Real War (3 page)

In the United States reaction to that initial Soviet seizure of power in Afghanistan was largely a yawn. The New York
Times
headlined an editorial “Keeping Cool about Kabul.” The “so what” school—those whose reflexive response to Soviet subversion or Soviet militarism is to say, “So what?”—said “So what?” about Afghanistan, if they paid even that much attention.

After the communist regime came to power, however, fiercely independent Moslem tribesmen launched a
jihad,
or holy war, in a struggle to the death for control of their country and of their lives. Insurgents sold their cattle and their wives' jewelry to buy ammunition. The rebels fought Soviet-made tanks by starting landslides. They rushed directly into the machine-gun fire of the tanks and overwhelmed them, armed with nothing more than wooden sticks and iron bars.

The government's army suffered from purges, desertions, and defections to the rebels; by late 1979 it had reportedly
dwindled from more than 100,000 to 50,000, with a hard core of no more than 10,000 to 15,000 effective troops. It was doubtful that the communists could have survived another spring offensive by the rebels.

In a September 1979 coup, Taraki was ousted and executed by his number-two man, Hafizullah Amin, who installed himself as President. But Amin made little headway in putting down the rebellion. In a carefully prepared and brazenly executed move, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve. Hundreds of Russian transport planes airlifted thousands of Soviet troops into Kabul; tens of thousands of other pre-positioned Soviet forces quickly moved across the border; Amin and his family were killed; a reliably pliant Soviet puppet, Babrak Karmal, whom the Russians had kept hidden away in reserve in Eastern Europe, was put in as Amin's replacement. He beamed his first message as President to the Afghan people from a radio station in the Soviet Union. Izvestia had the gall to denounce the deposed communist leader Amin as a tool of the CIA, while Brezhnev warmly congratulated Kamal on his “election.” The proud people of Afghanistan were crushed in the iron fist of the Soviet Union, and Russia came one country closer to achieving its goals—now within tantalizingly short reach—of a warm-water port on the Arabian Sea and control over the oil of the Persian Gulf.

In neighboring Pakistan a high-ranking official who had been privately warning of Russia's expansionist ambitions told an American friend, “You see, this is what I have been telling you and now it's come true. You Americans don't seem to understand the world anymore. Next comes the Finlandization of Pakistan, and subversion of our country by the Russians. There is a very real possibility—likelihood even—of Soviet hegemony in this whole part of the world. Don't your people in Washington care?”

The Soviet seizure of Afghanistan is a continuation of the old tsarist imperialism—the relentless outward pressure that has continued since the Duchy of Muscovy threw off Mongol rule in 1480. It also is a stark reminder that America no longer has the luxury of considering any place on earth too remote to affect its own security.

What made the fall of Afghanistan so significant a loss to
the West was not just the fate of its 18 million people, 90 percent of whom are illiterate, and whose $160 per capita annual income makes Afghanistan one of the poorest countries of the world. Not even its strategic location would make its loss so significant, if that loss had occurred in isolation. But it did not occur in isolation. It was part of a pattern. And that pattern is what presents the challenge. It is a pattern of ceaseless building by the Soviets toward a position of overwhelming military force, while using subversion and proxy troops, and now even its own, to take over one country after another, until they are in a position to conquer or Finlandize the world.

•  •  •

Looking at the changes in the world since World War II, we can see grounds for pessimism and grounds for optimism.

Communist regimes have taken power not only in Eastern Europe, but also in China, North Korea, all of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, and Cuba. So far, no country that has come completely under communist control has escaped from that control. Twenty-one countries are now in the communist orbit. Territorially, the communist powers are advancing all over the world, and the West is retreating.

In terms of nuclear weapons, the United States had an absolute monopoly at the end of World War II. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States still had an overwhelming nuclear superiority, in the range of 15 to 1 or even more. In 1973, when we ordered a worldwide alert in order to keep Soviet forces out of the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War, the United States and the Soviet Union were approximately equal in both strategic nuclear capability and theater nuclear capability. But since 1973 the Soviet Union has been spending three times as much as the United States on strategic weapons alone.

With their rapid advances in nuclear missile technology and their vigorous development of new weapons systems—while new American weapons systems have been systematically canceled or postponed—the Soviets are quickly closing the gap in those areas in which we are ahead and increasing their superiority where they are ahead.

The Soviets have an enormous advantage in conventional
ground forces. To some extent this should be expected, since the U.S.S.R. is primarily a land power, with two fronts to defend—against Europe and against China. But Russia's huge armies also pose a formidable threat to its neighbors, because while Russia has two fronts for defense it has three fronts for attack. Soviet military power threatens Europe in the west, China and Japan in the east, and the countries of Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Africa to the south.

Beyond this, the dramatic buildup of Soviet sea power has been particularly ominous. While the United States still has an advantage in aircraft carriers, the Soviets now have half again as many major surface combatant ships as the United States and three times as many submarines.

Unless the United States drastically increases its military budget, the Soviet Union by 1985 will have unquestioned nuclear superiority, overwhelming superiority on the ground, and at least equality at sea. In sum, unless we act fast, the period of the mid-1980s will be one of maximum peril for the United States and the West. In a nutshell: The Soviet Union will be number one; the United States will be number two.

•  •  •

Taken by themselves, these trends would be grounds for acute pessimism. If projected into the 1980s, they would give the Soviet Union the capacity to impose its will militarily on targets of its choosing around the globe.

But there is another side. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a shrewd strategist. I remember that during his presidency, when talk around the National Security Council table grew gloomy as its members surveyed the world, Eisenhower used to remind us that one of the first requirements for a successful military commander is the capability to assess realistically both the strengths and weaknesses of his own forces. But equally important, he added, is the ability to recognize not only the strengths but also the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the opposing forces.

When we do that, we find major vulnerabilities on the Soviet side, and major strengths on the Western side.

The most dramatic of those vulnerabilities lies in the deep and perhaps irreconcilable differences between the Soviet Union and China. China's economy is still weak, and its nuclear
capability is still relatively primitive. But with a billion of the world's potentially most able people on its longest frontier, under control of a government that looks toward Moscow with bitter hostility, the leaders of the Kremlin have reason to be apprehensive. In the long run China may pose an expansionist threat to the West. But for the present China fears the Soviet Union and needs the West.

A second vulnerability stems from the nature of the communist system. No people has ever freely chosen to live under communism. No nation remains under communist rule except through force. No system of government has been more successful at extending its domination over other nations and less successful at winning the approval of the people of those nations.

The tragic boat people of Vietnam, the dissidents attempting to leave the Soviet Union, the people who flee when they are able from Eastern Europe—all are dramatic proof that when people have a choice, they reject communist rule. Ironically, it was Lenin who said that refugees are people who vote with their feet. In that balloting, peoples in all parts of the world, frequently at risk of their lives, are overwhelmingly pro-freedom and anti-communist.

A third vulnerability, one that is potentially a decisive Western advantage, lies in the fact that economically, capitalism works and communism does not. As we survey the world's economies, we find that the United States, Western Europe, and Japan together have a gross national product four times as great as that of the entire Soviet bloc.

The communist nations have the advantage that being totalitarian, they can allocate their resources as their leaders choose, to serve the ambitions of the rulers rather than the needs of the people. Thus even relatively nonproductive economies can support enormous military establishments. But if there is to be an arms race, and if the West decides to compete, the West has the economic power to win it. The Soviets know this.

•  •  •

At the end of World War II the West, swept by waves of relief and exhaustion, let down its guard. We disarmed while Stalin used his armies to seize all the territory he could. Even
tually, alarmed, the West mobilized to meet this new Soviet threat. Moscow then moderated its tone and became more cautious in its expansion. This was a change of the head, not a change of the heart. When China shifted its emphasis from external adventuring to internal development—and to shoring up its defense against what by then it perceived as a looming Soviet threat—that, too, was a change of the head.

This change of the head is what made our first steps toward détente possible. We must understand that détente is not a love feast. It is an understanding between nations that have opposite purposes, but which share certain common interests, including the avoidance of nuclear war. Such an understanding can work—that is, it can restrain aggression and deter war—only as long as the potential aggressor is made to recognize that neither aggression nor war will be profitable.

The capitalist system works on the basis of the profit motive economically. The Soviet system works on the basis of the profit motive militarily and territorially. When the Kremlin calculates that it has more to gain than to lose by an act of aggression, subversion, or intimidation, it will engage in such action.

As the power balance shifts in the Soviets' favor, the Kremlin's profit-and-loss calculations will shift with it. Each time the West appears weak or irresolute, the potential cost of aggression falls and the Kremlin's market “demand” increases. Each time the West shows itself ready to resist effectively, the cost rises and the market dries up.

•  •  •

Woodrow Wilson once eloquently declared World War I a war to make the world “safe for democracy.” However noble that intent, events soon made a mockery of it. Our aim must be a world within which democracy will be safe, but more fundamentally a world in which aggression is restrained and national independence secure. Just as the 1940s and 1950s saw the end of the old colonialism, the 1980s and 1990s must be the years in which we turn back the new Soviet imperialism. To chart our course for the future, we must know our enemies, understand our friends, and know ourselves—where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go.

To meet the challenge to our own survival and to the survival of freedom and peace, we must drastically increase our
military power, shore up our economic power, reinvigorate our willpower, strengthen the power of our Presidents, and develop a strategy aimed not just at avoiding defeat but at attaining victory.

The decades ahead will not be easy. They will not be free of risk. But the risk we run if we fail will be infinitely greater. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to catch up. Every day lost increases the danger.

In 1934, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “To urge the preparation of defense is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war was imminent preparation for defense would be too late . . . but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that if we do not begin forthwith to put ourselves in a position of security, it will soon be beyond our power to do so.” In the 1930s Britain had what in effect was a “strategic reserve”—the vast industrial power of the United States, which, with the luxury of time, could be mobilized after war broke out in order to save the allied nations; and this “reserve” ultimately saved Britain from its own unpreparedness. The United States has no such reserve to fall back on.

It was shortly before the outbreak of World War II that General Douglas MacArthur observed, “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late.” MacArthur, then in the Philippines, had seen the war clouds on the horizon; he had been frustrated in his efforts to win support for a strengthening of forces in the Philippines. He warned of the danger, but too many said, “So what?”

When he made that statement the atomic bomb had not yet burst on Hiroshima, forever changing the potential nature of war and the consequences of a surprise attack. The United States had time to recover from a naval Pearl Harbor, and it had ample warning of impending war. We could have less than thirty minutes' warning of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, from which we would have no time to recover. The time to prevent that from happening is now. There is no time to lose.

The first characteristic of the Soviet Union is that it always adopts the attitude of bullying the soft and fearing the strong. The second characteristic of the Soviet Union is that it will go in and grab at every opportunity.