1999 (23 page)

If the Arias plan fails, Congress must renew military aid to the contras—and on a far larger scale than we have so far done. But we should not leave the defense of our critical interests in Central America solely in the hands of a proxy force like the contras. We should use our own forces to quarantine Nicaragua. We should prevent its expansionist and repressive communist government from receiving further shipments of arms and supplies from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Since they came to power the Sandinistas have been igniting fires throughout Central America. It makes no sense for the United States to run around putting out the fires while allowing the arsonists to continue to get their hands on the supplies to light still more.

We must declare a new version of the Monroe Doctrine. We should state that the United States will resist intervention in Latin America, not only by foreign governments, but also by Latin American governments controlled by foreign powers. A military quarantine of Nicaragua would be part of that policy. It would prevent Managua from subverting our friends in the region. It would also enable the contras to put the greatest pressure in the shortest time on the Sandinistas to agree to a settlement creating a genuine democratic process in Nicaragua, which is the only viable long-term solution to the crisis in Central America.

In Southwest Asia, the key American–Soviet conflict is the war in Afghanistan. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, Egypt's President
Anwar Sadat ominously observed, “The battle around the oil stores has already begun.” His comment was right on the mark.

If the Kremlin succeeds in consolidating its control over Afghanistan, it will have put itself into a perfect position from which to threaten our vital interests in the region. Moscow will be able to use Afghanistan as a base from which to destabilize Pakistan and Iran. That would give the Soviets total dominance over either the maritime approaches to the Persian Gulf or the gulf itself. Moscow would have won control of the oil jugular. We must treat the Soviet–Afghan war not as a peripheral conflict in a faraway place but as a crucial battle in our competition with Moscow.

At its present level of engagement, the Soviet Union has won only a stalemate. Eight years of fighting have put the Soviets no closer to final victory than they were at the outset. Since its armies have been unable to run the Afghan resistance off the battlefield, Moscow has adopted a strategy of attrition. It seeks to wear down the will of the Afghan people to resist with brutal attacks on the civilian population. There is not a village in the entire Afghan countryside which has escaped attack by Soviet aircraft. But even this campaign of terror bombing has not buckled the Afghans. Gorbachev and his colleagues know that they face a long, uphill fight to consolidate their control over the peaks of the Hindu Kush.

Therefore, the Kremlin has been trying to find a shortcut to victory. Moscow is trying to undercut outside support for the resistance, and that makes Pakistan the key to the war. Assistance from foreign countries, such as the United States, China, and oil-rich Middle East countries, reaches the Afghans principally through Pakistan, and the Soviets have leveled tremendous pressure on Islamabad to cut off the aid pipeline. In 1987, air strikes by Soviet and Afghan government jets and helicopters killed hundreds of people in Pakistan, and Soviet-supported terrorists planted over 250 bombs in Pakistani cities. Soviet forces have also armed separatist tribes in the Afghan–Pakistani border areas.

While Moscow has waged war, it has talked peace. It has put up a smokescreen of peace offers to soften the West and to create domestic pressure within Pakistan to sign a deal on Moscow's terms. For six years, UN-sponsored negotiations between Afghanistan
and Pakistan worked toward a settlement of the war. The tentative agreements have two key provisions. The first states that as soon as the parties sign an agreement the aid to resistance must be cut off. The second states that after the signing the Soviet Union would have a certain amount of time to pull out its forces. While it took only two days to put their forces in, the Soviets have been demanding a year or more to take them out. That would give Moscow time to decimate the resistance before its forces would have to depart.

We must pursue two goals in Afghanistan—a pullout of Soviet forces and self-determination for the Afghan people. Neither our interests nor those of Pakistan and the Afghan resistance would be served if we settle for the first without the second. To achieve our objectives, the United States must work on both the military and diplomatic fronts. We must aid the resistance, protect Pakistan, and negotiate with Moscow.

We should provide as much military and financial assistance to the Afghan resistance as they can effectively use. So far, we have not. We must increase our assistance both in quantity and in quality. The decision in 1986 to provide a sophisticated U.S. antiaircraft missile—the Stinger—has made a significant impact on the war. This should have been done six years earlier. We must not try to fine-tune the level of pressure on the Soviets, turning up the intensity of the war in small increments. If we want to induce the Soviets to strike a deal, we should give as much assistance to the Afghan resistance as it can effectively deploy.

An increase in our aid to the Afghans is in the interest of the United States and Pakistan because raising the military and political cost of the war is the only way to pressure the Soviets to accept a diplomatic solution. It is in the interest of the Afghan people because a diplomatic solution is the only way to liberate their country. It has a chance of success because there has been a direct correlation between the flexibility of the Soviets at the negotiating table and the intensity of the fighting on the battlefield. It is not coincidental that Moscow's recent willingness to reduce its withdrawal timetable from six years to one year came after the United States provided Stinger missiles to the resistance.

We must also protect Pakistan against Soviet efforts at intimidation.
We issued a pledge in 1959 to come to the assistance of Pakistan in the event of a communist attack. Today, we must make good on that promise. Congress must not cut our military and economic assistance package to Pakistan, notwithstanding its concerns about whether Islamabad is developing the capability to build nuclear weapons. We should accede to Pakistan's request to buy airborne radar aircraft so that its air force can shoot down marauding Soviet and Afghan-government jets and helicopters. We must recognize that if we cannot secure Pakistan against Soviet intimidation we cannot secure a just settlement of the war in Afghanistan.

While the government of President Zia ul-Haq is not a perfect democracy, it does meet the four conditions for American aid. It allows some freedoms, including freedom of the press, and has a parliament which creates the possibility for change through the electoral process. It has a competent government which has a good record on economic growth. It has a strong military which is capable of keeping order. The current opposition leadership would be a disaster for Pakistan if it succeeded in winning power.

On the diplomatic front, we must not allow Moscow to win at the negotiating table what it has failed to win on the battlefield. Afghanistan is not a minor issue, like cultural-exchange programs, which should be tossed into a summit as a sweetener. It is a crucial conflict that will determine who wins the U.S.–Soviet competition.

We must first dispel two misconceptions about how to deal with the issue of Afghanistan. The first is that the Soviets want any settlement they can get. On the contrary, they intend to use a settlement to get what they want. Moscow's goal is to withdraw after a communist government is firmly entrenched. Gorbachev's proposal for a protracted withdrawal period is designed to enable Soviet forces to crush a resistance starved of ammunition and supplies before packing up to leave. The second misconception is that if we provide enough assistance to the resistance the Afghans will be able to expel the Soviets from the country. However brave and determined resistance forces may be, they cannot win the war in the sense that the Allies did in World War II. Moscow can win militarily if it is willing to stay the course. Our friends in the Afghan
resistance therefore can only liberate their country through a political settlement.

We must make achieving a fair settlement a top priority item on the U.S.–Soviet agenda. We have the leverage to succeed. Moscow can win if Kremlin leaders are willing to pay the price—but we can raise that price. We should scrap the U N talks on Afghanistan and pursue the issue in bilateral talks. These talks must address the key issue: the future domestic and international political status of Afghanistan. We should concede that the Soviet Union has one—but only one—legitimate interest in Afghanistan: It is that Afghanistan be a nonaligned country. Neither the Soviet Union nor any other country has a right to determine the nature of Afghanistan's political system.

That is the basis of a fair settlement. A transitional government, composed of Afghans who are not members of either the Communist Party or the resistance and perhaps headed by the former King of Afghanistan, could rule while Soviet forces pulled out. After the withdrawal, an election or a national tribal council could decide the future system of government. This government should be pledged in advance to a nonaligned status internationally, and the United States, China, and the Soviet Union should all sign an agreement to guarantee that status.

We must accept no agreement that gives the Soviet Union a withdrawal period longer than about half a year. Moreover, we must not cut off American aid to the resistance until the Soviet Union has removed all its forces from Afghanistan, though we could phase down our aid as the Soviets reduced their forces. After the withdrawal, the agreement should call for the Soviet Union to stop aid to its communist clients at the same time the United States stops aid to the resistance. And if the Soviet Union breaks the arms embargo, the United States must respond in kind. Any policy that fails to measure up on these points would be a sellout.

Such a settlement would protect the interests of all parties involved in the war, including the Soviet Union's. Moscow is not threatened by a free and neutral Finland. It withdrew its postwar occupation forces from and accepted the neutrality of Austria under a treaty worked out with the United States in 1955. For sixty
years before the Afghan communists took power in their 1978 coup, a nonaligned but free Afghanistan had been acceptable to Moscow. Gorbachev should accept a restoration of that formula today.

We should actively pursue such a settlement in direct U.S.–Soviet negotiations. But we must also understand that it will never come about unless we protect Pakistan from Soviet intimidation and help the Afghans increase the cost of the Soviet occupation. If Gorbachev would like to cut his losses in Afghanistan, we should accommodate him—if he accepts a fair settlement, but not if a Soviet military withdrawal is a smokescreen to retain political control.

Antigovernment insurgencies exist throughout southern Africa, but Angola is the most important case. The region itself represents a critical interest for the West. It contains vast deposits of strategic minerals, such as platinum, chromium, manganese, and cobalt, upon which the industrial economies of the West depend. In some cases, the only alternate source is the Soviet Union. Unless we want to pay monopoly prices to the Kremlin, the United States must seek to minimize Soviet influence in the region.

In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union exploited the fall of the Portuguese empire to establish several communist states in southern Africa. In Angola, the communist members of a three-party government broke up the coalition and ordered up 35,000 Cuban troops through their friends in the Kremlin to assert their control over the country. Still worse, from the point of view of Western interests, these forces were used in a brief invasion of mineral-rich Shaba province of neighboring Zaire. Only a combined French-American intervention prevented a Cuban victory.

One of the other parties in the initial postcolonial coalition government, known by its acronym UNITA, then took up arms against the communists in Luanda. Congress prohibited U.S. assistance to UNITA through the Clark Amendment of 1976, leaving UNITA no other option than turning to South Africa for material aid. With the support of a substantial segment of the Angolan
people, UNITA quickly secured control over a third of Angola, with only the shield of Cuban proxy forces preventing UNITA from laying siege to the capital. In 1985, when Congress repealed the Clark Amendment, the Reagan administration resumed assistance to Angola's freedom fighters.