Word: stingers
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Shah and the Soviets both paid dearly for ignoring history. The Shah's equation of modernization with Westernization proved folly. Like the Soviets, he ignored the strength of religious and indigenous mores. Harnessed to grievances (the Shah's repression, Soviet imperialism) and to technologies (U.S. Stinger missiles, in the case of the Afghan war), those sentiments became strong enough to defeat the Soviet forces and send the Shah into exile. Importing foreign ideologies or language can create bitter historical ironies. The nuclear program that the Shah championed as a symbol of his Westernization and modernization is now, in the hands...
...with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and toured the mujahedin camps, befriending some of the guerrilla leaders who now live in Pakistan's tribal regions and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up American and Afghan forces. Ex - CIA officer Milt Bearden recalls crowds shouting "Allahu...