Afghanistan: Soviet view of four-year war

Press, 11 April 1984, Page 16

Afghanistan: Soviet view of four-year war

By

Vladimir Snegiryov,

in Moscow. Mr Snegiryov is a

correspondent of the Soviet newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” and has worked as a journalist in Afghanistan.

I fully share the concern of the author \of the editorial “Russia’s four-yeair war” (“The Press,” February 18) about the future of Afghanistan and the plight of its people. However, I cannot agree with your thesis that the cause of this plight is the presence of a Soviet contingent in Afghanistan. For several years I have been working in Afghanistan as a correspondent of a Soviet youth newspaper and can judge about the situation in that country from my own experience, not from newspaper reports. J am convinced that the main cause of tension in that country is continued counter-revo-lutionary terror. The author of the editorial deplores the fact that the West does not have enough sympathy for the Afghan counter-revolutionaries, whom he sympathetically calls a “guerrilla resistance movement” Thus he creates the impression that the Afghan counter-revolution-aries are lonely and badly armed

guerrillas. The impression is false however. The United States President regularly and openly receives in the White House the Afghan counter-revolutionary leaders and gives them generous aid in the form of arms, ammuniton and money. In February this year President Reagan reiterated American support for Afghan counter-revolution-aries. According to the American press, in 1984 the Pentagon has allocated $125 million out of its budget for subversion against Afghanistan. Well-informed analysts in the United States point out, however, that this sum is just a visible part of the iceberg and that the bulk of American financial aid goes to the Afghan border through secret channels of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon. I have serious misgivings about the author’s efforts to provoke readers’ sympathy for the people who say that they are waging the holy war, or jihad, in Afghanistan and under this pretext destroy everything linked with the Afghan people’s desire to wipe out poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy. When I worked in Afghanistan I visited almost all of the country’s 29 provinces and saw the targets of attacks by the “Guerrilla resistance movement.” They razed and burnt most schools, many hospitals, farms, factories and irrigation facilities.

A woman who took off the yashmak in • Herat risked being killed by the people for whom you are trying to evoke sympathy. Children who disobeyed bandits and went to school in the Kunduz Province had their hands cut off and their eyes gouged. A column of trucks loaded with food was once sent from Kandahar to a remote mountain area where people were dying of hunger. Sappers who drove ahead of the column removed more than 100

plastic mines along the 90-kilo-metre road. Those mines were planted to destroy bread, rice, salt, and tea. It is easier to deceive people and keep them in obedience when they are hungry, scared and illiterate. No wonder one American journalist called the Afghan counterrevolutionaries middle-age fascists. Incidentally, they even do not pretend that they fight for progress. Now, about the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. A statement recently made by the Afghan ' Foreign Ministry emphasised once again that a limited Soviet contingent had been brought into Afghanistan at the request of the country’s legal Government in order to help the people of Afghanistan to defend their freedom and independence from foreign aggression and the attempts to impose on them a proimperialist reactionary regime.

It would be appropriate to recall here that the Soviet Union met that request in December 1979 after long hesitation. Throughout 1978 and 1979, that is right after the April revolution, the Afghan Government had repeatedly asked the Soviet Union to give it help, including military help. It was only when the counterrevolutionary forces had forged a united front with the leading Western powers and Afghanistan faced the risk of losing not only its revolutionary acquisitions, but also its freedom and independence that the Soviet Union, guided by generally accepted standards of international law and in compliance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter, held out a helping hand to its neighbour. The Soviet leaders have never made a secret of the fact they did so also in order to ensure the security of the southern border of their own country. j