And Now Pistachio

The Soviet Union, whose recent acquisitions include Finnish nickel, Lithuanian butter, Estonian cellulose, Tannu Tuvan asbestos, last week marched on to pistachio nuts.

It legitimized the de facto Soviet sovereignty over the Kushk district, a remote corner of the world where Afghanistan, Iran and the U.S.S.R. meet among the high pastures, vast pistachio groves and wild tribesmen who live around the ancient Oxus River.* The treaty just negotiated between Moscow and Kabul scraps two 1921 clauses which granted the people of Kushk the right to choose their own masters by plebiscite, and stipulated Russian financial and material aid to Afghanistan.

The new treaty provides that the Russians can build a dam on the Murghab River, to irrigate the barren steppes of the neighboring Turkmen Soviet Republic. It also consolidates Russia's hold on the strategically important Trans-Caspian Railroad, a branch of which ends at Kushka, near Afghan and Iranian oil. In return, Afghanistan got a couple of small islands.

Fashions in political expansion have changed since the days when Genghis Khan swept through this dry and rocky land, leaving in his wake ghastly skull pyramids to act as scare-rebels. By maintaining a big embassy staff in mud-walled Kabul, Russia has used gentler means to win Afghan acquiescence.

Britain's Foreign Office, which has always kept a jealous eye on the "gateway to India," remained mum, the War Office referred callers to the India Office, the India Office said: "No importance at all."

Trouble, of course, is relative. Britain still worried about Russian influence in Afghanistan, but her silence was a measure of the inflation in bad relations between the Empire and the imperial Reds.

* "The shorn and parcell'd Oxus," whose strategic role is immortalized in Matthew Arnold's poem Sohrab and Rustum.

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