Achievement in Afghanistan : The End of Occupation Was Our Goal, Not Postwar Perfection

Just as the British, at the height of their empire in the 19th Century, found Afghanistan an inhospitable place for an unwanted army of occupation, so today have the Soviets.

Nearly 8 1/2 years after the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in one of the most flagrant acts of international aggression since World War II, Moscow seems to have finally learned that it is one thing to install a government in Kabul but quite another to rule the Afghan people.

The Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, ratified in the accords signed in Geneva on April 14, constitutes a truly historic development. Not since 1955, when the Red Army left Austria, have Soviet troops been withdrawn from an occupied country that was not part of the Kremlin’s sphere of dominance in Eastern Europe.

If Moscow honors the terms of the agreements, the accords should produce immediate and substantial benefits. Thus a Soviet withdrawal would make possible the emergence of a government in Kabul that reflects the will and wishes of the Afghan people. It would substantially diminish the scale of the fighting and the levels of destruction in Afghanistan. It would facilitate the return of millions of refugees. It would remove a major Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf and reduce Soviet pressures on Pakistan. It would enhance the prospects for political settlements of other regional disputes. It should facilitate a marked improvement in Soviet-American relations. And it presumably would represent a welcome recognition on the part of the Kremlin leadership that the dispatch of the Red Army into neighboring countries is not a productive way to advance Soviet interests.

The Soviet decision to call it quits in Afghanistan is a tribute to the courageous Afghan people. Pakistan’s stalwart support for the Afghan resistance and its generous hospitality toward more than 3 million Afghan refugees have also been instrumental in thwarting Soviet designs. In the United Nations overwhelming majorities have regularly condemned Soviet aggression, further adding to the pressures on the Soviet Union to withdraw.

A number of nations, including the United States, have provided more tangible forms of support for the freedom fighters, thus giving the moujahedeen the military capacity to deprive the Red Army of its ability to pacify the population and control the countryside.

The Carter Administration deserves credit for initiating the policy of support for the Afghan resistance, which the Reagan Administration then sustained. Working with the same bipartisan unity, Congress and the executive branch jointly fashioned an American policy that left no doubt where the United States stood in this struggle between freedom and oppression.

In short, the altogether favorable settlement of the war, ratified by the Geneva accords, has once again demonstrated that as a country we are most effective abroad when we are united at home.

Yet at a moment when the United States appears on the verge of achieving its objectives in Afghanistan, it seems almost perverse that a few right-wing hard-liners don’t want to take yes for an answer. In spite of the consensus within the American intelligence community that no amount of Soviet aid will enable the Kabul government to survive for more than a brief period of time, conservative critics have condemned the Geneva accords as a contemporary version of the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain half a century ago.

The truth is that even with the help of 115,000 Soviet troops, the Moscow-backed Najibullah government has consistently failed to crush the resistance, which currently controls 80% of the countryside. Indeed, better than half the Afghan army has defected, making it the only army in the world where more troops have fled than fought. How the Najibullah regime and its dispirited divisions will prevail once Soviet troops have departed is a matter the critics of the Geneva accords have been unable to explain.

In the general jubilation of the moment, however, we must not forget the tragic costs that this triumph has exacted upon the people of Afghanistan--the million or more who have been killed, the hundreds of thousands permanently maimed, the villages leveled, the homes and livestock destroyed, the booby-trapped toys that have robbed innocent children of their childhood, the 5 million civilians driven into exile.

Nor should we assume that the settlement in Geneva will automatically bring peace, prosperity and political pluralism to Afghanistan. Indeed, it probably will not. Afghanistan, after all, knows little of the Western concepts of democracy or toleration, and tribal conflicts and an ethos of revenge lie deep within the Afghan culture.

But our objective in Afghanistan has never been to create a liberal democracy in the Western image, however desirable that might be. Our purposes have been to secure the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, to diminish the Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf and to discourage Moscow from embarking upon future invasions of its neighbors.

In the achievement of each of these objectives we have been spectacularly successful. It would constitute a terrible and tragic mistake if we were now to permit a few die-hards to convince us otherwise.