Afghanistan

Abstract

WHEN US AMBASSADOR DUBS was killed recently during an Afghan assault on the Ambassador's kidnappers, Americans were shocked by the hand-in-glove role played by Soviet security advisors on the scene and in positions of responsibility, advising and cooperating with Afghan security officials who authorized the final fatal rush. They need not have been, because the nature of the Soviet role in the new, pro-Soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was clearly signalled last autumn by President Brezhnev during the visit to Moscow of Afghan President Taraki. Toasting Taraki on the occasion of the signing of a new Soviet-Afghan friendship treaty, Brezhnev remarked that: traditional good relations between our two countries have taken on a qualitatively different character. (Emphasis added.) We can assume that President Brezhnev knew whereof he spoke. After all, the conclusion of the treaty and the flood of Soviet advisors into Afghanistan so soon after the bloody takeover in Kabul by the minuscule People's Party, aided by Soviet-trained Afghan Army officers, and coupled with the replacement of the traditional red, black, and green flag with a solid red one-all this could not be without special significance. Indeed, the new leaders in Kabul frankly acknowledged that their revolution was a continuation of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The lesson for the rest of us is that history (especially along the Soviet borders) does move in certain orderly ways and according to some very compelling, if not inexorable, laws of strategy which, like the laws of physics, can be ignored only at great peril.