Soviet Lessons of Afghanistan Assure Pullout Will Go On

The Soviet Union’s announcement of a “pause” in the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and of a tougher military stance there is just a temporary bluff aimed at keeping its client regime in power until its soldiers leave.

A year ago, Deputy Foreign Minister Yuli Vorontsov told a State Department official that the Soviets would leave Afghanistan, but not “hanging from helicopters.” The current moves are aimed at preventing a Saigon-like collapse of the Kabul regime before the Feb. 15th withdrawal deadline. The Soviets are “bombing Hanoi” in a last-act face-saving show of resolve, as President Richard Nixon did before removing U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1973.

The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is a firm one with broad support among the Soviet people and ruling circles. The Soviet government will not start off its relations with the Bush Administration by reneging on the most important commitment it has made in decades within a month of the U.S. presidential inauguration.

Furthermore, in conversations with Soviet citizens this past summer in Moscow, I found unanimous condemnation of the decision to send Soviet troops to Afghanistan and a clear determination to disentangle the Soviet Union from domestic developments there.

The major difference was the same as that between radical and liberal critics of the American presence in Vietnam. Dissidents condemned the war as criminal aggression that exposed the true nature of the system. Establishment figures, on the other hand, echoed a letter from the Central Committee to all Communist Party members, which called the intervention a mistake due to flaws in analysis and a closed policy process.

Public opinion, which has become more vocal and volatile as Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev mobilizes it against the bureaucracy, would cry out in anguish against any such reversal in the decision to withdraw Soviet troops. A turnaround in Afghanistan would thus also be a turnaround for Gorbachev’s reforms, to which all other policies are now subordinated.

In fact, these reforms and the related “new thinking” in foreign policy partly derive from an analysis of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. Official Soviet analysts have drawn three main lessons from Afghanistan.

The first is that it is not possible to establish socialism or a “socialist-oriented state” in a backward country by imposing the rule of a militarized Marxist-Leninist party. This conclusion derives from other experiences in the Third World as well. Instead, the Soviet Communist Party has returned to the classical Marxist idea that capitalist development must precede socialist transformation. An economist at Moscow’s prestigious Institute for the Study of the World Economy and International Affairs was concerned not with whether Afghanistan could build socialism, but with whether it had enough of a national market and an entrepreneurial class to develop capitalism. She hoped for American collaboration in strengthening these institutions.

The second lesson is that foreign policy decision-making must be opened up to wider participation. Contrary to the claims made since 1980--that the decision to send Soviet troops to Afghanistan followed broad discussion--the Communist Party now says the decision was made in haste and secrecy by only five people. This group did not consult academic institutes, the Central Committee staff nor the embassy in Kabul before making the decision. This rewriting of history may be as distorted as the previous version, but it is serving as an argument to open up the policy process to new institutions such as specialized commissions of the Supreme Soviet.

Nevertheless, the opening is strictly limited. An international relations specialist enthusiastically told me that public discussion of past mistakes in foreign policy was not possible, but when I asked him about present mistakes, he laughed and said, “You expect too much.”

Finally, the failure of overwhelming force to subdue such a weak, disorganized opposition has provided a sober lesson in the limits of military power. In an authoritative article in Kommunist, the party’ theoretical journal, Izvestia commentator Alexander Bovin has compared the Soviet experience in Afghanistan to that of the United States in Vietnam and Iran--all situations where, he writes, we can see that “power becomes powerless.”

What the official analysts still will not or cannot say, however, is what the dissidents--and the Afghans--see clearly. The Soviet Union failed because it took the wrong side: its leaders analyzed the conflict through the categories of left and right, progressive and reactionary, East and West, rather than viewing the situation in its own terms. As a member of the independent peace group Trust told me, “Afghanistan shows that the so-called bipolar approach to local conflict is wrong.” And he added, “This is a good lesson not only for the Soviet Union, but for the United States as well.”