Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would accept a 10% to 12% limit on the downsizing of ICBMs. Vance held out for 5%, but the Soviets were moving in the right direction. The Secretary of State took Dobrynin to see Carter in the Oval Office. The President told the ambassador that despite disagreements over Indochina, Afghanistan, Iran and other trouble spots, the U.S. and the Soviet Union must salvage SALT and improve bilateral relations. A few days later, in a surprisingly moderate speech, Brezhnev said he agreed...
...post-revolution turmoil went on in Iran, another rebellion with Islamic roots continued to gather force next door. In Afghanistan, the militantly pro-Moscow government of President Noor Mohammed Taraki is bitterly opposed by some tribesmen and mullahs who believe that the "democratic republic" he is building has put their customs and their Muslim heritage in jeopardy. Reflecting the Kremlin's concern about the troubles afflicting Kabul's new rulers only 13 months after a left-wing military coup put them in power, Pravda has declared the rebels to be "gangs of saboteurs and terrorists sent from...
...mujahidin, which in Afghanistan's Dari language means roughly "holy warriors," are armed mainly with shotguns and ancient Enfield rifles, and thus are no match for the Taraki regime's Soviet-equipped 80,000-man army. But the rebellion has spread to 15 of the country's 28 provinces, and while guerrilla activity is most intense in the remote areas bordering on Iran in the west and Pakistan in the east, the regime has been forced to tighten security everywhere. Foreign diplomats in Kabul reckon that more than 12,000 political prisoners have been jailed. Major intersections...
Taraki, 62, a sometime journalist who heads Afghanistan's Khalq (People's) Party, does not have broad backing; some diplomats in Kabul believe his supporters in the military and among Afghanistan's small educated class number only 2,500 people. Yet the regime shows no sign of bending its rigid Marxist principles. While Taraki professes "full respect for holy Islam," his Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, angrily blames the bloodletting on the meddling of "imperialist lackeys from Iran and Pakistan...
Taraki and Amin are not the first reformers who have tried to tame Afghanistan. A half-century ago, King Amanullah launched a crash modernization effort that had some similarities to the Taraki program. But in 1929, after he had been on the throne only ten years, a civil war broke out and Amanullah went into exile, effectively ending his rule and the modernization drive. It is a chapter of Afghan history that the country's present rulers doubtless remember all too well...