Benevolent Brezhnev in Afghanistan
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Perspectives BENEVOLENT BREZHNEV IN AFGHANISTAN BY JOHN P ROCHE Leonid Brezhnev is a man who yields to no one in his respect for world opinion and the aspirations of the Afghan people....
...Pakistan is the ideal location for starting the "Jimmy Carter Trail" to carry arms and other useful materials to Afghan freedom fighters...
...Our policy has been in hock to that flim-flam too long...
...At last report, the Indians, who have first-class physicists but lousy engineers, were planning to have a bomb wallah deliver their warhead in an oxcart...
...To make sure the election would not be rigged by "external enemies" loyal to the treacherous Amin, several Soviet divisions handled the poll watching...
...The logic here has been that the Pakistanis are trying to build a nuclear bomb and this is a bad thing...
...As suspected, Amin tried to vote twice and was shot...
...Washington is notoriously a one-crisis town...
...External enemies" such as the U.S., Britain and West Germany made some noise about all this...
...The trick is not the physics, it is the engineering of delivery systems...
...If the Soviets can set up the equivalent of the Mongolian Peoples' Republic in Afghanistan, the location is ideal for moving on the whole Persian Gulf...
...A pretext could be manufactured by using the Lenin Mark I ploy: Leaders of the Tudeh Party, Moscow's Iranian creation, could pronounce themselves the legitimate government of their battered country and call on the USSR for support...
...Karmal, it seems, had invited the Russians in advance to save his government...
...Finally, it is obvious that Afghans want to shoot up their Soviet liberators, and we should do anything we can to help this patriotic front...
...With those in Iran out of business, and the Turks playing interminable games over Cyprus, our closest dependable stations are in Norway, a long way from Moscow's testing ground in Central Asia...
...Lenin Mark I, first used experimentally in 1919 in Poland, worked like a dream in Afghanistan...
...To take one seemingly trivial item, improvement of relations with Islamabad would enable us to reopen the monitoring stations we had in Pakistan for tracking Soviet activities...
...hence this foresighted anticipatory retaliation...
...When the news gets around that the United States is playing for keeps, it might even focus the minds of the Aya-lollahs in Iran...
...Further, we could reopen former air bases in Pakistan that would provide both a reconnaissance and strike capacity in the whole area—and back up the force 1 hope we will station in Oman to protect Hormuz Strait...
...The Pakistanis are in the same league and we have permitted our commitment to nonproliferation to overshadow the far more significant need for a U.S.Pakistan alliance...
...But it took a while before most of the accredited spokespersons for world opinion—the delegates at the United Nations—could work up their indignation...
...For several years now, it has been possible to go to the public library at Los Alamos and get a do-it-yourself H-bomb book...
...We could also negotiate base rights at Karachi for our Indian Ocean fleet...
...This means the United States must formulate a strong regional policy— and make it clear to Brezhnev that if he ignores the off-sides rules, there will be penalties...
...Despite the different backgrounds of the two crises, though, it would be a profound mistake to decouple them...
...One step in the right direction was Carter's decision to withdraw the salt II treaty from Senate consideration...
...Berbera in Somalia has been suggested, but it is too close to highly sophisticated Soviet weaponry in South Yemen...
...Moreover, what too few people seem to realize is that the fundamental problem with nuclear devices is not putting them together...
...However, on top of the continuing incarceration of our Teheran embassy staff, the President suddenly has to cope with Brezhnev's human rights safari in Afghanistan...
...President Carter must feel the cosmos is conspiring against him...
...Recognizing the fact that world opinion would no longer tolerate the monstrous behavior of Afghan despot Hafizullah Amin, President Brezhnev arranged for a splendid progressive Afghan, Babrak Karmal—who was temporarily residing in East Germany—to be unanimously elected President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan...
...I agree, but the Indians already have one...
...Another important step in the right direction is the Administration's move to end our preposterous policy of shunning Pakistan...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 1
