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Anti-Taliban
Forces Poised for First Victory
Is
the Taleban on the verge of losing Mazar-i-Sharif? Looks that
way. Excerpts from two articles describing the current situation
in Afghanistan, focusing on the Northern Alliance efforts around
Mazar-i-Sharif:
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The
Northern Alliance says Taliban forces are retreating from Mazar-i-Sharif.
The city's fall would be a major victory for the U.S. and its
allies.
... They claim to have killed up to 300 Taliban fighters in
fierce fighting since Monday, and that the speed of their advance
on the city has exceeded even their own expectations.
But
not necessarily because the Tailban forces have been routed
— instead, the Alliance commanders claim, the 5,000 Taliban
fighters who had been expected to fight to the death to hold
onto Mazar-i-Sharif have begun retreating, moving their forces
in small numbers so as to avoid attracting the attention of
U.S. warplanes.
Explosions rise over the Taliban
positions in the Qala-Cata mountains
The Northern Alliance commanders believe their men may yet have
to fight for the city, but against a considerably depleted Taliban
force.
...
the mood at the Pentagon is more upbeat than it has been for
three weeks, suggesting they're hearing plenty of good news
from their people on the ground.
Similarly,
while U.S. intelligence officials monitoring the offensive can't
say conclusively that Mazar-i-Sharif will fall within the next
day, they confirm that the Northern Alliance has the tactical
momentum at the moment, and that some of its forces are within
8 miles of the city.
"The
Taliban had very bad days yesterday and today," a U.S.
official told TIME on Thursday. "The Northern Alliance
is closing in and is making very good progress." ...
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Source:
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Nov.
8 — Northern Alliance forces are “knocking on the
door” of the strategic Northern Afghan city of Mazar-e
Sharif and could take the city within days, a senior Northern
Alliance official said today.
Northern
Alliance soldiers shell Taliban
positions near Mazar-e Sharif, 11/08/01
Mohammed
Hashan-Saad, the ambassador of the Northern Alliance government
to Uzbekistan, said in Tashkent that commanders on the Mazar
front had told him their forces have advanced to less than three
miles from outlying villages and six to seven miles from the
city itself.
Saad told Newsweek that U.S. airstrikes had been extremely effective
in pounding the Taliban lines in advance of attacks by the forces
of the Northern Alliance generals Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed
and Mohammed Muhaqiq.
He
claimed that while the Alliance casualty toll was only three
or four soldiers killed and 10 injured in recent days, sources
in the Taliban-controlled town had reported more than 300 dead
and 500 wounded in the Taliban ranks. “Our people there
told [the] U.S. that this morning the Taliban brought in 300
dead Pakistanis, Arabs, and Pashtounis [Pashtuns],” he
said.
In
at least a partial confirmation of this report, the pro-Taliban
Pakistani Islamic militant group Harkat Jihad-i-Islami announced
today that 85 of its volunteers had been killed by U.S. airstrikes
near Mazar-e Sharif.
...
Pentagon spokesmen described the situation on the ground near
Mazar as “fluid,” with front lines moving rapidly
back and forth. “I have seen reported by many in the media
that this is a great gunfight going on in the vicinity of Mazar-e
Sharif,” Franks said in a briefing Thursday. “It’s
a bit early for us to characterize this as the success ... but
yes, there is a big fight going on in the vicinity.”
...
But Mazar has not fallen yet. There are days—and probably
weeks—of fighting ahead. And as the battle continues, Afghans
and Americans alike should remember the translation of the name
of Mazar-e Sharif. Its meaning: graveyard of the righteous.
...
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Source:
Supercomputers
of Today Will Some Day Be Held In Your Hand
How
small can computers get? How powerful can they become? These
questions, and more, are now in the forefront of scientific
research, based on the results of molecule sized computing,
as evidenced by excerpts in the following article:
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Researchers
in the Netherlands and the United States have constructed simple
computer circuits with electrical components many times smaller
than those on commercial silicon chips. These ultra-minaturized
logic circuits hold out the prospect of hand-held computers
as powerful as today's state-of-the-art supercomputers.
...
The molecules are carbon nanotubes, tiny tubes of pure carbon
just a few millionths of a millimetre (nanometres) wide ...
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Source:
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Putin's
Russia Moving Towards a Pro-U.S. and Pro-West Position
Russia
is on its way to becoming a close friend of its long-time foe?
Hmmmm, maybe, kinda-sorta, as evidenced from the following excerpts
from an article detailing the new Russian-American relationship:
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At
an historic moment, it's emerging as a key U.S. ally.
For
two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin
seemed to go into a deep sleep. True, he was the first world
leader to call President George W. Bush to express his condolences.
Afterward,
though, Putin retreated to a luxurious dacha in the Black Sea
resort of Sochi, frequented by Kremlin leaders since the days
of Nikita Khrushchev.
Leaving
the day-to-day running of the government to Prime Minister Mikhail
Kasyanov, Putin spent hours on the phone with global and regional
leaders.
Yet
he kept silent as hard-line aides publicly set sharp limits
on Russia's participation in the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign.
But
as it later became clear, Putin was not hibernating. He was
hatching a plan to back America.
Some
members of his own team, including those in the military, were
left out of the loop--though U.S. diplomats at the American
Embassy in Moscow, clued to continuing telephone conversations
between Putin and Bush, knew where the Russian President was
headed.
"He's
with us," a senior embassy official said on Sept. 24. "And
he is all by himself." In a television address that evening,
Putin jolted hard-liners by backing the basing of U.S. forces
in former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
TURNING
POINT. That was just the start of the surprises.
At
an Oct. 3 meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Putin softened
his own opposition to NATO expansion to the Baltic states, on
Russia's border, and even expressed interest in Russia joining
the organization created in 1949 to check Soviet expansionism.
Then
came his announcement that Russia would pull out of its cold-war
era military bases in Cuba and Vietnam.
Now
Putin is headed for a summit with Bush in the U.S. on Nov. 12-14.
The
meeting, held while the rubble still smokes at the World Trade
Center, could prove an historic turning point in Russian-U.S.
relations.
Missile
defense, arms treaties, cooperation on fighting terrorism, business
deals--it's all on the table.
And
Putin is determined to make things happen. After months of warning
the Bush Administration against abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, he now appears willing to scale back the accord.
Such a step, controversial at home, would give the green light
to the Bush team's key foreign policy aim--to develop a missile
defense system.
Bush and Putin would also dramatically curtail the numbers of
warheads maintained by America and Russia. The cutbacks--to
as low as 1,500 on both sides--could save billions for Russia,
which over the next quarter-century may need up to $2.5 trillion
to replace outworn Soviet-era infrastructure.
Putin's
push for closer security ties to the U.S. is part of a wider
gambit. Putin wants to lead Russia closer to the West in a broad
and urgently needed modernization--not just of its battered
army but also of its economy, schools, and legal institutions.
The
goal is to create for post-Soviet Russia a lasting place in
the family of nations to which Putin feels his country rightly
belongs--even though it now lags behind by just about every
conceivable measure.
...
As Putin declared on Oct. 21 at a news conference with Bush
in Shanghai, "our priority is partnership, a partnership
based on the common values of one civilization."
Yet
if America is vital to Putin, Russia is important to Washington
in a way that hasn't been true since the war on Nazism.
Not
only does Bush want a strategic tie-up that will allow the U.S.
to move ahead with missile defense, he wants a U.S.-Russian
alliance in the campaign against terrorism, which could last
years. ...
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Source:
Taleban or Taliban?
Excerpt
from article describing reasons why different English spellings
are present for Afghan words like Tal eh / ih ban, Masar / Mazar
eh / ih Sharif, and others ...
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Afghans do not use Latin script, so the question of the spelling
of Taleban/Taliban does not arise.
While
most Arabic consonants have a clear equivalent in Latin script
there is more variation in how vowels are pronounced.
The
discrepancy in the spelling of Taleban/Taliban can be explained
as follows: the Arabic word Talib (meaning student) contains
the vowel called Kasra between the 'l' and the 'b'. In Arabic
this is similar to the short 'i' sound and is written as 'i'
for many Arabic words such as hijab (veil).
The
same vowel can also be pronounced as a short 'e' sound, particularly
by Farsi or Pashto speakers. That is why you will often see
the world hijab spelt hejab and Taliban as Taleban.
Pashto
and Dari (Afghan Farsi) are the official languages of Afghanistan.
Both belong to the Indo-European group of languages.
According to recent estimates, approximately 35% of the Afghan
population speaks Pashto, and about 50% speaks Dari. Turkic
languages - Uzbek and Turkmen - are spoken by about 11% of the
population.
There
are also a large number of other languages spoken in the country
(Baluchi, Pashai, Nuristani, Aimaq, Azerbaijani, and so on)
and multilingualism is very common.
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