that was one of the many international oil companies seeking the rights to build this pipeline, entered into negotiations with Taliban, to secure protection for the pipeline. Raphel spoke in favor of the pipeline project on trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in April and August 1996. Her meeting with Taliban leaders in 1996 to advocate for a pipeline project earned her the sobriquet "Lady Taliban" in the Indian press. After Raphel's successor Karl Inderfurth took over, the pipeline deal collapsed, however. Raphel took part in the State Department's establishment of diplomatic relations with the Taliban shortly after its takeover of Kabul in 1996. Advocacy for Pakistan Raphel entered her State Department assignment at a time when U.S.-Pakistan relations were strained. Sanctions imposed by George H. W. Bush over concerns about Pakistan's burgeoning nuclear program under the Pressler Amendment banned all military ties, supply of military hardware and jet fighters, and cut off political relations with Islamabad. Bhutto sought rapprochement with the Clinton White House, visiting the United States in April 1995. Bhutto, working with Pakistan's envoy to Washington at the time, Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, sought Congressional support for an exception to the Pressler Amendment that would allow Pakistan to take delivery of military equipment that it had already paid for. This exception to Pressler (known as the Brown Amendment) was strongly supported by Raphel and by other Clinton administration officials. It was put into effect in November 1995, permitting the one-time transfer to Pakistan of $368M of equipment that had been blocked by the Pressler Amendment. Criticism from India Raphel became unpopular with Indian media in 1993, after publicly describing Kashmir as a "disputed territory." India's position is that Jammu and Kashmir, having been ceded to India in 1947 by their maharajah, are an integral part of India's territory. Raphel's advocacy for negotiation between India and Pakistan was perceived as an attack on India's territorial integrity. Also in the 1990s, Indian officials who had tapped Raphel's phone learned that she had favored a UN resolution condemning India's actions in Kashmir, but was overruled by 'higher-ups.' Raphel's decades of work with Pakistan led Indian media to consider her a "brazenly pro-Pakistan partisan in Washington." According to Richard Leiby, writing about the 1993 incident in 2014 after the FBI investigation of Raphel became public knowledge: To the fury of India, she suggested Pakistan still had valid claims to the disputed territory of