AFGHANISTAN: Four Years in Purgatory

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AFGHANISTAN

The Soviets have settled in for a long, costly, nasty war

One night last week, Soviet television carried an astonishing news report from the capital of Afghanistan, a broadcast that was totally fitting for the dawn of the Orwellian new year. The film showed hundreds of Afghan demonstrators parading through the streets of Kabul on Christmas Day. The subject of their protest was, of course, not the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which had occurred exactly four years earlier. Instead, the Afghans were demonstrating against the U.S. invasion of Grenada, a military action that had begun in October and effectively ended after eight weeks. In the Soviet news film, the marchers carried a banner demanding U.S. IMPERIALISTS, HANDS OFF GRENADA ISLAND! The banner was in English, which probably reduced its readership in Kabul but certainly suggested something else: the broadcast was intended not so much to persuade Soviet audiences of U.S. perfidy as to distract Western attention from the historic day when nearly 100,000 Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan to prop up a faltering pro-Soviet regime.

As the fifth year of Soviet occupation of that savagely proud nation begins, the war is a soggy stalemate. As many as 20,000 Soviet troops have been killed in the past four years, according to U.S. estimates, but the Soviets are not about to leave. They still have a force of 105,000 in Afghanistan, enough to hold the cities most of the time but nowhere near enough to dominate the countryside. The Mujahedin guerrillas, whose insurrection precipitated the Soviet invasion in the first place, control some 80% of the Texas-size country. Despite factional differences and a pressing shortage of modern equipment, the rebels fight on with unflagging ferocity, but they are far from defeating the combined force of the Soviet occupation and the army of the Afghan government led by President Babrak Karmal. So the fighting continues, sporadically and inconclusively, while the cost of maintaining the Soviet presence, estimated at $8 million a day, is financed from Afghan exports to the Soviet Union.

One crucial aspect of the Soviets' original occupation plan was to build the Afghan army into an effective force. Nonetheless, that army has dwindled from 100,000 men in 1979 to about 40,000 today, as soldiers have deserted and civilians have done their best to escape forced conscription drives. To restore discipline in the population, the Soviets have relied more and more on the KhAD, the local version of the KGB. They have also vented their frustration by mounting reprisals against the civilian population. When Soviet convoys are attacked by Afghan rebels, Soviet-led squads now retaliate by burning villages, fields and orchards and sometimes by executing the male inhabitants of nearby villages. Last July Soviet forces shot as many as 30 elders in the provincial capital of Ghazni. In October, after a series of raids on convoys outside Kandahar, the Soviets left some 100 civilians dead in nearby settlements. At times over the past year, they have mounted aerial and artillery attacks on Istalif, Herat and other cities, but without destroying the rebels' resiliency. Soon after the Soviet and Afghan government forces announced last August that they had "pacified" Kandahar, the Mujahedin took to the rooftops with loudspeakers and for hours taunted the government soldiers, urging them to defect to the rebel cause.