It’s Probably Back to the Future in Afghanistan : Washington and Moscow are wise to disengage from this vicious conflict

In a further clearing of the agenda of contentious Cold War issues, the United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to halt all arms shipments to their respective clients in Afghanistan by Jan. 1. That will be a dozen years almost to the day after the Soviet invasion ignited a war that has so far consumed an estimated 1 million lives.

The arms control agreement is to be accompanied by a joint effort to achieve a cease-fire and foster a political climate that would allow a transitional government to conduct free elections.

This is all very high-minded. If Afghanistan were a country whose disparate factions are sincerely interested in achieving representative government through democratic choice, grounds for optimism might exist. Unfortunately, tragically, Afghanistan is not such a country.

The best that can be expected now is that the accord reached in Moscow will allow the major powers to disengage from a situation both have grown uncomfortable with.

Given the weapons already in the hands of both the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the anti-government forces, and the near-certainty that Iran and Pakistan will continue to provision their friends among the rebels, the likelihood is that this brutal civil war will drag on for years.

The Afghanistan war never really divided into a contest neatly pitting Afghan communists and their Soviet allies against a unified anti-communist opposition, “freedom fighters,” as President Ronald Reagan liked to call them. Afghanistan is a tribal country, and as in all tribal societies its politics largely reflect the imperatives of blood and clan. The half-dozen or so main rebel groups have never been able to agree on a common strategy, common leadership or common goals; trust has never been present at their deliberations. There has never been agreement that the fight was for a free and unified--let alone democratic--Afghanistan. Instead there has been constant maneuvering to try to determine which faction would have a decisive say in the post-communist allocation of power.

When the Soviet Union completed its disengagement from Afghanistan in February, 1989, it was widely assumed that the client regime it left behind in Kabul could survive for only a few months. That President Najibullah remains in office says much about the divisions among his enemies.

Those enemies lately may have spent more time battling each other than the central government. Broadly, they break into two camps--moderates supported by the United States and those who seek a fundamentalist-dominated Islamic state similar to Iran’s revolutionary republic.

The fundamentalists have benefited significantly from having sympathizers in neighboring Pakistan’s armed forces, because--at Pakistan’s insistence--it is through the Pakistani military that the bulk of U.S.-supplied weapons has been channeled.

The outlook is bleak in the extreme. Anarchy and violence are spreading, and the breakdown of security has forced curtailment of humanitarian operations by neutral agencies like the United Nations and the International Red Cross. “The war-torn countryside,” as Times correspondent Mark Fineman reports from Afghanistan, “is fast becoming a land of a thousand kings and a thousand armies, ruled by no one.” The level of cruelty and destructiveness that has occurred evokes chilling images of Germany during the Thirty Years War.

Washington and Moscow are wise to try to disengage from this vicious conflict, and certainly they--with the United Nations--should exert every possible influence, on Afghans and external parties alike, in behalf of a political settlement.

But the severe limits of that influence, especially on those fundamentalist forcesthat despise and reject the very idea of political compromise, must be recognized.

Afghanistan arouses American humanitarian concerns. But realism also compels recognizing that what happens there--at least for now--stops well short of being a vital national interest.