RETREAT FROM KABUL
Radek Sikorski argues that the
Soviet Union should be pressed to withdraw completely
NOT a single Soviet tank has yet crossed the River Oxus back into the Soviet Union and there are already myths being created about the reasons for the SOviet pull-out from Afghanistan. The Times wrote re- cently that 'one of the reasons —,perhaps the only reason — why there is now a real prospect of the Red Army leaving Kabul after mote than eight years is because its presence there has been consistently and single-mindedly opposed by international opinion'. This is sheer illusion. If it had, not been for the unbelievably brave resistance of the Afghans, if Afghanistan had been pacified quickly in the way Hungary. and Czechoslovakia had been before, the issue would have been off the agenda years ago and the country would have been 'normal- ised' with little protest from the West. Indeed, the Sunday Times. reported .the meeting between Chairman Gorbachev and Major-General Najibullah, which con- firmed that a withdrawal was inevitable, as taking place in Tashkent,, 'the ancient Russian city'. Muslith Tashkent was con- quered by the Russian Empire in 1865. The Soviet leadership has decided to disengage itself from the war much less in deference to half-baked, editorials in the Western press (the bad publicity in the Third World and espeeially in the Muslim world probably weighed more in, their calculations) than in response to the worsening position of the Soviet forces on the ground during 1987 and 1988. Western intelligence sources estimated that since the introduction of the American anti- aircraft missiles in October 1986 the Soviet and Afghan airforce has. been losing on average one aircraft or helicopter, per day. Even if this is greatly exaggerated, the Soviets have certainly lost more aircraft since the introduction of Stinger than they had done in the six years of the.war before it appeared on the battlefield. Such waste Of equipment and pilots would probably in itself have been intolerable, but it has also reversed the limited gains on the grOund that the Soviet Army had obtained at a great cost in lives and equipment prior to 1987. ,
The effective anti-aircraft missiles have neutralised Soviet domination of the air
and brought the conflict back into the 19th-century mode, which suits the AfghanS. The missileS have made the blockade of regime-held towns and garri- sons much easier for the resistance, and their relief much more difficult for the Soviets. WithOut the use of helicopters for escorting convoys and dropping special forces for ainbushes against the guerrillas the Soviet, Arthy needed more infantry (115,000 troops is not much to hold a mountainous country the size of France) Simply to hold on, to its gatrisons. The guerrillas have now been supplied with heavy artillery pieceS for preciSion shelling. The Soviet command must have realised that their •forces confined in posts and bases would make vulnerable targetS to long-range shelling, whereas the guerrillas roaming the countrySide would be more elusive than ever: The only alternative before the Soviet command was to escalate the war by doubling or trebling the number of their troops and pay the increased political and economic cost, without any guarantee of speedy victory. Whereas in 1986 it seemed that a few more years of attrition and the mujahedin would be defeated or made politically irrelevant in the mountains, in 1988 it became obvious that it might take decades to finish them off, and that is why the Soviet Union is calling it quits.
By refusing to stop propping up the Afghan communists the Soviet Union is saying, in effect, that ten rifles on each side is equivalent to no rifles at all: If for rifles we substitute `intercontinental ballistic missiles', the dangers of such reasoning on the part of one of the superpowers are readily apparent. The Soviet Union appears to be applying reverse kinds of logic depending on what suits its strategic interests. In this case, the price will be paid only by the Afghans.
The Russians ate not being good sports: they will not admit defeat, and will not negotiate an orderly transfer of power in Kabul to the mujahedin. There are some good reasons for this. The communist PDPA regime is entrenched in the Cities and main bases, and it looks as if the city of Mazar-e-Sharif near the Soviet border is
being prepared as their fall-back capital. The Russians must be hoping that fear of punishment will give a new unity to the communists so that they may remain as the strongest faction left on the field for at least some time. This would embarrass the West, camouflage the Soviet failure, and allow time to build a cordon sanitaire along the Oxus River to seal the border in case the PDPA is finally defeated. When the British expeditionary force departed from Kabul in January 1842 only to be annihi- lated in the gorges of Khord Kabul and Jekdalek, the puppet king Shah Soojah, whom they had invaded to install, survived their defeat. As soon as the foreign enemy was vanquished the temporary Afghan coalition broke up and Shah Soojah re- mained strong enough to survive in his Kabul fortress for several months. Kabul is again a fortress, and the guerrillas are as divided as their ancestors were.
On the other hand, if the communists are to be wiped out the Soviets are missing a chance to establish a modus vivendi with whoever replaces them. The guerrillas have declared that they would not stop fighting the Soviet Union until it pays damages for the estimated 1,240,000 Afghans killed and the widespread de- vastation of the country. If the Soviet leadership is indeed worried that the victo- rious Afghans will want to help their Muslim brothers in Soviet Central Asia, it is, by refusing to negotiate a peace treaty, giving the Afghans a good reason for seeking revenge.
The communist regime may well cave in soon; if the rate of defections from the Afghan army (which has shot up in the last few weeks) is anything to go by, it may collapse faster than anyone expects. Most government, army and even party officials in Kabul have always hedged their bets and kept in contact with both sides in the war. When the guerrillas appear at the gates it may suddenly appear that apart from a small core of regime zealots everyone was secretly working for the resistance all along. The Russians may soon discover that it is not implements of war that give power, but the loyalty of the men operat- ing them. If the arms that they are current- ly pouring into Afghanistan are taken by defecting units to their opponents they may soon find themselves attacked with their own hardware.
The West must remain vigilant: firstly, the Soviet army must withdraw com- pletely. Gas fields and pipelines which the Soviet Union has been exploiting must be transferred back to Afghan control. The Soviet Union must leave the Wakhan corridor — the long valley stretching to the Chinese border — which it annexed in all but name in 1979, expelling all its rightful inhabitants. Secondly, any attempt by the Soviet Union to annex any of Afghanis- tan's northern provinces should meet with a vigorous response from the West, even if the Soviets engineer a bogus referendum
on . the model . of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940. Thirdly, it should.be made clear that any attempt to reintroduce Soviet force into Afghanistan, either in the form of a new invasion or as cross-border bombing, would not be tolerated.
`The sun of Freedom has risen over Afghanistan, and no one will be able to extinguish it,' declared the late Leonid Brezhnev in 1980 at a welcoming ceremony for the then Afghan communist leader Babrak Karmal. Well, the sun of Soviet fortunes now seems distinctly dimmer, and not only over Afghanistan. Millions of Eastern European hearts are beating fas- ter.
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