The Soviets Dig In Deeper

An invasion turns into an occupation, but the rebels fight on

As Soviet forces fanned out to consolidate their hold on Afghanistan last week, the aftershocks of the invasion were causing tremors all over Southwest Asia. In neighboring Pakistan, which must now worry about Soviet incursions across its border in pursuit of Muslim Afghan rebels, the unsteady government of President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq appeared ready to accept emergency military aid from the U.S. and its allies. In India the stunning resurgence of Indira Gandhi, long a friend of Moscow, raised the prospect of an ominous tilt toward the Soviet Union in the subcontinent's largest country. In Iran, Ayatullah Khomeini's chaotic regime now had a Soviet threat on its eastern border as it struggled to cope with rebel autonomists and internal squabbles over what to do with the American hostages. In Egypt, Moscow's audacious conquest of Afghanistan cast a darkening shadow over a summit between President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. In New York City, one Third World country after another rose in the United Nations General Assembly to excoriate the Soviet Union (see following stones).

On the snow-blown slopes of the Afghan mountains, 75,000 Soviet troops turned their invasion into a full-scale occupation. Moscow's divisions spread into the hinterlands to stiffen the Afghan army's wavering resistance against the Muslim insurgency. A huge Soviet military airlift, which set the stage for the Christmas overthrow and execution of President Hafizullah Amin, showed no sign of slowing. Each day, eight to ten gigantic Antonov transport planes landed at Kabul and Bagram airports. Besides an arsenal of T-62 tanks and armored personnel carriers, the planes disgorged electric generators, bulldozers and building materials--telltale fixtures of an army that was digging in for a long stay. At least five Soviet combat divisions were in the country.

According to Western intelligence estimates, they controlled the five main population centers, the three big airfields at Bagram, Shindand and Kandahar, and all the important intersections of the paved "beltway" linking Kabul and other main Afghan cities.

Moscow's army of occupation was substantially larger than Afghanistan's own military forces. Kabul's conscript forces, once more than 100,000 strong, had been reduced to fewer than 65,000 by defections. Morale was further eroded by Soviet commanders, who ordered the disarming of Afghan battalions considered to be of suspect loyalty. Consequently, Soviet troops have had to take on an increasing share of the combat against the rebels, who still control about 80% of Afghanistan's barren countryside.

The stubborn bands of mujahidin (holy warriors), as the guerrillas call themselves, appeared to have concentrated their fighting in two regions: in the desert flats of the southwest, mainly around the city of Kandahar; and in the mountain provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan in the northeast. Last week the Soviets found themselves rushing to the rescue of Afghan units in both sectors.

In the southwest, Soviet troops were urgently summoned to shore up the defenses of Kandahar after mass defections from Afghan units stationed there. In the northeast, where rebels last week captured Takhars provincial capital of Taligan, Soviet battalions were believed to be advancing along the highway from Kabul to forestall a rebel seizure of Faizabad in neighboring Badakhshan. In addition, a Soviet column was trying to reopen the key highway at Jalalabad, between Kabul and the Khyber Pass, after repeated harassments by a marauding battalion of Afghan defectors. The Soviets were not advancing unscathed; every night at Kabul airport, loaded ambulances were seen driving into the holds of transport planes bound for bases in the Soviet Union.

How long the rebels can put up an effective resistance is uncertain. The guerrillas are armed primarily with homemade or captured Soviet rifles, plus a few Chinese-made automatic weapons smuggled in from Pakistan; relatively few of the defecting Afghan soldiers have joined the "holy warriors." Moreover, there are at least 60 different rebel groups, divided by ideology as well as old tribal enmities, and they lack a magnetic leader to unify them.

In Kabul, the Soviet-imposed government of President Babrak Karmal tried to project an image of legitimacy. It announced a few cosmetic changes, like a new campaign for land reform, and Karmal promised to release 2,073 political prisoners from Pul-e-Charkhi prison, seven miles outside Kabul. Clinging to the sides of trucks and squatting on the tops of buses, thousands of relatives converged on the prison gates to reclaim their loved ones in a crushing mob scene. Thousands more, lined up six deep, waited in the streets of Kabul. At the end of the day, however, not more than 500 prisoners had actually been released. The next morning the Interior Ministry was besieged by disappointed families, many in tears and some screaming in grief.

Karmal, who had appeared only once on television since the Soviets forcibly installed him, finally turned up in person at a press conference in sumptuous Chilsitoon Palace, once the summer retreat of Afghan monarchs. The new President disingenuously pledged that what he called "the very limited Soviet contingent" would withdraw as soon as "foreign intervention" was halted. He reiterated his government's stock charge that the U.S., China and Pakistan, as well as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were supporting the insurgency. "The Soviet Union is our sincere and reliable friend," said Karmal, adding, straight-faced, that "the U.S.S.R. has never interfered and is not now interfering in the affairs of other governments."

Applauded sporadically by obsequious Soviet diplomats and reporters, Karmal tried to turn aside tough questions from Western correspondents with bluster and even downright lies. How many Soviet soldiers have been killed or captured since the start of Afghanistan's internal war? "Not even one Soviet soldier has been killed, captured or wounded," he answered. When a British correspondent tried to ask a question, Karmal boorishly denounced him as a representative of British imperialism. "You invaded us three times and you got a rightful and deserved answer from the people of Afghanistan," he growled at the Briton, to the approving guffaws of Soviet embassy diplomats. No Western correspondent bothered to remind them that back in Moscow, readers of the Soviet press would have had a hard time figuring out that there were any Russian troops in Afghanistan at all.

As daily life in Kabul began to return to normal, Soviet troops lowered their profile. During the day few soldiers or military vehicles were in evidence, except for cruising armored cars with mounted loudspeakers blaring messages of friendship and reassurance. But the Russian presence was keenly felt if not always seen, and after dark it materialized in force. "Nobody has any illusions about the fact that Kabul today is run. by men with well-oiled Kalashnikov rifles and chauffered Volga sedans," TIME Correspondent David DeVoss reported from the Afghan capital. "Every night, just before 11 p.m. curfew, fleets of armored personnel carriers roll into Kabul from depots outside. Bristling with four machine guns each, they rumble alongside the frozen Kabul River past shuttered mosques and deserted bazaars, and halt momentarily in front of each government building. The elite paratroops who alight do not doze or socialize like the less disciplined Afghans from whom they assume command. Dressed in fur hats, bulky greatcoats and elephantine boots, they stand alert in the shadows waiting for the armored personnel carriers to pick them up again just before dawn."

It was not easy for the Red Army to be unobtrusive; more than 16,000 of its soldiers had encircled the capital. The Russian presence did not sit at all well with most Afghans. Before the invasion, the poor, illiterate, devoutly Muslim people of Kabul's mud-flecked Old Quarter routinely invited foreigners to take tea in their shop stalls. Now they assumed that all unfamiliar foreigners were Russian and thus to be glared at coldly and jostled. The Soviets were understandably wary. At least 30 soldiers had been murdered in the streets since the coup. The most common form of attack was for enraged bands of teen-agers to catch a Soviet soldier alone and beat him to death with rocks. In addition, shortly after the coup, twelve to 20 more members of the occupying army were reported to have been killed in a raid on their encampment five miles outside Kabul.

The deployment of the five Soviet divisions in Afghanistan raised ominous questions about Moscow's strategic intentions. Two of the mechanized divisions were positioned in western Afghanistan, and more troops were on their way there. In addition, two to three other divisions still in the U.S.S.R. were said to have moved westward toward the Iranian border. To some intelligence analysts in Kabul, the pattern pointed to the possibility of a strike into Iran if the Khomeini regime were to disintegrate.

"These are the divisions I would want if I were to make a run for Tehran," one military attache speculated in Kabul. "The Soviets are sitting pretty," concurred a South Asian expert. "Coming down from the north and across from Afghanistan, they would have the eastern half of Iran before the U.S. could react. There is no force that could stop them. The only impediment the Soviets would face is one wretched Iranian infantry division in Mashad."

Officials in Washington tended to disagree. They did not rule out the possibility if Iran were to tumble into complete chaos. In the Administration's view, however, it was considered more likely that the Soviets would pour increasing numbers of troops into Afghanistan in order to quell the rebellion as quickly as possible and set Karmal firmly in the saddle. Then, U.S. officials predict, the Kremlin would probably want to pull out as many of the troops as possible--though some tens of thousands would have to remain--and go on a propaganda offensive trumpeting the "stability" of Afghanistan. "They don't want to stay in there," one policy expert said of the Soviets. "They're putting a lot in to get it over with quickly."

The international outrage sparked by the Afghanistan conquest was the most severe since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Seeking to capitalize on the shock and dismay, the U.S. promoted a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. The vote was 13 to 2 in favor, but the Soviet Union promptly, and predictably, exercised its veto.

With that, the drive to condemn Moscow shifted to an emergency session of the General Assembly, where vetoes do not apply and where Third World countries hold a strong majority. The Soviets let Afghan Foreign Minister Shah Mohammed Dost carry their case at the debate's opening. He protested that the U.N. was reviving the "dark days of the cold war." Other delegates remained unpersuaded. Charged Colombia's delegate Indalecio Lievano: The Soviets' arrogant abuse of power represents "a return to the law of the jungle in the era of nuclear weapons."

Scoffed Amoakon Thiemele of the Ivory Coast: "Moscow had the brazenness to proclaim that it had come in at the request of the overthrown government." Lamented Nigeria's B. Akporode Clark: "No country had assisted the Third World more than the Soviet Union. Thus Nigeria has now felt a great sense of disappointment." One after the other, the delegates lashed out at Moscow. It was almost without precedent as a show of anti-Soviet sentiment among the Third World countries.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.