghanistan




General Abdul Rashid Dostum's largely ethnic Uzbek militia invaded Faryab from neighboring provinces on Wednesday, prompting the central government to send national troops there on Thursday in an attempt to maintain control.


The fighting in the north and another outbreak in the western province of Herat last month have been an unwanted diversion for Karzai and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan even as they battle Taliban and allied militants in the south and east.


The latest unrest bodes ill for President Bush (news - web sites)'s hopes for a successful election in Afghanistan later in the year to offset the mounting problems he faces in Iraq (news - web sites).


As the situation deteriorated in the far north on Wednesday, three Afghan security men and three Taliban guerrillas were killed in clashes in a southern province in which a U.S. soldier was also wounded.

I'm not sure how much more fucked-up news I can take!

Sigh...

It is obvious that we are stretched so thin in Iraq that anything else is wide open. Look for more of this.

:kick:

I remember the name Dostum associated with the "friendly" warlords of the Northern Alliance.

Now he's splitting off on his own?

isn't he responsible for all those people suffocating in metal containers?

Since 1978, there has been no true central government in Afghanistan--not the leftists, not the Soviets, not the Mujahideen, not even the Taleban, and certainly not Karzai.

Afghanistan is not so much a country as an unmanageable territory that nobody has been able to subdue because it is essentially a wasteland filled with unruly nomads. The British and the Russians have spent a good part of the last 200 years taking turns at staging military fiascos there.

we have tings under control!
do i really have to that sarcasm thingy?

guess I better recalibrate my cynic-meter...
:eyes:
;-)

that Rumsfeld will try to spin this into a success? So very tired......

How much worse can it get?

Why do I get this feeling that Ashcroft's gonna start arresting suspected masturbators or some such shit next week?

true Republican. Who else lives high on the hog
using taxpayers monies. Graft, greed and corruption
are the first 3 signs of a true Republican.

And compassion (the lack of) is the 4th.