ANGOLA MOVES TO MR. REAGAN'S FRONT BURNER
Document Type:
Collection:
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190004-6
Release Decision:
RIFPUB
Original Classification:
K
Document Page Count:
1
Document Creation Date:
December 22, 2016
Document Release Date:
September 27, 2012
Sequence Number:
4
Case Number:
Publication Date:
November 22, 1985
Content Type:
OPEN SOURCE
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Attachment | Size |
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CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190004-6.pdf | 107.65 KB |
Body:
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190004-6
ARUM AP?EATIED
ON PAGE 40
Angola Moves
To Mr. Reagan's
Front Burner
Welcome home from the summit, Mr.
President, and congratulations. You looked
like peace personified, and you did not
give away the store. Now let's put away
the muffler and topcoat?remember, it's
warmer back here in Washington?and
turn all those nice presents from the Gor-
bachevs over to the State Department. It's
time to get back to the foreign-policy head-
aches that pre-summit fever swept away.
For instance, what are you going to do
about the Angola issue, which was at a
lively boil when you stepped on the plane
to Geneva?
Angola is run by an "avowedly Marx-
ist" government, as some meticulous
newspapers put it. Western oil companies.
our own Chevron among them, do a fat
business extracting Angolan natural re-
sources. For this they pay Angola hand-
somely. The Angolan government uses the
money to pay for Cuban troops?some 35,-
000?and Soviet materiel, perhaps as much
as $2 billion worth in the past 18 months.
Angolan leaders say they need this for-
eign army because of a 10-year-old inter-
nal rebellion led by Jonas Savimbi. Mr. Sa-
vimbi's main base of support is among the
Ovimbundu, Angola's largest tribe. He
openly says he is pro-Western. He gets a
large part of his aid from South Africa. He
gets no aid from us. The issue of whether
we should start helping him is up for grabs
for the first time in a decade.
From 1976 on, the Clark amendment
prohibited our aiding Mr. Savimbi's organ-
Capital Chronicle
1. by Suzanne Garment
ization; Unita. This summer Congress re-
pealed the measure. Reps. Claude Pepper
and Jack Kemp immediately introduced a
bill to give Unita $27 million in humani-
tarian aid. Rep. Mark Siljander put in a
bill for the same amount of military assis-
tance. The aid idea's chances in the House
look surprisingly good.
The Reagan administration has re-
sponded to the changing climate with mas-
sive disorder. The State Department has
actively opposed the Pepper bill, saying it
would jeopardize current U.S. efforts to ne-
gotiate with the Angolan government for
withdrawal of the Cuban troops. But re-
WALL STREET JOURNAL
22 November 1985
cently there have been signs of subsurface
movement in the administration.
Secretary of State Georze Shultz is re-
ported to have said that a covert U.S. oper-
ation in AnKola, as opposed to an open one.
might be OR with him. The State Depart-
ment put out a new policy statement say-
ing that the U.S. wants to "be supportive"
of Mr. Savimbi and that the administration
was willing to work out the details with
Congress. A cable bearing word of the pol-
icy shift went out to our diplomats in the
field and gave some of them quite a sur-
prise. At one recent highest-level meeting
on the issue, with Mr. Reagan present, it
took a passionate speech from Mr. Shultz
to buy more time for current negotiations
policy.
Angola may be remote, but this issue is
not. People opposing aid think that helping
Unita would mark us indelibly as allies of
South Africa. People advocating aid say
that doing nothing would reveal us as
frauds who will not put money where our
mouths are.
The preliminary skirmishing has shown
the outlines of each side's public argu-
ment, and each is respectable. The pro-ne-
gotiations case says that when we strip
away all the hopeful talk about multiparty
governing coalitions, Mr. Savimbi cannot
win Angola, especially since U.S. aid to
him will never match the multibillion-dol-
lar Soviet and Cuban support. The only re-
alistic hope of evicting the Cubans is to
deal with the present government in
Luanda. Even if our chances of success
are small, there is no point in making
them even smaller by antagonizing current
Angolan leaders with aid to Unita.
The pro-Savimbi case answers that the
"realists" are not realistic at all. In light
of Angola's ethnic realities, Luanda cannot
wipe out Mr. Savimbi's opposition. The Cu-
bans are not going to be dismissed for
want of work; we aren't ever likely to see
the Luanda citizenry standing at dockside
bidding all the brave Cuban lads a lyr-
ical goodbye. So our current negotiations
with the Marxist regime buy us nothing
and cost us a lot: We miss a chance to
exert real pressure on the Soviets, and to
the ever-attentive Third World we look like
the gutless wonders we are.
The probabilities on this issue are even
more than usually uncertain. It may well
be that there isn't a prayer for stability
in Angola unless the country is partitioned
along ethnic lines. A growing crisis in
South Africa may make the neighbors'
problems look like peanuts. But we can see
one thing about the debate: At bottom it is
a quarrel about whether we should view
our foreign policy as a matter mainly of
constraints or of opportunities.
We have been through a decade in
which we seemed to be permanently on the
wrong side of history and in which our cen-
tral foreign-policy task seemed to be that
of damage limitation. The Reagan elec-
tions of 1980 and 1984 suggested that we
were undergoing a fundamental shift to a
foreign-policy view that takes its main
bearings from its assets rather than its lia-
bilities.
Today it is hard to say how much of a
change there has really been. We don't
know, for instance. whether Mr. Reagan is
returning from Geneva to resume his early
role as a cheerful hawk or whether his de-
light at some small handouts of friendship
from Russia will be enough to make him
shy away from rocking the boat in places
like Angola, either by not aiding Mr. Sa-
vimbi or by giving aid so timid that it
means nothing.
Even through the haze of imperfect
knowledge you can have a hunch on the
Angola issue: If Mr. Reagan decides to
view Mr. Savimbi as a problem rather
than an opening, it is a good bet that peo-
ple looking back on these years will won-
der how he could have let himself miss the
opportunity.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/27 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000302190004-6