Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...matter how much Bhutto's government tries to crack down on troublemakers, though, Mrs. Clinton is visiting a country that has grown bitterly anti-American since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Once-moderate Pakistan resents being left awash in drug and arms traffic--and trained Islamic fighters--built up with U.S. support during the Western campaign to oust the Soviet army from Afghanistan. In 1990 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution denying all economic and military aid to Pakistan over suspicions that it was developing nuclear weapons. Three years later, Washington threatened to place Pakistan on the list...
...Mohajir Muslim migrants from India, between the terrorists and the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and between rival groups of Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Add to that a booming heroin trade, a kidnap-for-ransom industry and a mountain of weapons left over from the 1979-89 Afghanistan war. The result: 1,200 murders in the past year, making Karachi one of the deadliest cities in the world. (In New York City, where 7.5 million live, 1,600 people were murdered last year.) "You've got people with all kinds of reasons to kill each other," says...
...Chechnya began almost on the same day in December as the conflict in Afghanistan had begun 15 years earlier. But that is all the two campaigns have in common. In Afghanistan a small group of special forces from the kgb and the gru, the military intelligence service, assisted by several paratroop battalions, managed to take Kabul, the capital, in one day with minimal losses. In the Chechnya war, our commanders seemed to be totally oblivious of this lesson when they went after Chechen leader Jokhar Dudayev. They should have used elite troops; instead, they went in with raw recruits...
...conditions of life for the soldiers in Chechnya were dreadful. In Afghanistan we were issued special rations of canned meat, condensed milk, juice, crackers, tea and a Sterno can, so you could heat up kasha or rice with the canned meat. All I saw our soldiers eating in Chechnya was pearl barley with a bare hint of meat. Looking at this meager fare, I had the impression that we must have eaten up all the army's stores of dried rations in Afghanistan and that no one had bothered to produce any since then...
...major event in Afghanistan when a soldier was taken prisoner. kgb and gru agents tried to locate pows; then field commanders began negotiations to free them. At first they tried to deal from strength, bombing and firing missiles at villages. If the mujahedin still refused to turn over prisoners, efforts were made to buy our people back. They were ransomed with flour, kerosene, uniforms, sometimes money, even, though rarely, with weapons. In the Chechen war, the military command will not even talk about the fate of captured officers and soldiers. Distraught mothers have had to go to Chechnya to free...