Ring Me Up

Hot winds from the Hindu Kush blew across the grass runway of Kabul airport last week as a sleek Russian TU-104 jet airliner touched down, bringing slim, weathered King Mohammed Zahir Shah back from a 17-day state visit to Moscow, 2,000 miles away. The King stepped onto a Persian carpet and delivered a brief arrival speech. "The trip was most successful," he told the assembled dignitaries. "The hearts of the Russian people are full of friendship for Afghanistan."

The King's concrete accomplishments in Moscow, according to the official communique, added up to the creation of a joint Russian-Afghan trading mission, the granting to the Russians of the right to begin "disinterested" explorations for oil in the arid wastes of northern Afghanistan (a similar request by the French was rejected by the Afghans under Russian pressure in 1952) and an agreement to send more Afghan students to the U.S.S.R. for training.

In rocky, underpopulated, not-very-strategic Afghanistan, where the U.S. and Russia are now competing for favor, Russian foreign aid officials have shown themselves at least as expert as U.S. officials are everywhere said to be in supplying reluctant populations with benefits they do not particularly want and do not particularly need.

The truth seems to be, reported London Daily Telegraph Special Correspondent Denis Warner last week from Kabul, that most Afghans, official as well as unofficial, dislike and distrust foreigners, regardless of nationality. When the Afghan King left his Russian jet and was whisked to his palace on a five-lane Russian-built superhighway, it quite possibly marked the first time in several weeks that the highway had been used by anything more than a donkey cart. Russia has also supplied some $40 million in military aid "several" T-34 tanks, fairly modern artillery pieces, 32 MIG-17 fighter planes and six helicopters, as well as 30 taxis for the near empty streets of Kabul. The U.S. considers southern Afghanistan its sphere of assistance, has built.two major dams there (which unfortunately cannot be seen by many Afghans) and has sponsored the training of 500 Afghan teachers by U.S. instructors sent out by Columbia University Teachers College.

The Russians have also given Kabul an automatic telephone system, which, reported Warner, has virtually paralyzed Kabul's bureaucracy because officials with phones spend the better part of their working day trying to think of someone to ring up.

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