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Minister Khan Appointed
"Afghanistan's cozy relationship with the Soviets originated under the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, a Pashtun with fleshy jowls and a shaved head who was appointed in 1953 by his cousin and brother-in-law, King Mohammed Zahir Shah" (6). -
Minister Khan Ousted
"Ten years later Daoud was forced to resign from the government after launching a brief but disastrous war against Pakistan" (6). -
Khan Back Again
"But in 1973 he reclaimed power by means of a nonviolent coup d’état, deposing King Zahir and declaring himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan" (6). -
Khan Gone for Good
“On April 27, 1978, MiG-21 jets from the Afghan Air Force strafed the Presidential Palace, where Daoud was ensconced with eighteen hundred members of his personal guard. That night, opposition forces overran the palace amid a rain of bullets. When the sun came up and the gunfire petered out, Daoud and his entire family were dead, adn the surrounding streets were strewn with the bodies of two thousand Afghans" (8). -
Period: to
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
"During the PDPA's first twenty months at the helm, twenty-seven thousand political dissidents were rounded up, transported to the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul, and summarily executed" (8). -
USSR Adds Support
"Back in Afghanistan, the brutality of the PDPA inspired a grassroots insurrection that rapidly escalated into full-blown civil war. At the forefrunt of the rebellion were Muslim holy warriors, the Afghan mujahideen, who fought the communist infidels with such ferocious intensity that in December 1979 the Soviets dispatched 100,000 troops to Afghanistan to quell the rebellion, prop up the PDPA, and protect their Cold War interests in the region" (9). -
Chernenko Increases Stakes
"The shift toward scorched-earth tactics intensified after Konstantin Chernenko became the Soviet general secretary in February 1984 and initiated a campaign of high-altitude carpet bombing" (10). -
Osama on the Scene (Date Unsure)
"In 1984 a wealthy young engineer from Saudi Arabia, name of Osama bin Laden, arrived in Khost to assist Haqqani's forces" (11). -
Gorbachev's Quagmire
"By the time the Soviet politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary on March 11, 1985, following the death of Chernenko, the war in Afghanistan had degenerated into a stalemate" (11). -
The Beginning of "The Base"
"In the summer of 1988, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri founded al-Qaeda. Significantly, when bin Laden established the first al-Qaeda training camps, he situated several of them in the mountains of Khost, Haqqani's homeland" (12). -
USSR Calls it Quits
"On February 15, 1989, when the last Soviet soldier retreated back across the Amu Darya--the broad, glacier-fed river that delineated the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan--the war had claimed the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand Soviet soldiers and well over a million Afghans, 90 percent of whom were civilian noncombatants" (13).
