Russia’s four-year war

Press, 18 February 1984, Page 18

Russia’s four-year war

An apocryphal story from the Vietnam War recorded an American general as observing: “This isn’t much of a war, but it’s the only war we got.” Similar comments, attributed to nameless Soviet generals, have come out from the four years of fighting in Afghanistan. The war itself poses no great problems for the Soviet Union. Perhaps one-twentieth of the Soviet Army and Air Force are serving in Afghanistan, a country with a population no more than a twentieth of that of the Soviet Union. The Soviet forces cannot be driven out by the Afghan resistance movement alone. Soviet casualties — some thousands killed and wounded since the Soviet invasion in December, 1979 — are apparently not causing disquiet inside the Soviet Union.

In exchange for this modest effort, the Soviet forces are gaining combat experience in harsh conditions against an ingenious foe. Conscripts on national service can use Afghanistan to gain experience of exercises in which an enemy shoots back, but with primitive weapons. Soviet weapons — especially helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles — are being tested rigorously by the climate and terrain. The prospect of having a war to fight does no harm for officer recruiting in any army; the continuing level of resistance in Afghanistan is sufficient to give a veneer of credibility to the decades-old Soviet propaganda that the country is ringed with enemies. Only by eternal vigilance, and a readiness to make sacrifices, runs the party line, can the Soviet Union ensure its own survival. Unlike the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviet Union has been able to fight for years with almost total censorship on what is happening inside Afghanistan. Russians are told occasionally that their soldiers are in action against “bandits,” or “mercenaries,” or “C.I.A. agents.” The truth, that Soviet forces are fighting a primitive but widespread resistance movement, that the Russians are an army of occupation in Afghanistan, in a manner as brutal and unjustified as the German occupation of parts of European Russia during the Second World War, remains unknown to the vast majority of the Russian people. The most powerful weapon of a guerrilla resistance movement — an appeal to public opinion among its oppressors — is denied to the Afghans. They may enjoy widespread support among their own people. They cannot reach the Soviet Union. Soviet control of access to Afghanistan means that only occasional Western journalists have been able to gather accurate reports of the sporadic fighting. Many reports reaching the West, like that last week describing the massacre of civilians in an Afghan village by Russian aircraft, come second or third-hand, or filter through weeks after the event as more refugees reach an uncertain haven in Pakistan or Iran. Much of the world, with fresher and more pressing events to claim its attention, events to which reporters and cameramen have access, has turned its back on Afghanistan. The guerrillas there are on their own. Their leaders appear to have recognised their isolation from any substantial prospect of help. Some groups are said to have reached a kind of accommodation

with the occupation troops, much as many Russians once did with the Germans in occupied territory. The majority of Afghans, however, are fighting on. Adversity has helped to patch differences between resistance groups. The war may continue for years yet. Attempts were made last year to find a settlement under the auspices of the United Nations. The effort was doomed, not least because the Afghan resistance was not represented at the talks. The Soviet Union, in a breath-taking distortion of reality, laid down as a condition for a settlement that “all outside interference” in Afghanistan must stop. The Soviet Union itself is the only outsider interfering in Afghanistan in any significant way. Perhaps the only people with a pressing incentive to achieve a negotiated settlement are Afghanistan’s neighbours — Pakistan and Iran — who are forced to be unwilling hosts to about four million refugees. Both countries are unstable, beset by problems of their own. Between them, they have to house and feed about a quarter of Afghanistaii’s population. However remote and insignificant the continued bloodletting in Afghanistan may seem, the world cannot safely ignore a situation that remains a major source of tension between East and West. The war puts Soviet interests into further conflict with Afghanistan’s other neighbours — China, Iran, and Pakistan. It heightens tensions in the Muslim world and brings Soviet military action close to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. Any State that borders the Soviet Union, and is not yet under Soviet domination, must be fearful of the lesson that emerges from the last four years. Better relations between the Soviet Union and the West are unlikely when there is renewed evidence that Russian policy remains unchanged from Tsarist days — to expand its power across its borders wherever there is a possibility of doing so without a major war. As a new leadership emerges in Moscow after the death of Mr Andropov, one of its immediate tasks must be to review the protracted war in Afghanistan. A new Soviet leader might hope to consolidate his position by bringing the fighting to a successful conclusion; any withdrawal that leaves Soviet objectives unfulfilled would be viewed as a sign of weakness by powerful lobbies in the Kremlin. Fresh attempts to negotiate a settlement can be expected, but Soviet intransigence towards allowing Afghans to choose their own rulers is likely to be as rigid as ever. Behind all the considerations of power politics lies the plight of Afghanistan and its people. Life in their rugged, land-locked country was harsh enough without an army of occupation that shows little hesitation in taking cruel reprisals against civilians and their vital crops and livestock. Other peoples who have been driven from their homes by civil war or foreign invasion — in Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia and Central America — have their enthusiastic advocates and partisans in Western societies. Much of the world refuses to consider seriously the fate of the Afghanis. Yet it can only be from a show of revulsion towards Soviet actions that any prospect of influencing Russian behaviour in its newest satellite can come.