DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — The main avenue through Dushanbe is lined every 50-100 meters with pairs of cops in huge goofy hats. All day long, every day of the week, they use their batons to stop random drivers for no apparent traffic infraction and, after some fawned inspection of papers, solicit bribes. The process is constant, accepted, and appears to keep hundreds of useless policemen in their jobs. The police appear to take turns, with the partner either turning his back on the indiscretion or scoping his next target. The other day I was witness to just how choreographed the bribing [...]
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Six years since the economy came slamming down here, common-man anger seems ready as ever to erupt into violence, be it a storm of fisticuffs that consumes an entire stadium of soccer fans or street brawl among teenage boys. I’d read a good deal in the Argentine media recently about problems facing this city’s young people, especially in relation to the expanded presence of hard drugs in economically depressed areas away from downtown. But on arrival to the elegant grid of European-style buildings that defines the city’s massive downtown, the thought of roving gangs of fight-thirsty [...]
Today, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force boasts 32,000 men and women from more than two dozen contributing nations, spread out over Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Some partners (Germany, France) restrict their troops to relatively calm areas in the north where they focus on reconstruction projects. Others (the United States, Britain, Canada, Holland) operate in the southern and eastern provinces, which remain hotbeds of the Taliban insurgency. Below are snapshots of two separate coalition forces at work on the ground in their respective theaters of the conflict. Each national force has a style all their own. For example, the British use [...]
