Conflicting Signals From Every Side in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan, eight years old next month, goes on as though it were a malevolent force of nature. A few weeks ago in Peshawar, Pakistan, I saw photographs, just hand-carried in, of a newly bombed village near Herat in the northwest. One showed a family sitting in their house overtaken by death, as in Pompeii. In another, a dozen or more youngsters were laid out for burial. Around Peshawar, the moujahedeen resistance fighters moved back and forth across the border and some of the more than 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan lived for the day they could go home.

There is a grinding sameness in the struggle, as there is in the Afghanistan debate that resumes in the U.N. General Assembly next week--and as there has been in the negotiations the United Nations has conducted with Kabul and Pakistan for five years about Soviet withdrawal and a peace settlement.

But there are also striking new elements, signs of change. Unfortunately, they point in different directions. The regime installed by the Soviet Union in Kabul has offered reconciliation, with amnesty and high position in a coalition government, to freedom fighters and leaders who come into the fold. Moscow, in the spirit of glasnost , asserts that it favors self-determination for the Afghans --not through elections, still less by voting under international supervision, but by traditional consultation of tribal elders, the jirga , leading to consensus.

The Soviets say quietly that their man, Najib, and his predecessor, Babrak Karmal, might well not find a place in such a picture. General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev has more than hinted at his readiness to see the 74-year-old former King Mohammed Zahir Shah return from exile in Rome as a reassuring, unifying transitional head of state. How that would happen is not clear. Najib, head of the ruling party, has assumed the presidency.

Pakistan seems more disposed than ever to consider compromise. The Afghans it shelters, the largest refugee community in the world, although taken in as kinsmen, are a burden. To be sure, they have brought Pakistan the good will of the United States plus billions of dollars in military and economic aid that would not have been forthcoming had Pakistan refused to take a stand against the Soviet invasion. But all this year, bomb blasts bringing death and damage to Pakistan’s big cities, laid at the door of Kabul’s secret police, have aroused animosity against the refugees as a source of danger. More vocally now, Pakistanis want their government to be more “flexible” in bargaining with Kabul to send the refugees home. Another new factor is Moscow’s insistence about wanting to withdraw troops as soon as possible, with only assurances that withdrawal not be followed by a blood bath, that the new government not be hostile and that there be no intervention to tilt Afghanistan’s nonalignment.

The Soviet stance is plausible. It is embellished with admission that the invasion was a mistake and the justification that in December, 1979, the Soviet Union was acting defensively against renegade clients who were opening the door to “imperialistic aggression.” But the logic is thin. There has never been a government hostile to the Soviets and the moujahedeen accept the impossibility of charting an anti-Soviet course. They call Moscow’s intervention completely unprovoked and not to be justified by the mistakes it made in playing its Afghan pawns.

One hears the hypothesis that the Soviet Union, a great power not given to adventurism, would not heedlessly have sent its own army against an independent Islamic neighbor, but would have moved only for the gravest reasons of state. These are not hard to imagine. In 1979 Iran was a revolutionary bedlam quite possibly sliding into chaos. The Soviets have long sought influence in this rich, strategic territory and have even tried to break off pieces for themselves. The Russian drive to the south is not a figment of the imagination. It was expressed when Stalin in 1941 accepted Hitler’s invitation to join the German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact, on the condition, among others, that “the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is recognized as the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union.”

By Dec. 24, 1979, six weeks of American impotence in the Tehran hostage crisis showed conclusively that the Soviet Union could move with impunity. Not into the hornet’s nest of Iran, uncontrollable and unpredictable, but into Afghanistan, as a sure thing. The Kremlin had trusted agents there who would invite it to save the people from counterrevolution. Access was easy. Soviet development aid had built a fine road straight to Kabul and the Red Army had immense airlift capability. Moslem soldiers from Soviet Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan would be a friendly spearhead. There would be no significant resistance and the prize was physical control of a country that could be a stepping stone should circumstances one day offer the opportunity politically or militarily to penetrate Iran. Serious miscalculation. The Afghan people who have been fighting invaders since Alexander the Great, rose against them.

The cost to the Soviet Union has been much higher than anticipated; but has it been high enough to make Moscow reach for any face-saving expedient to get out? Estimates suggest a Soviet loss, in eight years of war, of more than 10,000 dead and many more wounded. That may not be entirely unacceptable to a great military machine gaining experience and testing equipment in its first real engagements since World War II.

The political price has not been excessive. Domestically, the Kremlin has had little or no trouble. Abroad, the invasion cost it American participation in the 1980 Olympics but has not impeded the pursuit of far-reaching agreements with the Reagan Administration. China, also bitterly opposed to the intervention, is currently engaged in normalizing relations with its old adversary. And the opprobrium heaped on it in the U.N. General Assembly year after year is largely platonic. It is borne with equanimity. One Soviet diplomat at the United Nations remarked, shrugging his shoulders, “It took us 20 years to pacify Central Asia.” (Nothing has made Moscow give up the northern Japanese islands).

Further complicating the search for a settlement, the only systematic talks have not included the moujahedeen. For all their internal squabbles, they are united in demanding the unconditional departure of Soviet forces and in rejecting any dealing, let alone cooperation, with the Kabul regime. If the Russians fear a blood bath, they say, let them take their Afghans home with them. Total withdrawal means leaving no Trojan horse behind, no military bases and no Soviet presence in the Vakhan Corridor that touches China and separates the Soviet Union from Pakistan.

This is not simply bravado. The moujahedeen appear to have fought the Soviet army to a standstill, specifically breaking a “reconciliation offensive” last spring. They control large areas and, having received quantities of American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles last year, they speak happily of the “Stinger effect” that keeps enemy planes at a distance. Response to Kabul’s invitation has been negligible. However, some refugees have returned to their villages--or what is left of them--in liberated territory. Guerrilla field commanders of different political factions are beginning to coordinate their operations as well as to administer sizeable areas. They may be fashioning the core of an effective, popular postwar government.

All this is to say that the moujahedeen are indispensable to the peace process. They have held aloof--refusing to negotiate with Kabul on Kabul’s terms and denied direct talks with Moscow. But without them there seems little prospect of success. They cannot be defeated with the level of forces the Kremlin appears willing to commit. And if, which seems unlikely, a weary Pakistan were to try to push the moujahedeen and the refugees back across the border, they have the weapons and the will to resist. Despite some Pakistani fears that the refugees may stay forever, those who know them best say they will go home as soon as they feel safe there--and not before.

Defeat is a bitter pill for a great power. The United States swallowed it in Vietnam. The Soviet Union may still believe that it can prevail in Afghanistan. The steadfastness of the “mouj” and their friends could disillusion Moscow and clear the way to real peace.