Word: sovietization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pakistan, a country of 173 million people that encompasses dusty plains, sublime mountain peaks and some of the world's most densely populated cities, has rarely been a placid place since it became an independent nation in 1947. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Islamabad, with U.S. and Saudi funding, sent thousands of men across the border to join Afghans in fighting the Soviets. The Pakistani military used religious schools in the borderland to train and equip Afghan mujahedin and to heal them when they returned. More than 3 million Afghan refugees took shelter in Pakistan's cities...
...Ethnic Divide I partly agree with Andrew Purvis' Briefing on Georgia [Sept. 1]. However, on the question of the two ethnic entities now not being able to live side by side any time soon, one must remember that toward the end of the former Soviet Union the South Ossetians had a degree of autonomy. It was the new Georgian government that unilaterally revoked this autonomous status. So, at a moment of crisis, what should Russia have done but come to the rescue of its people (although in military terms the way it was done was definitely disproportionate)? I wonder what...
...Zardari, during his inauguration ceremony, swore to protect his country's sovereignty, a U.S. Predator drone launched five missiles at a suspected militant compound near the border with Afghanistan. The compound belonged to Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most notorious Afghan Taliban commanders based in Pakistan and a Soviet-era ally of the CIA. The Predator strike missed Haqqani, but it did kill four midlevel al-Qaeda operatives, government and militant sources told the Associated Press. It also killed as many as eight children, one of Haqqani's wives and a sister...
...taken to heart by the extraordinarily skillful foreign-policy team around President George H.W. Bush, which was convinced that it was dangerous to rub Moscow's nose in its own failure. As Western policy shifted in the Clinton years toward doing more to protect those who had suffered Soviet domination, there was no shortage of those who argued that Washington was playing with fire. I remember those debates very well. They were vigorous and impassioned. For all those who warned that it was unwise to poke the Russian bear in the eye, there were those (myself included) who believed that...
...There were no good, costless choices over NATO expansion, much less over Kosovo. A decision to withhold NATO membership from Eastern Europe, and to leave the Kosovars to their fate, would have exposed as hypocrites those who had spent the Cold War taking the high moral ground against the Soviet Union. But sometimes, we have just been reminded, good intentions are not enough to ward off tragedy. That's one reason why it's always worth keeping a volume of Yeats' poetry close at hand...