It is difficult for us to say whether President Zia-ul-Haq genuinely believes what he has said in Washington about the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan or whether he is pretending to go along with the Reagan administration’s propaganda line in order to extract the maximum aid out of it. His statement comes straight out of the writings of Lord Curzon and other British strategists of the 19th and the early 20th century which make strange reading today. He has said that the British withdrawal from the sub-continent in 1947 created a power vacuum, that the Soviet Union has been anxious to fill it ever since, that it seized the opportunity to move into Afghanistan which the willingness of Babrak Karmal to cooperate with it offered it in 1979, and that it will like to repeat Afghanistan in Iran and Pakistani Baluchistan in order to get to the warm waters of the Gulf and finally seize control of them. And as if this was not enough, he has gone to add that the Soviet leadership has been very concerned over the resurgence of Islam in Iran and Pakistan and has, therefore, been anxious to build a “dam in Afghanistan so that its own Muslim population in the central Asian republics is not inundated by the Islamic flood.”
This is so much crap which only the cold warriors in Washington will buy. The Soviet Union, unlike even up to the sixties, now disposes of a blue waters navy which gives it access to the Persian-Arab gulf as to any other part of the world. The Afghanistan-Iranian route is the worst possible for getting there even if the enterprise did not involve great political hazards, including a possible US occupation of the southern oil-rich part of Iran and direct confrontation with it. Moscow has gone out of its way to affirm its interest in friendly ties with Pakistan and there is no evidence at all that it is planning to promote insurrection in Baluchistan. Above all, if General Zia believes what he has said, he should not be carrying on any kind of talks with the Soviet Union at all. These make sense only on the assumption that the Kremlin recognizes that it has landed itself in a mess in Afghanistan and would wish to get out if the right circumstances can be created.
President Zia is right in taking a rather pessimistic view of the prospects in the near future. The Soviet Union cannot withdraw its troops from Afghanistan because the Babrak Karmal or any other reasonably friendly regime cannot on its own withstand the onslaught of the Mujahideen backed and armed by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. A rational government in Moscow would accept a genuinely neutral Afghanistan. It is in Pakistan’s interest to promote developments leading to the establishment of such a regime in Kabul. It will be a tragedy for the region if General Zia refuses to recognise this fact in order to get from the US arms which his country does not need for ensuring its security.