Afghan Deal Is the Better Choice : Protracted War Through Pakistan Would Be Hard to Sustain

The U.N.-mediated negotiations between Pakistan and the Kabul regime concerning Afghanistan enter their sixth round this week, and may soon provide an opportunity to test the Soviet Union’s willingness to withdraw its troops. As a result of what one State Department official called “the positive tone of the summit,” the U.S. government has taken a necessary step by writing to the United Nations, promising to guarantee any treaty that provides for complete Soviet withdrawal.

An escalating war of extermination against large portions of the rural population, the arrest and torture of anyone suspected of opposition and a program of sending thousands of children to the Soviet Union for 10 years of education all seem to indicate long-range plans to turn Afghanistan into another Soviet republic in all but the name.

The Soviets’ participation in negotiations may be simply a propaganda ruse aimed at obtaining recognition for their client regime. There is only one way to find out: Pursue the negotiations as far as possible.

Under the proposed settlement, the Soviets would withdraw their 115,000 combat troops from Afghanistan, and Pakistan would end its military support for the Afghan resistance. The Afghan refugees would be consulted about the settlement through a mechanism still to be agreed on, and would be voluntarily repatriated under U.N. protection. The agreement does not deal with the regime in Kabul; it would neither replace it nor guarantee its stability. What has thus far been lacking is precisely what Mikhail S. Gorbachev reportedly indicated at the summit that he would now be willing to provide: a timetable for Soviet withdrawal.

If the Soviets are not willing to reach such an agreement, there is no risk in challenging them to do so. The risk would come if they were willing. The proposed agreement would not dismantle the KGB-dominated apparatus of the Afghan secret police; it would leave thousands of Soviet advisers in place in the military and civil administration; it would leave intact the Soviet-style education system, including the program for sending children to the Soviet Union, and it would permit an Afghan communist government to continue to receive all forms of Soviet assistance short of combat troops, while depriving its opposition of all foreign support.

The agreement, however, would not preclude the resistance from carrying on its struggle within Afghanistan. Without Soviet military support, the communist administration of Afghanistan might soon disintegrate. Both the Soviets and the Afghan communists are said to recognize this, and to have said in private that they would have to moderate the regime, perhaps by bringing back the deposed King of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, from his exile in Rome. Nevertheless, it is still hard to imagine that such an illegitimate government could broaden itself.

The alternative is to support a protracted guerrilla war, which, to have any chances of success, would require a qualitative improvement in the equipment, leadership and coordination of the Afghan resistance. One often-ignored weak spot of a strategy of protracted war is that it requires us to lean even harder on Pakistan.

All U.S. aid to the Afghan resistance must go through Pakistani territory, and remain largely under Pakistani operational control. Even the U.S.-dependent military government has been wary of the better-armed and -organized Afghan resistance that a protracted war would require for success. They fear both the actions of such a resistance on the territory of Pakistan, evoking the image of the PLO in Lebanon, and the reactions of the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, growing segments of opinion in Pakistan are hostile even to the current program. Many, if not most, of the political leaders of Pakistan believe that the United States does not want to resolve the Afghan conflict, but prefers to bleed the Soviets by providing the annoying but ultimately ineffectual current level of aid. They see a protracted Soviet presence as full of dangers for Pakistan from which the United States cannot protect them.

As martial law is lifted in Pakistan on Jan. 1, and these leaders gradually enlarge their influence, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain the “covert” operation of supplying the resistance without their support. For them U.S. flexibility in the negotiations is a test of whether we wish to resolve the conflict or keep it going to further Cold War aims regardless of the consequences for Pakistan. If America is perceived as torpedoing the negotiations, opposition to arming the resistance will accelerate dramatically in Pakistan.

Thus, for all its dangers, a Geneva agreement would be the best alternative. Perhaps the Soviets will refuse to make the necessary concessions, but if the talks fail and the war continues, it must be because the Soviets refuse to withdraw, not because the United States prefers to bleed them.