This time it is Munich
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers THIS TINE IT IS MUNICH THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING THE MOST DIFFICULT choice which ever faces men in power is the choice between war now and war later. Ordinary...
...allies to take similar measures...
...If we allow ourselves to become angry about Afghanistan, simple selfrespect may force us to attempt to do something about it...
...The military borders of the Soviet Union have remained unchanged since the Second World War, until December 28...
...It has been a kind of rule since 1945 that the United States and the Soviet Union will not oppose each other's troops with their own...
...At this very moment in the prison cellars of Kabul Russian interrogators must be extracting the names addresses, and personal histories of the old Afghanistan which is now marked for burial...
...The Russians, it is said, will be bogged down in mountain warfare, Afghanistan had been within their sphere anyway, the real threat is to the Persian Gulf, and we can stand fast there...
...Too weak or too strong...
...Even the hawks in Washington are talking only about the future, beefing up the defense budget, putting detente to rest and building a new tougher policy, stripped of illusion...
...The winner of a face-down is likely to press his luck, and the loser to grow obstinate...
...they are possessed by it...
...Ordinary citizens distinguish between peacetime and wartime but for men in power war is never far away...
...Now the Russians have invaded and are in the process of occupying Afghanistan, an independent country...
...But other questions still remain to be answered: how long will the war last...
...The climate of war-mindedness is one of the great facts about national capitals...
...The rest of the world—including us—can have few illusions about what must be happening...
...It doesn't matter...
...The decision facing Carter now, one far tougher than the matter of the Olympic Games, is whether or not to join with China and Pakistan in supplying the rebels with the armaments they need if they are to do anything more than plink at Russian patrols from behind rocks...
...Who will fight in it...
...Not now...
...naval presence in the Indian Ocean, proposed a boycott of the summer Olympic Games in Moscow, and called on U.S...
...There's nothing we can do, the small voice says...
...If it was wrong for us to do so, there can be no excuse for the Russians either...
...Russian control of Eastern Europe was imposed by terror as well as tanks, and the Afghans can expect the same thing—wholesale executions and imprisonment, dissolution of all opposition groups, suppression of all civil rights...
...Quite apart from the fact the outcome of the invasion matters very much to the Afghans, it matters to us and to the Russians...
...If the Afghan rebels continue to resist their villages will be destroyed, their families driven out as refugees...
...It may very well be that the political and economic reprisals ordered by Carter so far are the best that he can do...
...They have already resorted to arms...
...Then why has there been no protest...
...War is not a possibility...
...We've been outmaneuvered this time, but the invasion speaks for itself, world opinion will swing to our side, next time we'll be quicker off the mark...
...If they fail they will be chastened and cautious, just as we were after Vietnam...
...The postwar histories of Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia leave absolutely no room for ambiguity...
...it is here...
...The thrust of these criticisms is very far from being that Carter has been too weak...
...But even so men in power are like the rest of us, they shrink before the imminence of war and tremble inside when the choice before them is war now or war later...
...soldiers to Afghanistan...
...Clear and vocal condemnation of the Soviet Union must seem, to many people, like a surrender to all their old enemies in this country, the hardliners waiting to say I told you so...
...Nothing will be very different the morning after the last shot is fired, but what we do will have an effect on how we think about ourselves a year later, or ten years later...
...when the Afghans resisted, the Russians sent in an army to seize by main force what had eluded covert political manipulation...
...The awful temptation—for President Carter, for other governments, for all of us whose only role is to read the newspapers in the morning—is to say oh hell, let them have it...
...In the weeks since the Russian divisions moved into Afghanistan Carter has canceled sales of grain and high-technology hardware, offered military aid to Pakistan, closed the Russian consulate in New York, pressed for condemnation of the Soviet Union in he United Nations, postponed a vote on the SALT treaty (which at that point was practically doomed in the Senate anyway), strengthened the U.S...
...When they are not waging it they are preparing for it or recovering from it so they can begin to prepare again...
...They do not love it...
...The opposition to the war in Vietnam was fundamentally fueled by anger...
...What sort of weapons will be used...
...A prudent man can recognize a threat of war when it is there before him, and once he has recognized it he cannot prudently ignore it...
...American forces did not oppose the Russians in East Berlin, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, just as the Russians did not oppose the United States in Korea or Vietnam...
...But this only widens the door to temptation: since we are agreed on the primacy of restraint, the small voice says, it's all right to do nothing...
...The 15 February 1980: 73 Russians began their theft on the sly...
...Whoever moves first is given, in effect, a clear field...
...Critics of these moves in the United States have pointed out that they won't "work"—i.e., force the Russians to withdraw, that they hurt us more than the Russians, that other nations seem ready to sell the goods we withhold, that SALT is too important to abandon...
...If Munich offers a lesson it is that responding too weakly is as dangerous, ultimately, as responding too strongly...
...There is no evidence anyone in Washington has proposed to send U.S...
...Who will win...
...But that is only part of the horror...
...This demands some sort of explanation...
...The explanation, I think, must be fear—not personal fear of the immediate consequences, but fear that nothing can be done, fear the Russians are inexorable, fear of self-recrimination—even self-contempt~if we once admit the Afghans are being abandoned, and what they are being abandoned to...
...The whole world is of course watching to see if the United States does something about it, or does nothing about it...
...Well of course it matters...
...It was not critical analysis of official policy which turned the country against the war, but a sense that no country had a right to inflict such devastation and suffering oh another country for what amounted to reasons of its own...
...No outsiders will watch what is happening...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 74...
...Invasion is the ultimate international crime, the armed theft of a nation's property, freedom, and destiny...
...In a sense, they are Afghanistan...
...But the peace people have not been alone in their silence...
...For one thing there is no cruder or more brutal weapon for settling a political struggle than an army...
...There have even been attempts to explain away the invasion as characteristic of Russian anxiety about their borders...
...As we learned in Vietnam, an army is inherently incapable of distinguishing friend from foe unless both are in uniform, with the result that violence is general and indiscriminate...
...This is the very heart of what we have meant for forty years by the word "Munich" —that nothing makes nations more unpredictable, impulsive, and erratic than a challenge which meets no response, or a grossly inadequate response...
...No simple anger at the crime...
...This trepidation is well founded...
...If it must happen, let it happen in quiet...
...It is of course possible—but I do not think it likely—that the war will quickly escalate into a major conflagration...
...Smoother words, naturally, would be found to say it, but the very ease, and the seeming prudence, of explaining it away is only part of the temptation...
...Then what of President Carter's response...
...At the moment they have ready access to sanctuary in Pakistan and southern Iran...
...Does it matter...
...It is hard to think of anyone, in any country, who has thrown political calculation to the winds and spoken out in a voice of cold, pure anger at what the Russians are doing...
...But it's too late, the Russians were too quick, we can't help, not now...
...If the Russians succeed they will not be able to resist a swagger...
...I don't know...
...What will the world be like when the war is over...
...We might draw as lurid a picture as we like without doing violence to the facts...
...One can sense the shrinking now, and it is not confined to Washington...
...The most dangerous aspect of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan is the fact they have committed their own soldiers...
...If we let the Russians succeed—if we surrender to the small voice and say oh hell, let them have it—the echo of that act will come back.to haunt us with self-doubt, and with the most dangerous result of all, the doubter's determination to prove himself the next time around...
...The strength of the temptation can be glimpsed in the complete absence of anger about what the Russians have done...
...If anything, he is being faintly counseled to call it a day, let the Games proceed, attempt to salvage the remnants of detente...
...But I do know what the small voice says: it's too late, the rebels are divided, the Russians are too tough, it's kinder to get it over with, the dangers are too great, this isn't the place, not now...
...The one factor most ignored in this situation is that of the rebels themselves...
...The truth will seep out in ten or twenty years' time, but by then Afghan society will have been altered beyond recognition...
...Afghanistan is a joke, not a country...
...People are distressed, alarmed, frightened, in some cases even embarrassed by the invasion, but they do not seem to be angry about it...
...The silence of the peace movement can be explained by confusion, doubts about what to do, a fear of seeming to repudiate their own history, pure bewilderment after fifteen years of principled opposition to the foreign policies of their own country...
...That would embrace the large war which small wars, by the crazy logic of the world, are intended to preclude...
...Not now...
...It is clear they have both an appetite and a motive for warfare...
...Without such outside help—help of the very sort given in liberal measure by Russia to North Vietnam—the rebels haven't any chance at all...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
