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The Way to Afghan Peace
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20191 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,175 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence Person
Lawrence Person is a science-fiction writer and former editor
of Citizens' Agenda living in Austin, Texas. |
Even before the Soviet coup disintegrated, anticommunist forces throughout the Third World seemed to have gained the upper hand. In countries as diverse as Angola, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, long-standing civil wars gave way to peace talks, elections, and agendas of national reconciliation. As a bankrupt Soviet Union abandoned them one by one, dictators who had relied on Moscow's largess to keep them in power soon found themselves faced with a difficult choice: Share power through negotiations, or lose it by force.
Everywhere, that is, except Afghanistan.
In the post-Cold War world, Najibullah was an anachronism. Even after Moscow cut off the tap to most of its other puppets, Gorbachev continued to supply the Kabul regime with more than $4 billion worth of military equipment and supplies a year, despite the Soviet Union's own financial crises. That assistance (which Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf characterized as "an absolutely unbelievable amount of Soviet aid") was still continuing right up to the time of the August coup, and it kept Najibullah in power despite popular opposition and armed resistance to his regime.
Now, all that finally seems to have changed. Like Fidel Castro, another communist relic from the Age of Dictators, Najibullah has found himself at odds with the newly democratized Soviet government. Although he has proven himself quite adept at defying previous predictions of his imminent political demise, it now seems highly unlikely that his government will last out the next 12 months. The end itself will undoubtedly come at the hands of a mujahideen commander like Ahmed Massoud, but the man who made it possible was Boris Yeltsin.
Long an opponent of Soviet policy in Afghanistan, Yeltsin found himself in a position to do something about it only after the failure of the August coup. As the president of Russia and the newly empowered coruler of what's left of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin finally had the leverage to cut off the tap. Reports just now reaching the West indicate that all Soviet aid to Najibullah bas ceased.
Soviet Arms Cornucopia
Just how massive that aid was became clear in an article by David C. Isby, in the August issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, that provides a staggering list of Soviet military hardware sent to Afghanistan over the past three years: 600 tanks, 350 MBP combat vehicles, 150
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