Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Secretary of State George Shultz responded with a mixture of tough talk and fresh signs of flexibility. He welcomed Shevardnadze's remarks as "desirable" and added that the initial Soviet withdrawal should be "front-end loaded," meaning that large numbers of the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan should pull out quickly "so that once it starts, there's a certain inevitability to it." Shultz added a new demand, insisting that all Soviet military aid to Afghanistan cease after the pullout. On a conciliatory note, he reiterated that the U.S. would similarly cut off arms supplies for the mujahedin, Afghanistan...
...suggestion of sharing power with the Afghan Communists, who will be powerless without their Soviet backers. U.S. Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost raised the issue with rebel leaders last week in Islamabad but made no headway. Said Sayed Ahmed Gilani, chief of the National Islamic Front for Afghanistan: "We told Mr. Armacost that the future government in Kabul will be 100% Afghan, without any Communist...
...town is little more than an overgrown village, with ramshackle buildings huddled along dirt streets. Yet the road to Khost (pop. 15,000) was the scene last week of some of the most furious fighting in the Soviet Union's eight- year drive to crush Muslim rebels in Afghanistan. Although accounts of the battle differed, all reports indicated that Soviet and Afghan forces had mounted a desperate effort to break the latest guerrilla siege of Khost. Supported by Soviet Sukhoi-25 attack jets, an estimated 20,000 troops repeatedly struck rebel positions along the 50-mile highway that connects Khost...
Since the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan to prop up a Moscow-installed Communist regime in 1979, more than 20,000 Soviet fighters have died. An estimated 1 million Afghans have lost their lives. Weary of such bloodshed, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Rogachev said last November that Moscow had made the "political decision" to pull out its 115,000 troops, but a timetable remains to be worked...
...speaks Russian heard Gorbachev mutter under his breath, "We are not going to see this ((in the Soviet Union)) for another 50 years." Eugene Whelan, then Minister of Agriculture and Gorbachev's official host, was surprised on another occasion to hear the Soviet leader comment about the invasion of Afghanistan: "It was a mistake." (He was later to call Afghanistan a "bleeding wound," but in public he still justifies the invasion.) In the same year, however, Gorbachev served on a Politburo crisis- management subgroup that sought to justify the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet by asserting...