Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reasons for scaling back the U.S.S.R.'s foreign entanglements: they are expensive, diverting resources that might otherwise go to domestic reform; and they provoke worldwide antagonism at a time when Moscow is looking for capitalist goods and credits. So Gorbachev has withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan, encouraged the Vietnamese to end their occupation of Cambodia and warned Fidel Castro that the Kremlin will not indefinitely underwrite the export of revolution in Latin America...
...Afghanistan, American hopes for a quick, easy mujahedin victory have faded. A protracted civil war might favor the more fanatical, anti-Western elements among the rebels. The U.S. has just said good riddance to one ayatullah in Iran, and the last thing Washington wants is a Khomeini-like figure in Afghanistan. There are also 3.5 million well-armed Afghan refugees who are an increasing worry to Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. On a visit to Washington last month, she persuaded Bush to endorse publicly a "political solution," implying an internationally brokered deal that might allow some Afghan Communists to remain...
Bhutto was in Washington to seek continued military and economic aid for her country and to discuss a political settlement for the struggle in neighboring Afghanistan. In an interview with TIME, the Prime Minister said she believes that Afghanistan should have a neutral government "which reflects the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and which is neither hostile to the Soviet Union nor hostile to us." With support from the U.S., Pakistan has been the main arms distributor to the Afghan mujahedin rebels ever since Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviets withdrew their forces early this year...
...accused the Nobel Peace laureate of trying to "belittle" the new parliament's achievements. There were also painful disclosures about the dreadful state of the Soviet economy. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov admitted that some 40 million Soviets, or 13% of the population, live below the poverty level, that the Afghanistan war had cost about $70 billion and that the country's foreign-trade deficit this year will reach $52 billion. (The U.S. foreign-trade deficit last year was $119.8 billion.) In an attack on the economic front, Ryzhkov proposed cuts of almost a third in the military budget until...
Tarazi defends the PLO with well-honed technique. He says he opposes violence himself and notes that the nationalist organization has recently renounced terrorism. Comparing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the war in Afghanistan, he adds, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...