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■ Afghan Dust: Most Americans think of the Russo-Afghan war as little more than another Soviet land-grab which ended happily when on February 15, 1989, the Red Army departed Afghanistan in apparent defeat.

A young Polish émigré living in London, journalist Radek Sikorski took interest in the Soviet subjugation of the Afghan people. He had heard accounts of children taken from their mothers and sent to Russia to be educated; of the Soviets’ forcibly replacing the Afghan language with Russian; and of the destruction of the nation’s most beautiful and cherished mosques. In 1987, Mr. Sikorski made the first of several trips to Afghanistan to live with, to travel with, and indeed to become one of the mujahedin.

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■ Afghan Dust: Most Americans think of the Russo-Afghan war as little more than another Soviet land-grab which ended happily when on February 15, 1989, the Red Army departed Afghanistan in apparent defeat.

A young Polish émigré living in London, journalist Radek Sikorski took interest in the Soviet subjugation of the Afghan people. He had heard accounts of children taken from their mothers and sent to Russia to be educated; of the Soviets’ forcibly replacing the Afghan language with Russian; and of the destruction of the nation’s most beautiful and cherished mosques. In 1987, Mr. Sikorski made the first of several trips to Afghanistan to live with, to travel with, and indeed to become one of the mujahedin.