Asia Times: COMMENTARY: Leaving Afghanistan, changing the world



	February 18, 1999	atimes.com

Central Asia / Siberia

COMMENTARY: Leaving Afghanistan, changing the world
by Paul Goble

Ten years ago, the last Soviet army units left Afghanistan, closing a chapter on Moscow's disastrous military intervention there and opening the way to the disintegration of the Soviet system as a whole.

But as dramatic as those changes were, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan continues to affect that country, the post-Soviet states, and the Western world in ways that may ultimately prove to be even more dramatic. That is because the withdrawal called into question many of the assumptions that had governed the international system during the Cold War and thus opened the way not only to a post- Soviet but also to a post-Cold War world.

That process began on 15 February 1989, when General Boris Gromov led approximately 400 Soviet soldiers across the Afghan border into the USSR, just five minutes before the deadline set for their withdrawal by the U.N.-sponsored Geneva accords of April 1988. In addition to the impact of the event itself - the first Soviet withdrawal from any territory since the Austrian State Treaty more than 30 years earlier - its larger implications for the Soviet Union were suggested by two articles that appeared in the Moscow press on the same day.

In a front-page commentary, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda argued that any future commitment of Soviet troops must ''not be decided in secrecy,'' as had been the case when Moscow decided to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979, but only ''with the approval of the country's parliament."

The Moscow weekly Literaturnaya gazeta, for its part, published one of the first detailed accounts of Soviet atrocities in the Afghan war, which many Soviet citizens had known about but which the Soviet authorities until then had consistently refused to acknowledge.

All three of these events - the withdrawal itself, the acknowledgement that the Soviet intervention lacked popular support, and the description of the atrocities - had the effect of further delegitimizing the Soviet system. Thus, they played a key role in its ultimate destruction.

But precisely because this withdrawal proved to be so pivotal in the history of the region, it has generated a set of images that continue to mold opinions not only in Afghanistan but also in the post-Soviet states and the Western world. These opinions appear likely to reshape the future even as the withdrawal itself already has reshaped the past.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet withdrawal had much the same effect as Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War more than 80 years earlier. It encouraged Afghans, other Muslims, and indeed many non-Europeans to think that they could take on a major power and win, something few had assumed until then. That shift in assumptions helped power the Taliban in Afghanistan itself, and many other challenges to European and U.S. dominance of international affairs.

Indeed, much of the current terrorist challenge to the West has its roots in the Soviet withdrawal not only because the Mujaheddin demonstrated that a European power could be defeated on the field of battle but also because it showed that a great power would be willing to withdraw rather than continue to fight.

In the post-Soviet states - and particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus - Moscow's withdrawal from Afghanistan has led many to conclude that political power is fragile and that popular groups inspired by Islam can successfully challenge it. Some groups in Tajikistan and elsewhere have challenged the authorities, while many of those in power have sought to justify repressive policies in the name of preventing the kind of societal and political chaos that Afghanistan suffered in the wake of the Soviet occupation.

And on a global scale, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan continues to serve as a reminder that however strong a state may appear to outsiders, it can be defeated and even destroyed if it loses all popular legitimacy.

Before the Soviet withdrawal, many in both the Soviet Union and the West assumed that the Soviet Union would continue forever. After that event, many in both places recognized that the days of the Soviet power were numbered.

Such prophecies not only proved to be self-fulfilling, but they also have led people in other countries, far different and far removed from the USSR, to think about changing structures that many had assumed could never be dislodged.

In 1975, four years before Moscow invaded Afghanistan and 14 years before it withdrew, the yearbook of the Kabul Times claimed that Afghanistan was ''the beginning of the end of everything.'' To a larger extent than the editors of that newspaper knew, their claim has proved true, first by the Soviet withdrawal and then by the impact of that withdrawal on the world.

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