Word: tribesmen
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...Soviets escalated their intervention against Afghanistan's Muslim militants and recalcitrant tribesmen who had been waging a long simmering and spreading rebellion. The insurgents, in turn, received more covert assistance from China, Pakistan and other countries. But by now the U.S. was distracted by a new preoccupation, right next door in Iran. (One immediate consequence of the collapse of the Shah: CENTO, long moribund, was disbanded.) Insofar as U.S. diplomats and intelligence experts focused on Afghanistan at all, they made two miscalculations. First, they believed that the Soviets' desire to preserve detente would restrain them in Afghanistan. Second...
...excess of what was needed to quell an internal insurgency. Afghanistan, according to these suspicions, could be only a steppingstone on the way to further military aggression, either west into Iran or possibly south into Baluchistan. Straddling both Iran and Pakistan, this area is inhabited by fiercely independent Baluch tribesmen who have long sought autonomy from both countries. The other school maintained that the Soviet move was basically a defensive, self-contained operation aimed at rescuing a crumbling client regime. The military overkill, one Western European envoy argued, simply represented "typical Russian thoroughness-using more force than necessary in order...
Historical events, or so Karl Marx said, always happen twice: once as tragedy, the second time as farce. These days we are told we are enmeshed in a second Cold War. The Russians are once again out to conquer the entire world, starting with the Moslem tribesmen of Afghanistan. SALT II is off, the MX is on; public opinion polls show a majority of the U.S. population favors increased defense spending for the first time in a long while. Once again the calls go up to arm the anti-Communist dictators, and to hell with human rights, nonproliferation or progressive...
...Pakistani government of President Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq is tempted to encourage the Afghan tribesmen to fight the Kabul government, with which Pakistan has always had uneasy relations. But the Pushtun (or Pathan) tribesmen, whose homeland is on both sides of the border, also have their differences with Pakistan. So Zia is reluctant to grant the insurgents too much aid lest they use it to fight his government, which has serious problems...
...adventure in Afghanistan, the British ordered the withdrawal of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers from Kabul. A week later, the sole survivor of the march, a field surgeon named Brydon, staggered into Jalalabad on the way to the Khyber Pass. The present generation of rebel tribesmen are hardly equipped to repeat such a feat. But, as a former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, Robert Neumann, has observed, "Foreign invaders have found it easier to march into Afghanistan than to march...