Otro que tropieza unas x veces (cuando x tiende a infinito) en la misma piedra:
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday Taliban insurgent leaders were increasingly contacting him to try to find ways of making peace.
Afghan and Western military leaders and diplomats recognize talks will ultimately have to be held to end the Taliban insurgency which has claimed some 5,000 lives this year alone. But, they say, talks should be held from a position of strength.
"We have had an increasing number of contacts from Taliban from within Afghanistan and from Pakistan," Karzai told a news conference.
"These contacts have especially increased in the past seven or eight months. As a matter of fact only this week, I had more than five or six major contacts, approaches by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan," he said.
Karzai says Taliban make contact for Afghan peace - Yahoo! News
Eso sí: el Consejo Senlis dice que la mitad del país está ya en poder de los talibán:
The Senlis Council claims over half of Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban
In war-torn Afghanistan, the Taliban is gaining ground again as it continues its insurgency. A report released Wednesday by the Senlis Council, an international security and development policy think tank, concludes that more than half the entire country is now under Taliban control.
"The Taliban's ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt," the report says, adding that "54 percent of Afghanistan's landmass hosts a permanent Taliban presence, primarily in southern Afghanistan, and is subject to frequent hostile activity by the insurgency."
The report, entitled "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink," is not merely a litany of depressing statistics. It also offers ideas to halt the spread of Taliban influence including a troop "surge." NATO forces, for example, should be doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 "as soon as logistically possible." It also recommends that all present caveats constraining troop deployment be removed and that Muslim countries should supply an additional 9,000 troops to supplement Western forces. And military efforts against the Taliban should extend their reach into Pakistan, with that country's permission.
Al parecer los Talibán están a sólo una hora de Kabul.
Taliban fighters are now less than an hour's drive from Kabul, the capital. To erect new cellphone towers for the country's rapidly growing mobile telephone industry, companies have had to make deals with Taliban commanders throughout the south, east and much of the west of the country.
Cellphone payoffs are not the only source of Taliban funding. Opium production in Afghanistan has expanded by 40 percent this year and has become increasingly concentrated in areas under Taliban control.
Sobre los teléfonos móbiles, podeis leer tambien la jihad de los politonos, que sobre todo ha tenido lugar en la frontera afgano-pakistaní.
En cuanto a la droga, podeis leer el informe de la Comisión para el Control de Narcóticos para 2006.
Most of the heroin found in Europe comes from Afghanistan. According to the World Drug Report 2006, in Europe seizures of opiates rose by 49 per cent in 2004 to 29 tons, the highest figure ever recorded. The increase in seizures of opiates in Europe was mainly attributable to the fact that such seizures doubled in South-Eastern Europe, especially in Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey.
[...] The heroin on the illicit market in Europe is mainly smuggled from Turkey along the Balkan route, via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. In addition, a southern branch of the Balkan route has developed: heroin and other opiates from Turkey are smuggled via Bulgaria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia into Albania, Italy, Austria and Germany. There have been reports of shipments of opiates from Afghanistan to the Islamic Republic of Iran being smuggled through the Caucasus into Ukraine and then into Romania before reaching their final destinations in Western Europe. The northern route through Central Asia is increasingly being used to transport heroin to other major illicit markets for heroin, such as the Russian Federation and countries in Eastern Europe. A new route for smuggling heroin from East Asia into the United Kingdom was recently uncovered, resulting in the interception of heroin consignments at ports in the United Kingdom.
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