My Opinion of the Russians Has Changed Most Drastically...
Monday, Jan. 14, 1980
So saying, Carter angrily halts grain sales and postpones SALT in a series of retaliations against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan It was as though a time warp had plunged the world back into an earlier and more dangerous era. Soviet divisions had swarmed across the border of a neighboring country and turned it into a new satellite. Moscow and Washington were exchanging very angry words. Jimmy Carter accused Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev of lying, and the Soviets' TASS press agency shot back that Carter's statements were "bellicose and wicked." For Carter, the rapid series of events in Afghanistan seemed to provide a remarkable kind of revelation. Said he, sounding strikingly naive in an ABC television interview: "My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous 2 1/2 years before that." He added that it was "imperative" that "the leaders of the world make it clear to the Soviets that they cannot have taken this action to violate world peace ... without paying severe political consequences."
What those consequences might be was the subject of week-long strategy sessions,
and then on Friday night Carter set forth his response to the bold Soviet challenge. Appearing for 13 minutes on nationwide television, he delivered the toughest speech of his presidency. Warned Carter: "Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease." He denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as "a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people" and said that a "Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a stepping-stone to their possible control over much of the world's oil supplies."
Carter then announced that he was sharply cutting the sale to the Soviets of two kinds of goods they desperately need: grain and advanced technology. Contracts for 17 million tons of grain, worth $2 billion, are being canceled. Soviet fishing privileges in American waters are also being severely curtailed, as are new cultural exchange programs; Carter further hinted that the U.S. might boycott this summer's Moscow Olympics. To shore up Afghanistan's neighbors,
Carter said that the U.S. "along with other countries will provide military equipment, food and other assistance" to help Pakistan defend its independence.
These actions were only the latest in an escalating series of retaliatory moves. Carter officially requested the Senate to postpone any further consideration of the U.S.-Soviet treaty to limit strategic arms, once the chief symbol of superpower detente. The U.S. and nearly 50 other countries then called for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to condemn the latest Soviet aggression. That meeting convened on Saturday. And the U.S. summoned Ambassador Thomas J. Watson Jr. home from Moscow for consultations. (Not even during the crisis triggered by the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the American ambassador recalled from Moscow.)
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to the decade-long Soviet military buildup). Irritating Moscow too was the prospect that while it was not going to get most-favored-nation trading benefits from Washington, it seemed certain that Peking was going to get them. That would violate the principle of'evenhanded' treatment of the two Communist powers, which Carter had promised when he normalized relations with China.
"Taken together, these developments created an atmosphere in which the Soviets felt no particular need to be cautious. Some well-informed Soviet sources privately admit that the Kremlin had become disenchanted with the course of detente and had decided to thumb its nose at the U.S. Had Afghanistan not come along, say these Soviet insiders, something else probably would have happened to permit Moscow to demonstrate that it no longer felt restrained by détente."
Moscow's primary purpose in invading Afghanistan, most experts agree, was simply to tighten its control of that rebellious country. The tide of Islamic fervor, which had already shaken Iran, was now threatening Afghanistan. Unless it were checked, might it not also spread across the border into the Soviet Central Asian Republics and stir unrest among their substantial Islamic populations? Thus Soviet leaders probably felt that they had only two options: 1) to allow a Moscow-leaning socialist state on their border to dissolve into chaos and possibly pass into the hands of Muslim fanatics or 2) to move forcefully to take control of events. A Soviet foreign affairs analyst told TIME'S Nelan that "it was not easy for us to make this decision, but we were committed in Afghanistan from the beginning." Employing a rationale heard frequently in Washington in the 1960s to explain the growing U.S. presence in South Viet Nam, the Soviet official added: "Whether we like it or not, we have to liva up to our commitments. We can't wash our hands of them. There was no other choice." To describe this Soviet use of military force to restore hegemony over Afghanistan, the British embassy in Moscow, in a cable to London, used the strange term defensive aggression.
Besides securing a hold on Afghanistan, the Soviets may have had other reasons to launch their invasion. For one, the invasion could be part of a long-range strategy to gain influence over Pakistan, Iran and other Persian Gulf nations. Says a senior British official: "The Soviets have a vested interest in getting an influence in Iran. The prize in political, economic and military terms would be enormous. It would, place them in a position of being able to turn off the oil tap for Western consumers almost at will when the oil shortage starts to really bite later in the 1980s." It would also put them in a position of having immediate access to the gulf's rich petroleum reserves when, in the next few years, the U.S.S.R.'s domestic output of oil is expected to start falling short of its internal needs.
Beyond any specific and immediate goals, the Soviets may also have intended their invasion of Afghanistan to demonstrate to Pakistan and Iran what happens to unruly neighbors. This is a message that Moscow may be particularly interested in sending to China in an effort to restrain Peking's maneuverings both in Southeast Asia and along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet frontier.
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I guess that answers the questions
