Afghanistan Foreign Relations Ussr

At 7:59 p.m. on Aug. 4, thousands of feet above one of the world's most rugged borders, a Pakistani air force F-16 fighter plane opened fire on a Soviet SU-25 fighter-bomber that had penetrated Pakistani airspace. The encounter was brief: A single missile from the F-16 scored a direct hit. The Soviet plane, which Pakistan alleges was carrying cluster bombs meant for Pakistani villagers, crashed 15 miles inside Pakistan. The pilot, Col. Alexander V.

A senior and usually staid official of the Indian Foreign Ministry was quietly sipping his Scotch and soda at a recent cocktail party in the capital, when, inevitably, the conversation turned to the collapse of the nearby empire that for so long has so profoundly influenced the fate and direction of his own nation.

Old-timers remember this as a lively, playfully irreverent city. Once, street urchins had a standard greeting for Westerners strolling down the market lanes: "Hey, Mr. Katchalu, " they would shout. That means "Mr. Potato" in the local Dari language. The nickname dates back two centuries to the Europeans who introduced potatoes to this remote Central Asian land ringed with mountains. But it is no longer heard on the streets of Kabul.

A Soviet delegation arrives in the Pakistani capital Thursday for three days of talks with leaders of Afghanistan's Islamic moujahedeen resistance. It will be Moscow's latest effort to gain freedom for dozens--possibly hundreds--of Soviet prisoners still missing from the decade-long war in Afghanistan. A handful of prisoners seized by the U.S.-backed rebels have been freed since the Soviet army withdrew the last of its 110,000 troops from Kabul in February, 1990.

It was like the film "Top Gun," Jim Lindelof once told a reporter, "only we were the targets." He was talking about Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1985 and the daily bombing raids by MIG jets that rocked the village where he was working undercover as a medic tending to the sick, the wounded and the dying. He never forgot the sound, or the smell, or the simple fear that gripped his stomach during those three months.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze concluded two days of talks in the Siberian city of Irkutsk today by agreeing on the importance of Soviet and American cooperation in Asia. "In Asia, too, the Soviet Union and the United States do not regard each other as adversaries," Shevardnadze told reporters during a news conference after the talks. The U.S.

Afghan rebels, firing a U.S.-made Stinger missile, shot down a civilian airplane in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing at least 53 people including 16 children, Kabul radio said. The broadcast said a Soviet-made AN-26 plane of Bakhtar Alwatana, Afghanistan's domestic carrier, was hit by a missile over Zabul province, about 180 miles southwest of Kabul, on a domestic flight to the capital, crashing near Shah Juy.

The top Soviet general in Afghanistan said Tuesday that once the pullout of his forces is completed by the Feb. 15 deadline, Moscow will no longer use its air power to support the Afghan government. The Soviet Union has been using air power increasingly since last fall to try to push back guerrilla forces besieging Afghan cities, and recently to help keep open a key highway from the Soviet border.

Soviet servicemen in Afghanistan have suffered heavier casualties since the United States began supplying modern weapons to Muslim guerrillas, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday. Those weapons "created additional difficulties for Afghan army and Soviet troops," deputy spokesman Boris Pyadyshev said at a regular government briefing. "This led to additional casualties among Afghan and Soviet troops and the air force."

Top Kremlin officials have now staked their prestige on a withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan this year without linking it to survival of the present Moscow-backed regime in Kabul, Western diplomats believe. The main Soviet condition for a pullout of an estimated 115,000 troops after eight years of an inconclusive war is an immediate halt in military aid to the rebel forces by the United States and other suppliers. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A.

A delegation representing Afghan rebel groups flew to Moscow on Sunday for new negotiations on ending the 13-year-old civil war. Delegation leader Burhanuddin Rabbani told the Soviet news agency Tass on arrival that he hopes the political changes in the Soviet Union will lead Moscow to help bring about a lasting peace. "The establishment of an Islamic government in my homeland could become a reliable guarantee of that peace, not only for Afghanistan itself but for its neighbors," he said.

The Soviet-backed Afghan government said Saturday it is ready to stop the war against Western-supported guerrillas and endorsed Friday's U.S.-Soviet agreement to halt all weapons supplies to the warring sides by Jan. 1. But radical Muslim guerrillas said they will continue fighting to topple President Najibullah's government in Kabul. Afghan Premier Fazlul Haq Khaleqyar has "expressed full readiness to ensure peace and cessation of the war as well as implementation of the Soviet-U.S.

The announcement that the Soviet Union and the United States have agreed to halt all military aid to the warring factions in Afghanistan may signal the winding up of the bloodiest conflict of the 1980s. The History An April, 1978, revolution brought the Communists to power, and by late the next year the Soviet Union had begin a massive airlift of men and armor to save the tottering Kabul regime.

President Najibullah, one of the world's last Soviet-backed totalitarian leaders, says he has no intention of stepping down, despite the fall of the hard-liners in the Kremlin and the KGB who put him in power and the imminent prospect of an end to his arms supplies from Moscow.

The Soviet Union and the United States agreed Friday to halt all military aid to the warring factions in Afghanistan as of Jan. 1, opening the way for a negotiated end to a 13-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Mukhtar, a 12-year-old orphan of Afghanistan's raging civil war, was studying his Russian lessons on the floor of a dingy dormitory room at Kabul's Orphanage of the Homeland on Wednesday when a visitor dropped in. The stranger wanted to chat about Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin and the recent events that have radically transformed the superpower that has looked after Mukhtar since he lost his mother, father, uncle and brothers to war. "Why are you studying Russian?" the visitor asked.

It was a rare moment in international diplomacy. Farid Ahmad Mazdak, the third most powerful official in a nation that has been at virtual war with the United States for more than a decade, had invited two American journalists to an informal Friday lunch in the sitting room of his Kabul apartment.

The Bush Administration denied a report Wednesday that the United States and the Soviet Union have reached an agreement on settling the war in Afghanistan, but officials pointed to significant progress in resolving the conflict. A television broadcast saying that a deal was completed is a "product of the rumor mill," said Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who is traveling in Asia and will meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze in Irkutsk next week.

Afghanistan admitted that one of its warplanes accidentally bombed a Soviet border village, state-run Kabul Radio said. It said the Afghan air force jet encountered technical difficulties during a routine training mission and accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, dropping bombs that left four people dead. Soviet news agencies had reported that a Soviet-made SU-25 fighter-bomber dropped up to four bombs on the village of Namadguti-Poen.

It was a rare moment in international diplomacy. Farid Ahmad Mazdak, the third most powerful official in a nation that has been at virtual war with the United States for more than a decade, had invited two American journalists to an informal Friday lunch in the sitting room of his Kabul apartment.