Word: khyber
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...passport had just been stamped at the customs house at the Khyber Pass on the border with Pakistan when the shooting began. "It's the Muslim fanatics!" cried the Afghan immigration official, as he dived for cover into a pile of crumpled visa forms. Outside, border guards with flapping puttees, braying donkeys, and assorted smugglers and baggage handlers churned about in confusion. Quiet soon returned, but the rebels had made their point. "Very, very bad this jihad [holy war]," a local tea vendor muttered. "The mujahidin are everywhere...
...reckon that more than 12,000 political prisoners have been jailed. Major intersections in the capital, where an 11 p.m. curfew is in effect, are patrolled by soldiers, and the country's few highways are under heavy guard; eight police checkpoints dot the 115-mile route from the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Where the rebellion really flourishes is in the rugged narrow canyons of rural Afghanistan. There a single rifleman can hold off an infantry battalion...
...that they have seen a map, drawn in Moscow and secured by the Iranian intelligence service, showing a Greater Baluchistan that would connect the U.S.S.R. with the Arabian Sea. Similarly, an Islamabad diplomat refers darkly to the "Moscow-Kabul-Delhi axis." The Russians, he insists, "are now at the Khyber Pass." Certainly this is an exaggeration if not a delusion. It is also self-serving. The Pakistanis would like nothing better than to receive large-scale U.S. aid both to shore up the crumbling southern tier and to bolster their own security...
...just tore down the only church in the nation. This month McClung was in Katmandu, Nepal, where conversion to Christianity is a crime, to check on a similar Jesus house that a colleague started last year. McClung also has a small house in Pakistan at the foot of the Khyber Pass, and last week he acquired another in New Delhi...
Daoud, during his tenure as Prime Minister, between 1953 and 1963, cleverly exploited Afghanistan's strategic location (with access to the Khyber Pass and common borders with Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia) to get the U.S. and the Soviet Union to compete with each other in giving aid. "I feel happiest when I can light my American cigarette with a Russian match," he once joked. But Moscow's nearly $1.5 billion in military and economic aid over the past 20 years far outdistanced Washington's $500 million, and inevitably the flame of the match grew a little...