Word: islamabad
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...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...
Unlike some alarmists in Islamabad, the Reagan Administration does not believe that the Soviet Union is about to take full-scale war into Pakistan. But the U.S. acknowledges Moscow's continuing attempt to bully Zia into backing off from his demands for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the return of the refugees to that country and free elections in Kabul. U.S. military aid to Pakistan's 478,600-member armed forces is substantial--about $1.6 billion promised for the 1981-86 period--and includes F-16 jet fighters, tanks, artillery, antiaircraft missiles and a radar surveillance system...
Nonetheless, the growing Soviet pressures are viewed with concern in Pakistan. Says a Western intelligence officer in Islamabad: "The Soviets have been telling the Pakistanis that the Soviet Union no longer wants to keep Soviet-Pakistani relations separate from the issue of Afghanistan. That, in effect, has torn up the tacit understanding that has existed between them." The understanding has been beneficial to Pakistan: since 1972 it has received an estimated $700 million in Soviet...
Sources within the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance movement say that the children will join an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 Afghan youngsters who have been forcibly sent to the Soviet Union over the past four years. One Western diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan, says that the Soviets, faced with widespread opposition in Afghanistan, "may have concluded that nothing short of Sovietization inside the U.S.S.R. would make much of an ideological dent in Afghan youth...
...taste. She signed a friendship treaty with Moscow and became a regular buyer of Soviet arms, while the U.S. lined up behind Pakistan. New Delhi was annoyed by Washington's opposition to India's nuclear program, and relations hit an alltime low when the Nixon Administration openly "tilted" toward Islamabad during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which Mrs. Gandhi refused to condemn outright, the U.S. began to supply Pakistan with heavy arms aid. Some U.S. officials predicted last week that relations between the two countries, already on the mend, might improve un der Rajiv...