As little as I knew back then about Afghan society and politics, I could tell from my first fleeting visits to Kabul in 1979 that the place was rapidly coming unglued. That February, I drove in from ...
KABUL -- Afghanistan's communist President Hafizullah Amin was lying unconscious in his bed. A KGB agent who had infiltrated Amin's staff as a cook had poisoned the president and his ministers during ...
Frederick W. Kagan is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Comparisons between our current efforts in Afghanistan and the Soviet ...
The Soviet Union's botched attempt to poison Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin in 1979 set off a chain of events that reshaped the geopolitical landscape of Afghanistan The failure of the poisoning ...
It was a cold Tuesday evening and the Afghan capital was under piles of deep white snow when swathes of Soviet Airborne Forces joined Russian troops already stationed in Kabul 35 years ago. The ...
On Dec. 27, 1979, Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal. On this date In 1831, naturalist Charles ...
One of Alpha Group’s first operations became its most known ever. In 1979, the Soviet leadership decided to eliminate Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin and replace him with another head, more willing to ...
During a cabinet meeting yesterday, President Donald Trump reached a new low, when he actually defended the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was ...
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan 25 years ago this month -- the first time since World War II that organized Soviet troops had been sent outside the bloc or Cuba. The fighting in Afghanistan -- ...
Twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Valery Vostrotin had never seen combat before when the elite Soviet paratroop company he commanded was briefed by a KGB general on the afternoon of December 27, 1979.
The veils came off last Tuesday. Two hundred women had assembled outside the Kabul apartment of Soraya Parlika, Afghanistan’s most prominent woman activist, and–in one motion–they all lifted their ...