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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, June 20, 1980
Page 10
ON THE WORLD SCENE
BAD NEWS FOR SOVIETS FROM ALL DIRECTIONS: Nearly everywhere the Kremlin
looks these days, developments are discouraging. The Soviet leadership
has finally admitted publicly over Moscow Radio and in a Pravda dispatch,
that the military situation in Afghanistan is getting worse rather than
better. Rebel "cutthroats," as Moscow Radio calls them, have been
successful at blowing up schools and hospitals. "Their activity is
seriously disrupting normal life in the country," the radio dispatch adds.
The Daily Telegraph editoralizes on Russia's bloody dilemma: "Clearly the
Russians grossly underestimated the political and military hostility they
would encounter, and equally grossly overestimated the ability of their
tanks and gunships, however ruthlessly employed, to crush guerrilla re
sistance. They may well have become so used to the Europeans trembling
in their shoes at Russia's relative superiority that it never occurred
to them that the Afghans would really fight for their freedom against, by
all civilised standards, hopeless odds...Russia has got herself into a
ghastly�- There must be red faces and worried heads in the Kremlin.
But the only solution envisaged seems to be more troops and more slaughter.
The question arises of how long Russia's inefficient and overstretched
economy can stand the additional strain of Afghanistan on top of Cuba (� 5
million a day), Vietnam (,J, 3 million a day) and so on, increasingly,
around the world. This is the Achilles heel that the West must merci
lessly exploit."
Ilya Dzhirkvelov, a former KGB officer and Tass correspondent defected to
Britain in April. He tells now that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
took Soviet officials stationed abroad by surprise and left them in an
embarrassed position in having to try to defend their government's action.
Soviet troops in Afghanistan, claims Dzhirkvelov, are likely to become
permeneritly bogged down in a war they may never win on foreign soil--witb
serious ramifications for Soviet society as a whole. How can you justify
to Soviet mothers and fathers the deaths of young Russian lads in Afghanis
tan? If they were dying for some high political motive that would be
another matter, but Afghanistan poses no threat to the Soviet state. So
why did the Kremlin do it? Mr. Dzhirkvelov told The Times that in his
view it was to show the world--and above all Washington--that they could
get away with it as "proof of the contempt of the Soviet leadership for
the United States President and world opinion."
(There were reports today that the Soviet-installed Afghan President,
Babrak Karmal,has attempted to kill himself. There are so many defections
from the regular Afghan army that 15 year-olds are being rounded up on
house-to-house searches and dragged off to training.)
Soviet authorities have also gotten other bad news recently. Archrival
China joined the exclusive club of ICBM powers in May. Two unarmed Long
March 3 missiles lifted off from the remote Zinjiang region and traveled
some 6,000 miles to a target zone near the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.
The needle-nosed, liquid-propelled rocket--known in the West as the
CSS-X-4, No. 4 -- is relatively crude. But it showed that China intends
to allocate scarce resources to hold its own in what it calls "a world in
great turmoil." The test, reported Time magazine, proved China's ability