BOOK REVIEW; AFGHANISTAN

DIE SOWJETISCHE INTERVENTION IN AFGHANISTAN: ENTSTEHUNG UND HINTERGRUENDE EINER WELTPOLITISCHEN KRISE. Edited by Heinrich Vogel. Osteuropa und der internationale Kommunismus., vol. 8 Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980. 392 pp. Maps. Tables. DM 39, paper.

This hefty chrestomathy of research studies collected by the Bundesinstitut fuer ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Bonn (March, 1980) should prove invaluable to serious commentators on Eurasian political relations. While certain of its studies would have benefitted from Draconian editorial excisions, the volume as a whole is solid testimony to the continued capability of German scholarship to produce informed and informative materials on short notice, even when restricting itself to previously published sources. A self-denying exclusion of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese sources, however, manifests unusual fidelity to the Euroopean Ordnung in a putatively postcolonial world.
Hans Braker's essay depicts the growing economic investment of the Soviets in Afghanistan's natural reserves in the context of regional re-Islamicization. In his view, the Soviet Union had become partially dependent on imported fuels from Iran and Afghanistan. Although Soviet military intervention was the logical consequence of long-term economic penetration, the Islamic Great Awakening has transformed the northern frontier of the Soviet Asian republics into the "front" for a North-South clash of Weltanschauungen. Gerd Linde exposes the multinational character of the old Afghan monarchy (1747-1973), the disputed nature of the Durand Line (1893) between the mountain kingdom and British India, and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy from the presentation of Afghanistan to the world as a model of peaceful coexistence to the military missions in 1979 of Generals Epishev and Pavlovskii. Gerhard Simon ventures a sophisticated analysis of the innner psychological components of Russian expansionism. He locates its dynamic source in an inferiority complex that has grasped historically at colonial expansion as a compensation for internal weaknesses. Analyzing the functional role of various Soviet administrative mechanisms, Astrid von Borcke finds the leitmotif of Kremlin consensus to be "muddling through." Brezhnev's successor will have to continue to appease vested interests, for "Die Alternative zu einer solchen Moeglichkeit waere eine wachsende Macht der Apparate, speziell der Militaers and womoeglich der Sicherheitsorgane: am Ende dieses Weges koennte damit eine Form von Militarisierung des Parteiregimes stehen...(The alternative to such a possibility would be the growing power of the Apparat, especially that of the military and possibly the secret police: this road could eventually lead to a form of militarization of party rule..." (p. 160)
In a sometimes painfully scholastic piece, Helmut Dahm analyzes a new (1975) Soviet military category, the "civil war of liberation" (grazhdanskaia osvoboditel'naia voina). While opposing interstate conflict, Soviet strategy now accepts the possibility of military intervention in civil wars in support of the proletariat. Soviet strategy for the Third World is presented as a Leninist Compelle intrare, ut impleature domus with no trace of an inferiority complex. Gerhard Wettig suggests that the Carter Administration so consistently rebuffed the Soviets that the leadership felt it had little to lose in denying Afghanistan to an encirclement of potential enemies and thereby miscalculated both Afghan military resistance and Third World reactions. Responses among the Warsaw Pact countries were mixed, Christian Meier reports: reactions ranged from dutiful assent (Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia), obligatory noises (Hungary), limited support (Poland) and dissociation (Romania). Further, abridgment of Western trade and credits negatively affects East European efforts at economic modernization, which constituted a major justification for detente. With unusual cogency, Heinz Timmermann advocates that Western Europe pursue toward the Third World a "total strategy" of cultural support and economic aid that would complement American efforts while maintaining,if I may suggest, Europe's pretensions to a mission civilatrice.
Simply outstanding on the inner party history of the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan is Wolfgang Berner's "Der Kampf um Kabul," which discovers in the "Khalq" faction a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism, in the multinational "Parcham" a taint from its former collaboration with the previous Daud regime, and in both factions a political chastity questionable enough to have led to their neglect by Soviet media for over a decade prior to the coup of April 1979. Whether military intervention may serve as a paradigm of Soviet strategy, as Heiinrich Vogel suggests in his introduction, remains problematic. Perhaps the key will be found in New Delhi.
--Slavic Review, vol 41, No. 4
(Winter, 1982), pp. 720-21.

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