The Sorrow of Parting

The scene at Kabul airport was heartrending, according to one observer: parents and relatives were held at gunpoint behind police barricades, prevented from gathering their departing children in a final embrace. Amid tears and anguish, earlier this month some 370 Afghan children between the ages of seven and nine were herded aboard a Soviet airliner. Their destination: the Soviet Union, where for the next 15 to 20 years they will be put through a course of political indoctrination. According to Radio Kabul, the official voice of Afghan President Babrak Karmal's Soviet-backed regime, the children will be taught "Marxist-Leninist thinking, and an appreciation of the greatness of the Soviet state and the evils of imperialism."

Sources within the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance movement say that the children will join an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 Afghan youngsters who have been forcibly sent to the Soviet Union over the past four years. One Western diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan, says that the Soviets, faced with widespread opposition in Afghanistan, "may have concluded that nothing short of Sovietization inside the U.S.S.R. would make much of an ideological dent in Afghan youth."