The Afghanistan Wars - William Maley

individual recruitment (Dorronsoro and Lobato, 1989: 100). A number of militia leaders were to achieve considerable notoriety, s ...

was again apparent in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Operation Magistral’, in which the siege of Khost was broken. This has bee ...

rockets were fired into it. The regime blamed the blasts on ‘tech- nical problems’, but the following day, Soviet television rep ...

6 July 1986 attack on a huge Soviet convoy near Maimana, coord- inated actions became more difficult to put together in the nort ...

Badakhshan was a significant commander, but Wahhabi forces, manipulated by both the Kabul regime and Hekmatyar’s Hezb, caused hi ...

last Brezhnev era Congress in 1981 (Mawdsley and White, 2000: 198). However, Gorbachev did face one notable limitation, which wa ...

explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on 26 April 1986. Together with Gorbachev’s other main domestic policy positions – pe ...

The radicalism of this approach should not be underestimated. It had across-the-board implications, shaping Moscow’s approach to ...

consolidated his power vis-à-vishis colleagues to the point that he could actually issue commands and not have them blocked thro ...

removed from the Central Committee on 17 October 1987. The biggest purge of all came in October 1988. Saleh Muhammad Zeray and A ...

in Afghanistan. The candour of this information also grew over time. The following items are merely samples from a wider body of ...

what the Soviet leadership described as ‘regional problems’, a code expression for the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan ...

an instrument of policy. Its aim was to create the imageof a con- stitutionalist order. Substantively, the policy of ‘national r ...

national unity’ as part of Najibullah’s readiness ‘officially and in practice, to share power’ (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts ...

speech to the PDPA Conference in October 1987, he argued that in a coalition administration ‘the PDPA should not lose its leadin ...

his creatures’ – he was promptly arrested (Rubin, 1995a: 166; Giustozzi, 2000: 159). Despite all these problems, might there not ...

6 The Road to Soviet Withdrawal In a radio broadcast on 8 February 1988, General Secretary Gorbachev announced the intention of ...

role of the United Nations in structuring negotiations between some – but, crucially, not all– of the parties to the conflict, a ...

who headed the Secretariat’s International Department. Ponomarev was replaced by Anatoly Dobrynin, a very different figure. Wher ...

Oriental Studies, who in interviews published in The Times of India in May 1987, described the Soviet intervention as a ‘real tr ...