Moscow Expected to Honor Afghan Agreements

Despite vehement Soviet protests that the United States and Pakistan are violating the Geneva agreements on Afghanistan, Moscow is likely to remain committed to the accords, Soviet and Western sources believe.

In part, they say, the level of this commitment simply reflects the lack of alternatives for Moscow in extricating its forces from a messy, unpopular conflict now generally acknowledged within the Soviet hierarchy as a foreign policy debacle.

Under the terms of the April 14 agreements, Soviet forces must complete their pullout by Feb. 15, 1989.

However, the strength of commitment to the Geneva process also stems from the Soviet belief that the agreement could be a model for resolving other regional conflicts.

As such, it constitutes an important milestone in an emerging Soviet foreign policy increasingly characterized by a desire for constructive engagement.

Achieve More by Dialogue

“There’s the sense now they can achieve more in a reasoned dialogue than by sitting there slab-faced as they have in the past,” a senior Western diplomat commented.

As Soviet disillusionment grows with its costly, largely unproductive efforts to export Marxism to the Third World, Moscow seems to place special significance on two aspects of the Geneva agreements:

-- The idea of low-profile cooperation with the United States in defusing such regional conflicts. The United States and the Soviet Union both act as guarantors to the Afghan accords, although neither formally sat at the negotiating tables in Geneva.

-- The active role of the United Nations in bringing about the Afghan settlement and policing its implementation.

The importance of the Afghan formula is also fostered by the Soviet conclusion that neither superpower has achieved much in its Third World ventures, so both have something to gain in resolving them.

“Neither of us has fared very well,” said Andrei Y. Shoumikhin, head of the Middle East Department at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada here.

In an interview, Shoumikhin blamed Soviet failures on the misplaced idea that newly independent African and Asian nations would swiftly embrace Marxist models.

“Revolutionary slogans were seen as reflecting revolutionary change that wasn’t there,” noted Shoumikhin, who has studied leftist movements in both Africa and Asia during the 1970s and 1980s. “We’re taking a much more serious, careful view of such events now.”

While the Soviets have a long history of suspicion toward the United Nations and initially resisted the world body’s offers to mediate the Afghan crisis, they now see it as potentially playing a variety of positive roles.

Soviets Backed U.N. Resolution

In the area of regional conflicts, the Soviets backed U.N. Resolution 598, which called for a cease-fire in the eight-year-old Persian Gulf War and is now seen as a formula for ending the war.

A Soviet decision that the 13-year-old Angolan civil war should be resolved politically rather than militarily was one element generating a breakthrough in that crisis.

Pressure from Moscow has also helped Vietnam decide to begin the withdrawal of its estimated 120,000 troops from Cambodia.

The new Soviet enthusiasm for the United Nations was described by Shoumikhin as “a change whose time has come.”

Since Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power 3 1/2 years ago, Moscow has paid the United Nations $50 million in membership dues that were in arrears, although it still owes $172 million in contributions for peacekeeping forces.

As the pace of complex arms control negotiations slows, some analysts see the prospect of greater U.S. and Soviet involvement on regional issues as a key factor in sustaining improved East-West relations over the short term.

“They (regional issues) could well become the primary focus of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in 1989,” noted Francois Heisbourg, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.

In addition to Moscow’s broader hopes for the Afghan agreements, Western analysts assess events in Afghanistan during the three months since the agreements came into force as disappointing but not disastrous for the Soviets.

The Soviet news agency Tass, in a dispatch this month from the Afghan capital, Kabul, reported that 448 people had died in fighting between government forces and Afghan resistance groups since they began withdrawing their forces May 15.

However, the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Boris Gromov, told a group of Western reporters that “about 10” Soviet soldiers had been killed during the first six weeks of the withdrawal period, a figure that compared with the casualty rate of about 150 Soviet deaths per month during the war.

Soviet leaders have warned that sharply deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan could force a review of the Soviet withdrawal timetable, but few believe it would halt or reverse the pullout.

“Going back in would have a tremendously destructive effect on everything Gorbachev is trying to do,” said Heisbourg, referring to changes in foreign policy.

His remarks come amid conflicting reports about the pace of the Soviet withdrawal and steadily increasing pressure from the Afghan resistance groups on the Soviet-backed Kabul government.

Report ‘Pure Slander’

Pakistan’s President Zia ul-Haq recently cited unconfirmed reports that Moscow had reversed its troop withdrawal and was sending forces back into Afghanistan, a charge hotly dismissed as “pure slander” by the Soviet chief of staff, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev.

And on Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign minister in effect contradicted Zia’s remarks. “There were earlier indications that there were some interruptions in the withdrawal,” Sahabzada Yaqub Khan told reporters after meeting in Washington with Secretary of State George P. Shultz. “This impression has since been dispelled and our views and those of the United States are exactly the same.”

U.S. officials had said they were assured by Moscow that the withdrawal was continuing on schedule.

To maintain the agreed timetable, half the estimated 115,000 Soviet troops should be out of the country by Aug. 15.

As the Soviets move to extricate themselves from Afghanistan, the resistance has increased its pressure on the country’s major population centers, including Kabul. Rocket attacks have become a common occurrence in the capital.

In June, resistance forces reportedly captured their first provincial capital at Kalat in Zabul province, but are believed to have lost the town again when resistance factions began fighting each other for the spoils of victory.

Despite initial predictions by the moujahedeen that they would quickly seize major cities as the Soviets withdraw, they have so far failed to do so.

However, the Kabul regime’s ability to hold out after the Soviet departure remains doubtful.

Even some Soviet officials now openly admit that survival of the Kabul government is questionable.

Soviet Gen. Kim Tsagolov, in an interview with the Soviet magazine Ogonyok, recently questioned whether the Afghan government forces could repel a major resistance offensive.

As military pressure intensifies on the Kabul government, the Soviets have escalated their own diplomatic offensive, charging Pakistan and the United States with violating the agreements.

At least twice in recent weeks, deputy foreign minister Yuli M. Vorontsov has summoned Pakistan’s ambassador, Shahid Amin, to protest alleged Pakistani aid to the resistance. The Soviets then called on U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. to exert American pressure on Pakistan.