WRONG MOVES ON AFGHANISTAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100140004-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: January 26, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/23: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100140004-3
THE NATION
26 January 1980
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FRED HALLIDAY
fghanistan is not, as P, esident Carter would have
us believe, "the greatest threat to world peace
since 1945." Nor, as his pugnacious _adviser Zbi--
niew Brzezinski is quoted in Time assaying, is it
"a watershed event. ' It has, however, been the for
some of the most undiluted irresponsibility and"crass dema-
gogy or. the part of a U.S. Administration for many a long
year. And the U.S. response-rushing to shore up a crew of
petty.tyrants and religious obscurantists in West-Asia-has
sowed the seeds of new international crises inahe future.
The Russians don't need to do anything to take advantage
of their position in Afghanistan to weaken the West's posi-
tion in the "arc of crisis": they just have to sit back, as they
did in Iran, and let the West hang itself.
Looking beyond the confusion of immediate?'events, Nye
should understand several general propositions. First, the
Russian intervention in Afghanistan does not represent any
change in international strategy on their part. Afghanistan is
a country that has, since 1955, been militarily dependent on
the U.S.S.R. It is a country that borders the U.S.S.R. And,
since April 1978, there has been a Soviet-backed regime in
that country. The Russians intervened because the regime of
the incumbent President Hafizullah Amin was tottering. He
was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent
people, and incapable of reaching any settlement of the
country's problems. No one would have thanked the Rus-
sians for not intervening: i.e., for keeping Amin 'in power.
And there is no way, given the international balance of
power, that the Russians could have abandoned.the country
altogether to a triumphant horde of Moslem"insurgents,
who would, in all likelihood, have fallen to" fighting one
another for years to come: It was the internal -iituation in
Afghanistan itself that dictated the Russian intervention, a
situation which, as 1 explained' in an earlier Nation article
(see Halliday, "Afghanistan-A Revolution. Consumes
Itself," November 17, 1979), the Russians were certainly to
'blame in having brought about. Their desire was to stabilize
a situation that had spiraled out of control, not to' make
some further strategic advance. Russia does not have a
Halliday is a fellow of the Transnational Institute,
Amsterdam, and an editorial associate of New Left Review
and MERIP Reports. Ile is the author of Arabia Without,
Sultans: A Political Survey of Instability in the Arab World
(Vintage Books) and Iran: Dictatorship and Development
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To be sure
cannot be p;
has deflectec
where it had,
on the Unit
Tudeh Party-has been seriously compromised. The talk
about the Russians using Afghanistan as a steppingstone is
thus strategic whimsy. The last way to have influenced Iran
was to invade Afghanistan. Nor are the Russians snaking
some major thrust for Persian Gulf oil-,Apart from their
production difficulties, they still have the largest oil output
of any country in the world-I 2.4 million barrels a day. And
all the rhetoric about "warm-water ports" is overblown.
Obviously, the Russians would not refuse an unconditional
offer of a warm-'.eater port any more than the Americans
would, but they already have such facilities in Aden, and
these ports have a lot less significance than.thcy used to have
in a premissile age.
At this juncture, the Russians are not planning a perma-
nent military annexation of Afghanistan.: Nor will they
become involved in a "Vietnam-style situation.". The Rus-
sians appear to be intent on staying long enough to buy time
for the new regime to build itself up, and in particular to
reconstruct the army and the administration. They know
that the mountain tribes will fight if they think the Govern-
ment is weak, and will be much less likely to do so if the
.Government is strong. It is in this psychological-political
dimension, rather than in purely military terms, that the
numerical weight of the Russian involvement must be evalu-
ated. This massive presence does of course entail the risk of
a major nationalist counterreaction, and the Russians are
certainly disliked. But they will do all they can, with arms
and economic inducements, to build up a strong new
Afghan Army, and although the rebellion will take some
years to be reduced, the Russians would hope progressively
to hand over internal security to this new army while contin-
uing their long standing supply of arms, equipment and
officers. For their part, the rebels would have to transform
their whole mode of social organization if they were to sus-
tain a protracted and large-scale war against the Govern-
ment forces.: The reasons why it is not another Vietnam
follow from::this: unlike the National Liberation Front,
which was organized bya political party and had a coherent
revolutionary - ideology,' the rebels an?'--divided among
themselves and cannot sustain the kind of military struggle
needed to undermine permanently the Russian forces. One;-'
cannot help feeling that, beyond the obvious Schadenfreude
T
ofseeing. the Russians in trouble, Americans who use the
Vietnam analogy are trying to debase their former foes,
to equate the Marxist guerrillas of the Mekong Delta with
the ultraconservative tribesmen of the Hindu Kush. If one
adds to this the facts that: (1) the Afghani mountains offer