KABUL: A few months ago, the relationship between the new U.S. administration and the veteran Afghan president looked like a bad marriage, with both sides using every opportunity to complain about each other in public.But when Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai meet this week in Washington for the first time since Obama's election last year, expect the two presidents to get along fine. After months of berating Karzai's government as ineffectual and tolerant of corruption, U.S. officials have stopped chiding the man Washington helped install in power in 2001. Karzai, for his part, has toned down what had been increasingly angry complaints about U.S. troops killing Afghan civilians
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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