Imperial Arrogance

In this media age, complex events throughout the world tend to get boiled down into simple catch phrases. For instance, the five-year-old war in Afghanistan is now frequently summed up in news reports as "Russia's Vietnam." In this case, the instant analogy has the ring of truth.

It is certainly true that in Afghanistan the Soviet Union has committed itself to an unwinnable and apparently interminable war. In the Vietnam days, they called such a situation a quagmire.

During the five years they have occupied Afghanistan, the Soviets have had to commit a larger and larger chunk of their resources just to hold their ground. At first the Soviet forces were supposed to supply reinforcement and air support for the Afghan army; but as the war has dragged on, Soviet troops have taken over more and more of the ground-based combat duties.

As in Vietnam, the local army has proved unreliable, unwilling to fight against its own people, and prone to desertion. In another Vietnam echo, it has been reported that Soviet troops, stationed far from home among a hostile population, suffer low morale and have fallen into widespread drunkenness and drug abuse. Afghanistan, like Indochina, boasts a plentiful, potent, and inexpensive supply of marijuana and opium to distract the occupiers.

The similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam run much deeper than these matters of appearance; they are political and moral as well. Like the Vietnam war, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan represents a superpower's heavy-handed attempt to impose an unpopular and essentially alien regime on a Third World peasant society.

The Soviets of course have their ideological and public relations justifications for their Afghan adventure. They are defending "socialism." They say they entered Afghanistan at the invitation of its government to defend the Afghan "revolution" against outside interference from the CIA.

But the Soviet excuses are patently self-serving and false. It is true that Afghanistan's first Marxist government seized power in 1978 with only minimal Soviet involvement. But its rule proved tremendously unpopular. The current Afghan government under Babrak Karmal was installed by a Soviet-engineered coup that coincided with the onset of the Soviet invasion.

The fundamental reason for the Soviet war in Afghanistan is the desire of a large and powerful country to assert its control over a small and relatively powerless neighbor. All the rhetoric is just a cover for the familiar syndrome of imperial arrogance, a disease found both in the Kremlin and the White House.

IMPERIAL ARROGANCE is a strange disease. It is contracted largely by superpowers. But its outward symptoms—hunger, displacement, and death—are suffered most by the poor of the world. And there can be no denying the fact that the people of Afghanistan are suffering those symptoms. Napalm, anti-personnel cluster bombs, and inflammatory phosphorus shells are being employed by the Soviet Union to rain a fiery death upon tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. It is also reported that occasionally the population of an entire village is massacred in retaliation for rebel attacks.

Apparently the techniques of counter-insurgency know no ideology. Since the people are mostly on the side of the rebels, war is waged with unremitting ferocity against the population as a whole. Indiscriminate saturation bombing by Soviet planes is used to destroy every living creature in an area several miles wide. Food supplies, including livestock and much of this year's wheat crop, as well as irrigation systems, have been destroyed in order to prevent the guerrillas from living off the land. As a result, in addition to the untold numbers of civilian dead, three million people, approximately 20 percent of Afghanistan's population, have fled the horror and become refugees in neighboring Pakistan.

When our country pursued such scorched-earth policies in Vietnam, some of us called it genocide. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "genocide" as "the systematic, planned annihilation of a racial, political, or cultural group." If that definition fit what went on in Vietnam, it certainly fits what is happening today in Afghanistan.

Of course, no political situation is ever completely simple and clear. In Afghanistan it must be noted that the initial resistance to Marxist rule was sparked by reforms like the redistribution of land and the education of women, which were construed by the masses as contrary to Islamic tradition. It is also true that the rebels spend much of their time fighting each other and have yet to present a coherent political program for the country. And a report by Helsinki Watch, a human rights monitoring group, found that in addition to the wholesale slaughter carried on by the Soviets, the rebel troops were also guilty of some lesser counts of torturing and executing prisoners and attacking civilian targets.

It is also true that the United States has made extensive and mostly unjustified foreign policy use of the Soviet invasion. The invasion has served to create an atmosphere of deepened Cold War hostility and to sell a new round of escalation in the nuclear arms race. U.S. support for the Afghans has also greased the skids for a more open and uncritical U.S. alliance with the government of Pakistan, a government that routinely tortures its own people and is generally believed to be building an atomic bomb.

But, in the final analysis, none of these political ramifications change the real issue in Afghanistan: the survival of a people and their right to carve out their own destiny in this world. That is an issue that must be raised by people of conscience in every corner of the globe.

Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.