"Who Lost Afghanistan?"

A sad chronicle of surprises and miscalculations

The virtual annexation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union represents not only a strategic setback for the U.S. but a potential political liability for Jimmy Carter as well. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott examines the historical background of the crisis:

The question "Who lost Afghanistan?" is probably inevitable in the presidential campaign, if only because it echoes last year's refrains of "Who lost Iran?" and "Who lost Nicaragua?" The temptation to blame Jimmy Carter is understandable--and, for his critics, irresistible. After all, even though his predecessors had unwittingly contributed to the leftward drift of the Kabul government, it was during Carter's watch--and partly because of his misjudgments--that Afghanistan finally slipped from its traditional neutrality into the Soviet orbit.

But Afghanistan, unlike Iran and Nicaragua, was never really "ours" to lose. The British raj stopped at the Afghan border, and so did the post-World War II Pax Americana. In 1955 John Foster Dulles helped set up what became known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) as part of a global network of anti-Soviet alliances. In effect, Dulles was drawing a line in the dust that the Soviets dared not step across lest they incur the thermonuclear wrath of the West. That line ran along the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, which were all members of CENTO. In keeping with Afghanistan's policy of nonalignment, it remained beyond the American "security perimeter" and was therefore vulnerable to its giant neighbor.

U.S policymakers left Afghanistan largely out of their geopolitical calculations, implicitly conceding it to the Soviet sphere of influence. When Henry Kissinger stopped off in Kabul to show the flag for a few hours in 1974, he spent almost as much time watching buzkashi, a primitive and violent form of polo, as he did talking business with President Mohammed Daoud. Says a veteran of the Nixon and Ford Administrations: "We had no illusions that the Afghans would or could defy Moscow. They were more Finlandized than the Finns."

The Marxist coup in which Noor Mohammed Taraki overthrew Daoud in April 1978 surprised the Soviets as much as it did the Americans. Western intelligence has not been able to find Russian fingerprints on the scene of "the April revolution," but the Soviets wasted no time in placing advisers in all the important ministries and down to the company level in the armed forces.

The Carter Administration under reacted. Soviet aggressiveness in Afghanistan would be bad news for detente and for U.S. peace initiatives in the Middle East. Also, in its eagerness to make friends in the Third World, the Administration tended to give the benefit of the doubt to leftists who also seemed to be nationalists. Pakistan's strongman, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, warned that a Marxist government in Kabul, supported by the Soviets, had gravely upset the balance of power in the region. "The Russians are now at the Khyber Pass," Zia told TIME in September 1978--but that was simply not a message Washington wanted to hear.

In 1979 the Soviets escalated their intervention against Afghanistan's Muslim militants and recalcitrant tribesmen who had been waging a long simmering and spreading rebellion. The insurgents, in turn, received more covert assistance from China, Pakistan and other countries. But by now the U.S. was distracted by a new preoccupation, right next door in Iran. (One immediate consequence of the collapse of the Shah: CENTO, long moribund, was disbanded.) Insofar as U.S. diplomats and intelligence experts focused on Afghanistan at all, they made two miscalculations. First, they believed that the Soviets' desire to preserve detente would restrain them in Afghanistan. Second, they had long since written off Babrak Karmal and his comrades in the pro-Soviet faction, whom the more independent Marxists ruling in Kabul had purged or driven into East European exile. Even in the early fall of last year, when an interagency intelligence report seriously raised the possibility that the Soviets might launch a full-scale "pacification" campaign in order to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a hostile Islamic republic, many U.S. experts were betting that the Soviets would put that campaign in the hands of a nationalistic general, Mohammed Aslam Watanjar. The notion of the Soviets flying Karmal home from V--SYGMA Eastern Europe seemed too ham handed and provocative, given the Communists' obvious need to broaden the political base of the Kabul regime. An armed Soviet takeover of the country was discounted for the same reason. More prescient intelligence would have enabled the U.S. to mount a diplomatic offensive to deter the Soviets, or at least to prepare countermeasures in advance.

Now Karmal is President. (Watanjar is Minister of Communications and No. 6 in the leadership.) Afghanistan has a made-in-Moscow presidium and the ruble is the coin of the realm. Having become a de facto Soviet satellite two years ago, the benighted nation is now in danger of becoming the de facto 16th republic of the U.S.S.R. That sorry prospect leaves the U.S. to polish its intelligence community's crystal ball and to rebuild the original "security perimeter" south of Afghanistan with new alliances, fresh diplomatic offensives, and reinforced military deployments. Of course, the U.S. can also hope that the Afghan guerrillas will eventually wear out the superior Soviet force in a war of attrition. The odds are against that, but then, the odds were against a Soviet occupation in the first place. Now Afghanistan is the Soviets' to lose.

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