Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet armored personnel carrier, loaded with infantrymen and flying a white flag, rolled up to the Pakistani frontier post of Tor Kham from the Afghanistan side of the border. It was the climactic moment of a battle that had begun after Afghanistan's mujahedin resistance fighters attacked and briefly held three Afghan border posts on the Khyber Pass. The Soviets had reacted with lightning speed, sending in a full brigade by air to retake the outposts. In the confusion of battle, three soldiers of the Soviet-backed Afghan army fled to Pakistan, but their defection had been detected...
...Soviet captain emerged from the personnel carrier. "We want the three men back," he said, addressing Pakistani frontier policemen in English. Beside | him, an Afghan officer repeated the request in Urdu, adding, "If we don't have them back, you will be in for a lot of trouble." The Soviet vehicle then turned around and rumbled back into Afghanistan. "Not a shot was fired," a Pakistani officer recalled. "But just in case we didn't believe they meant business, they dropped 80 artillery shells on our positions that night." For the next two days, sporadic tank and artillery fire fell...
...Pakistanis claimed their territory was bombed or strafed by Soviet aircraft. So far this year 56 such violations have been registered, and in the past month there have been at least 60 artillery attacks as well. Soviet and Afghan government forces have also mounted several ground raids along the frontier, including one last month that involved several hundred Soviet tanks as well as fighter-bombers and helicopters. A few days later, Soviet infantry and helicopter gunships in pursuit of guerrillas attacked several Afghan border villages, killing more than 100 civilians...
Pakistani officials suggest that the situation along the frontier has worsened since President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq met last month in Moscow with Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Zia was told by the Soviets that Pakistan's policy toward Afghanistan --collaboration with the resistance and cooperation with the U.S.--could cause the relationship between Moscow and Islamabad to deteriorate. Though that line was not new, Zia was said to have been shaken by the conversation...
...PROBLEM IS that great universities, or rather those that would sooner appear great than be great, hum along towards the intellectual frontier with all the speed and grace of a brontosaurus. Harvard is notorious, particularly in the English Department, for sitting tight and hoping whatever's new and exciting will go away with next year's graduates. But that strategy hasn't paid off with all the permutations of New Criticism, which refused to crawl away and die, and the odds aren't in the department's favor now. As it is, students are deserting the English Department in large...