Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...June and then vanished into Chechnya's mountains. Yeltsin has been ill, and his popularity rating is low. The political medicine he needs is an image of strong leadership, so he unleashed furious force on Pervomaiskoye. Last week's operation, says General Boris Gromov, who commanded Soviet forces in Afghanistan and is now a member of parliament, was intended "to destroy militants rather than release hostages." That was not the method of the Turkish government, which negotiated with the Chechens who hijacked a ferry at the port of Trabzon. All hostages were released unharmed...
...settlement that grants Chechnya some kind of special status within the Russian Federation is the only possible long-term solution. A counterinsurgency war would be expensive and bloody, and the Russian armed forces are obviously not up to the job. In any case, their commanders should have learned in Afghanistan that conventional armies do badly when pitted against highly motivated guerrillas. If Yeltsin chooses to fight, by election day in June he could be under political attack from both sides: hawkish rivals criticizing the unsuccessful conduct of the war and doves calling for negotiations...
...another major concern. An estimated 2,500 to 4,000 of them--1,000 in the American sector-to-be--have been fighting in Bosnia on the side of their fellow Muslims but under the effective control of no one. Many are radical fundamentalists from such countries as Iran, Afghanistan and Syria who view all Westerners, especially Americans, with suspicion and hostility. Under terms of the peace treaty, all unauthorized foreign forces, including the mujahedin, are to get out of Bosnia within 30 days. Undoubtedly some will. But Pentagon officials are worried that others will go underground. U.S. officials point...
...plans to place the missiles, then made him "an involuntary tool of deceit" by maintaining that they were defensive only. Khrushchev's lack of a fallback plan once the missiles were discovered was a lesson, Dobrynin notes, that was forgotten by his successors when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ignoring warnings from his generals and ambassador, Brezhnev told Dobrynin not to worry: "It'll be over in three to four weeks...
...expansion of NATO is the experience of the cold war. Having learned the lesson of the Hitler era, the democracies responded promptly, firmly and effectively to a series of dangerous Soviet initiatives: the forcible imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Korean War, Sputnik and the invasion of Afghanistan. I believe the West would act in a similar manner to protect the new democracies of Eastern Europe should these countries be threatened by renewed Russian imperialism. Because they are not currently threatened, there is no need to expand NATO now. MICHAEL MANDELBAUM, PROFESSOR Johns Hopkins University Washington...