Afghanistan Was Misread on All Sides

History does not repeat itself. But some historical conditions do. The possible Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988; the American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973-75: Is it the same kind of a cruel dilemma, and failure?

Yes and no. “A great country can have no such thing as a little war,” the Duke of Wellington said 160 years ago. This is even truer today. In our times, wars between states, involving professional soldiers, have often become wars between entire peoples, involving hordes of guerrillas (the very word guerrilla means “little war”). Once the armies of a state confront the armed opposition of a large portion of a population, they face new conditions of warfare for which they are mentally and physically often unequipped.

The armed forces of a great modern power are not powerless. The United States could have subdued Indochina--if it had chosen to drop nuclear bombs on Hanoi or invaded North Vietnam itself. The Soviet Union could have subdued Afghanistan--if it had poured into it a million soldiers, not 115,000. In both cases this was impossible because of public opinion--which, albeit in different ways, exists in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States.

But now for the differences. There was a South Vietnamese government accepted by the majority of its own people. But it eventually lost most of that often-unspoken support as those people became aware of the American willingness to negotiate with North Vietnam.

The Afghan government sustained by the Soviet Union seems to have very little popular support and Moscow has not been able to establish any kind of negotiation with the fighting opposition. (We must also remember that during the Vietnam War, the Soviets gave significantly few arms to the North Vietnamese, whereas the American support to the Afghan guerrillas has become significant and, in certain instances, perhaps even decisive.)

There is a greater difference. Afghanistan is not Indochina. Asia is a vast continent, without any of the relative geographic and cultural and racial homogeneity of Europe. The history, the character, the situation of Afghanistan and Vietnam differ far more than, say, those of Scotland and Bulgaria. Among other things, Vietnam was for many decades part of a European colonial empire. Even in the heyday of imperialism, Afghanistan was never conquered or subdued by a white nation. In the 19th Century, the British were twice forced to give up their forays into Afghanistan, and in 1921, at the peak of their power, (and when their Soviet opponents in Central Asia were down and out) were pushed out again. (It is worth noting that in both world wars the government and people of Afghanistan were strongly pro-German.)

Astonishing, in retrospect, has been the American reaction of both the Carter and Reagan Administrations to the Soviet invasion of Kabul in 1979. Both overlooked the fact that the Soviets had replaced one tribal Communist Party leader and his group with another (after a bloody fight among those tribal chieftains themselves). We were also told by our “experts” that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, of course, but the first step of their planned march to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. It was nothing of the kind. What worried the Soviets was the same kind of fierce Muslim nationalism that had led to our humiliations in Iran; while Iran is many thousands of miles from the United States, this kind of nationalism could spill over into the populations of the Muslim-inhabited republics of the Soviet Union itself.

But those Soviet “experts” who convinced Leonid Brezhnev to go into Afghanistan were even worse than ours at giving advice. The Soviets have done very poorly in Afghanistan. They must cut their losses.

This is all to the good. Therefore it is in our interest to further, and to welcome, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan without any American interference. Contrary to the position of President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, all American support to the Afghan guerrillas ought to stop--that is, completely stop--not after but during, and possibly even before, the withdrawal of the Russian troops. We ought to remember that the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and to their local satellites had begun well before the first American arms shipments got there; it is likely to continue, in whatever form, after their American supplies stop.

To call the Afghan guerrillas “freedom fighters” is just as absurd as to call the Contras’ effort in Nicaragua the local equivalent of 1776. The Afghans are tribal patriots, incarnating a fierce religious nationalism that may menace the integrity and the cohesion of the Soviet Union itself. But this should be no great comfort to the United States (whose integrity is not menaced, and whose interests are, at the most, only indirectly threatened by the government of Nicaragua.)

Moscow would now willingly settle for an Afghanistan that is neither communist nor anti-Soviet. In this respect the Soviet policy approximates their experiences with some of their other European neighbors: security is guaranteed by the existence of non-communist, though not anti-Russian, governments such as that of Finland. That “Finlandization” of neighbor states is in the interest of both the Soviet Union and of the United States.

But the big problem remains--the Afghans are not Finns.