Word: kabul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ahmad Shah Massoud, 35, a onetime engineering student at the Soviet Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, has spent the past nine years molding the mujahedin in Afghanistan's northeast into what is widely considered the country's most effective guerrilla formation. Last May Massoud's men, who owe allegiance to Jamiat-i-Islami, one of the seven mujahedin parties based across the border in Pakistan, watched in triumph as the last Soviet and Afghan government troops retreated from the Panjshir...
After nine years of fighting, mujahedin can drive their few vehicles through the valley in daylight with little worry of attack. The government withdrawal from the Panjshir has prompted hopes in Kabul that Massoud might be coaxed into a cease-fire or even a coalition. According to Massoud, President Najibullah has even offered him a choice of top government posts in exchange for peace...
...Soviet news agency TASS said Mohmand's main assignments are participating in experiments on the nauseating effects of weightlessness and photographic surveys of his native land. But the images broadcast to the folks back in Kabul suggested that Mohmand was given a larger mission: helping Moscow win friends in Afghanistan as the Soviets withdraw their troops from that divided country...
Moscow and Kabul's answer to the emerging rebel strategy of slow strangulation is to dig in at a few strongholds -- Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, Faizabad, Ghazni, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif -- and await a change in the military or political equation that could give them an advantage. Most of the remaining 50,000 Soviet troops are garrisoned in Kabul and Shindand, the huge air base in western Afghanistan, as well as in Herat and a few other cities along the main roads to the Soviet border. As many as 100,000 Afghan troops - are deployed in the same areas...
...prime suspect is the Khad, the Soviet-trained Afghan secret police, which in the past several years has been blamed for hundreds of terrorist bombings in Pakistan. Over the past few months, Kabul and Moscow have issued strident warnings to Islamabad to stop allowing arms for the Afghan rebels, or mujahedin, to be smuggled across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan. Just days before Zia's death, the Kremlin issued a statement saying the Pakistani actions could not "be further tolerated." But many Western diplomats doubt that Moscow would go so far as assassinating Zia, and it is assumed that...