Moscow Deals From Strength in Afghanistan

In recent months the Soviet Union has launched a very active diplomatic offensive on the Afghanistan front, leaving some to conclude that a real possibility exists for a negotiated settlement. It is a forlorn hope at best.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev no doubt would like to withdraw Moscow’s troops from Afghanistan. The war has lasted two years longer than World War II. At last year’s 27th Communist Party Congress, Gorbachev called it “a running sore.”

The Soviet Union has appealed for a negotiated settlement, and in one sense it is sincere. Unfortunately, the phrase negotiated settlement has become a polite synonym for negotiated surrender. And that is the way it is being used in Afghanistan today. Thus the Afghan rebels are willing to negotiate only with Moscow--a demand that implies that the Kabul government is illegitimate or non-existent and that Moscow is the ruling force in the country. Soviet agreement to such negotiations would destroy the Afghan regime, and the rebels have made it clear that the communists would have no role in a new government.

Gorbachev, like his predecessors, treats the rebels as terrorists who live in Pakistan, are financed by the United States and limit themselves to darting across the border periodically to commit hostile acts against Soviet troops and Afghan civilians. The implication is that there is no indigenous revolution--only “outside agitators.”

Hence Gorbachev essentially wants negotiations between the Afghan government and those who harbor the rebels. Since the only rebellion that he recognizes is foreign-financed, the continuation of any revolutionary action is “proof” that foreign intervention is continuing and that Soviet troops are needed to defend against this intervention.

Similarly, when the Soviet Union or Afghanistan calls for a truce, it means that all rebels would stay in Pakistan and that all revolutionary activity inside the country would come to an end. A truce means a consolidation of the communist regime.

There are a great many indications that Gorbachev, despite all the talk of flexibility and of a coalition government, will not accept anything less than a “coalition” that is dominated by the communists and a recognition of their rule in Afghanistan.

Gorbachev has many reasons for his policy. First, Afghanistan is very important to the Soviets in their geopolitical calculations concerning Asia. Some think that the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan because of fear of Islamic fundamentalism inside Soviet borders. But in its domestic propaganda Moscow has failed to capitalize on criticism of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iranian regime, indicating that it considers the Muslim threat small.

Instead, the Soviet Union has been involved in a complex geopolitical game in Asia in which it has been allied with India (and Vietnam) against China and Pakistan. Well before the communist revolution in 1978, Afghanistan was already becoming a Soviet satellite. But the moujahedeen rebellion threatened to take Afghanistan into the Pakistani-Chinese camp. The Soviet Union would never willingly tolerate such a thing.

Second, Gorbachev has a winning hand in Afghanistan. He has pressured the government into following a moderate domestic policy and co-opting mullahs, tribal leaders, peasants and anyone else who can be courted. The Soviet Union is training a new young Afghan elite in Soviet schools, and their fate--indeed, their personal survival--will be tied to the communist regime. And Pakistan knows that it must keep the rebels on a relatively short leash or risk a major blow from the Soviets.

When Gorbachev begins reducing the number of Soviet troops, it is a sign not of retreat but of victory. Total pacification will take decades, but over the long run the Soviet Union’s problem is no more intolerable than the one that the British have in Northern Ireland.

In the long run America should not be totally discouraged by the failure of the anti-communist revolution in Afghanistan. Communist regimes seem to be abandoning traditional collectivization. If so, the moderate industrializing regime that is being established in Kabul is closer, in human-rights terms, to American values than are the Islamic fundamentalist rebels, who often are worse than Khomeini on such questions as women’s rights and education for children.

Our crucial foreign-policy interest in Afghanistan was to warn Moscow to stay out of neighboring Iran during the turmoil of the Khomeini takeover there in 1980. Our secondary interests were to score a propaganda victory over the Soviet Union, to allow Pakistan’s military regime to neutralize Islamic fundamentalism at home by identifying with the rebels, and to make gestures to our Chinese friends when they were in a more anti-Soviet phase. The establishment of an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan was the last thing that we needed.

Essentially all our objectives have been successfully achieved. It would have been better to have a non-fundamentalist, anti-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, but that hope was utopian.