Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited. - book reviews

National Review, June 10, 1988 by Maggie Gallagher

Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisted

ONCE UPON a time there was, well--not exactly an evil empire, but still a very, very naughty one. By accident, this great power stumbled into a war with a bunch of fierce, fanatical, half-savage Muslims in a faroff land called Afghanistan. The noble savages kept fighting and fighting. Realizing the futility of war, the good Prince Gorbachev graciously decided to withdraw his troops and Give Peace a Chance: proving once again that The People, United, Can Never Be Defeated.

A pretty story, and one the American press (not to mention the American diplomatic corps) seems to have swallowed, hook, line, and sinker. Most fairy tales are harmless, but this one may lead the U.S. into betraying a whole people. As one contributor to this volume puts it, "Tragic is an overused adjective, but there is no better way to describe what is happening in Afghanistan." In Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited, Rosanne Klass has addressed the issue of Afghanistan by pulling the expertise of over a dozen scholars into one essential volume.

Brutal Soviet tactics--terrorizing civilians, depopulating whole regions--have as yet failed to overpower the Afghan resistance. But neither have the mujahedin succeeded in making the Soviets pay a high cost--either militarily or diplomatically--for invading Afghanistan. That, of course, is not what you read in the papers, which portray the Geneva accord as an unlloyed triumph for the mujahedin. In a chapter on Soviet military strategy in Afghanistan, Yossef Bodansky points out: The chief purpose of those Soviet forces dedicated to confronting the resistance has been to deny it access to Soviet strategic assets, using the least possible Soviet force in order to avoid casualties and wastage of Soviet military assets. In this they have been highly successful. As of this writing, the resistance has been unable to hit any major Soviet installations, to interrupt the economic exploitation of Afghanistan, or to prevent major troop movements and maneuvers. The Soviets can move anywhere in the country as long as they are willing to pay the price. As Professor Rabbani, head of the Jamiat Islami Resistance party, admitted, "the Soviets feel comfortable in Afghanistan."

So if the Soviets aren't in fact taking a terrible beating in Afghanistan, what accounts for Mikhail Gorbachev's apparent willingness to pull out? The Great Game Revisited may provide a partial answer. Far from having learned the "lessons of Vietnam" from its experience in Afghanistan, the Kremlin sees the war as an extension of its earlier campaign to pacify Muslim unrest in what are now the so-called constituent republics of Soviet Central Asia--which were once independent nations. From this perspective, the Afghan war appears to the Kremlin to be running just about on schedule. As the civilian Afghan population is beaten or starved into submission, the resistance "is ever more dependent on open lines of communications with Pakistan for its very survival...Russian and Soviet forces have completely crushed all past Muslim insurrections the moment they managed to isolate them from external support." The current peace agreement offers the Kremlin the chance to do just that. It isolates the mujahedin diplomatically: Pakistan and the U.S., by accepting the accord, recognize the legitimacy of the current Communist government. That means that the string of treaty agreements virtually incorporating northern Afghanistan into the USSR remains intact. With the Soviet soldiers out, the mujahedin will be encouraged to fight among themselves--in an extension of the divide-and-conquer strategy that worked so well for Stalin in subduing the Muslims of Central Asia. Then, a few years down the road, as disorder mounts, the Afghan Communist regime will, quite easily and with perfect legality, invite the Russians back to keep order. No invasion, no uproar, just a complete Soviet victory.

To some, that may sound like an unnecessarily black scenario--but not to those who have taken the time to study The Great Game Revisited. The history of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan is the story of crafty, farsighted diplomacy with one consistent goal: the subordination of Afghanistan. In one particularly trenchant chapter, "The Sovietization of Afghanistan," A. Rasul Amin points out that the Soviets have invested a great deal of capital in programs designated to destroy the Afghans as a people: programs that range from bringing religious leaders under state control, rewriting Afghan history, and making Russian the common language, to forcibly removing children from their parents for re-education in the Soviet Union. "The USSR has designed and is implementing a massive program intended to deprive the Afghans of their cultural heritage and their very identity, and to transform Afghanistan into a passive future instrument of Soviet policy," notes Amin. "When Soviet leaders hint at a possible willingness to withdraw military forces, they say nothing about withdrawing their second army--the army of social and cultural transformation, spearheaded by the KGB--or dismantling the programs designed to accomplish this end."