Word: sovietizers
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...July 2002, the office of the Pentagon's former top lawyer, William "Jim" Haynes, began to examine a program that taught U.S. military personnel how to survive interrogation methods used by dictatorships such as North Korea and the former Soviet Union. The program, know as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), was designed to prepare U.S. personnel to face techniques such as sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, being forced into stress positions and even "waterboarding." Haynes' office sought to borrow the interrogation techniques of America's erstwhile enemies - techniques that if used against detainees, may violate U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions...
...battle is being joined in a storied and auspicious place. Arghandab, just 10 miles northwest of Kandahar, is famous for its lush vineyards and pomegranate orchards. It is also a key symbol for the insurgency. Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, but were never fully able to conquer the Arghandab district, which remained an outpost of mujahedin defiance. Its shady groves, raisin-drying barns and deep irrigation canals provide excellent cover for fighters. Kandahar residents worry that the militants could use the Arghandab district as a base for an attack on the city itself, in an attempt to regain their...
During the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistan backed the Taliban by offering training, funding and weapons. In 2001 President General Pervez Musharraf severed the ties, but many observers believe that some elements within the military have retained links, either for ideological reasons or in order to keep control over their neighbor. "I do not believe it is centrally directed or accepted," says a Western military official in Pakistan who was not authorized to speak on the record, "but I do believe there are individuals at the lower field levels who are maintaining ties...
...Founded in the late 1980s by Filipino Muslims who fought with al-Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Abu Sayyaf (Arabic for "Father of the Sword") aims to create an Islamic state in the southern islands of the mostly Catholic Philippines. Its bombings, kidnappings and assassinations have killed some 300 people and wounded hundreds more. Abu Sayyaf first caught the world's attention in 2000, when it used speedboats to snatch 21 tourists from a Malaysian beach resort within reach of Jolo. The following year it seized 20 more people from a resort on Palawan, in the southwest Philippines...
China is hardly the only country to build a national sports machine. In fact, the nation's athletics factories were modeled after the old Soviet-style system, which during the cold war churned out limber Romanian gymnasts and a fleet of doped-up East German swimmers. But the East bloc is long gone--and with it, sports by diktat. Today China is one of the few nations, apart from the likes of North Korea and Cuba, to commit so many state resources to athletics. While some young Chinese choose to attend sports schools, others, like Cloud, are little more than...