Moscow pours more forces, equipment into Afghanistan

Press, 8 February 1980, Page 5

Moscow pours more forces, equipment into Afghanistan

NZPA-Reuter Islamabad

Th j international repercussions of the crisis of Afghanistan widened yesterday with new signs of its impact on world power politics and increasing concern over the plight of the growing army of Afghan refugees. Reuter correspondents inside Afghanistan reported that six weeks after the Soviet intervention, Moscow was still pouring troops and military equipment into the country.

There was evidence, too, of new determination on the part of rebels fighting the Soviet-backed Government of Babrak Karmal and more expressions of worry in

neighbouring Pakistan, where President Mohammed Zia-Ul-Haq proposed that an international peace force should replace Moscow’s troops in Afghanistan. The crisis had further diplomatic consequences as the soviet Union reacted strongly to the criticism of Moscow issued this week by France and West Germany. The Soviet Government newspaper, “Izvestia," warned the two Western countries that they would be

threatening detente in Europe if they succumbed to American pressure for a hard anti-Soviet line over Afghanistan. The French President (Mr Valery Giscard d’Estaing) and the West German Chan-

cellor (Mr Helmut Schmidt) had ended their latest meeting in Paris by declaring there would be permanent damage to detente if Soviet troops were not withdrawn from Afghanistan. The two Western leaders both later assured President Carter of their support “when the going is rough,” the White House has said. Additional indications of wintry diplomatic weather ahead came by way of a Paris newspaper account quoting the Soviet President (Mr Leonid Brezhnev) as saying Moscow would never

give up Afghanistan. In Islamabad an American official, announcing a S2IM American contribution to relief for the 700,000 Afghan refugees estimated to be in Pakistani camps, said more aid would probably be needed later. The latest signs of the Soviet. military build-up in Afghanistan included the sight,

reported by a Reuter correspondent from the southern city of Kandahar, of a seemingly endless line of olivecoloured vehicles rumbling through a rocky mountain pass and causing terror among Afghan witnesses.

This Soviet force was seen only 150 km from the Pakistani border. Farther north, on Afghanistan’s border with the Soviet Union, another Reuter correspondent watched a convoy of 46 Soviet armoured personnel carriers, 250 trucks, and five large tanks heading into Afghan territory.

There was some indication of civilian hostility to the growing Soviet presence. At Kandahar, a protest strike which first shut down the city's markets on January 30 was still in progress.

Across the border in Pakistan, a spokesman for the newly formed alliance of Afghan insurgent groups said it expected to set up a provisional government next month to rival the Kabul Administration. Evidence of further conflict within Afghanistan came from Kandahar, where informed sources said Mus-

lim insurgents now controlled most of the country’s central province of Uruzgan. In Islamabad, diplomatic representatives of India and Pakistan assured one another of their peaceful intentions despite their differences over Afghanistan. ,

But a member of the Indian delegation said the American response to the Afghan crisis had infinitely complicated relations’ between Islamabad and New Delhi. Pakistan’s General Zia told Indian reporters in Rawalpindi that their country should join the international community in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The' latest attack on the intervention came when socialist leaders from 30 countries meeting in Vienna condemned it and called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. A statement issued at a two-day meeting of leaders of the Socialist International, which groups 63 social democratic parties, said the Soviet intervention had violated international law and put international detente in danger.