“I cannot predict the future course of Soviet behavior, ” said national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski when asked on a Sunday morning public affairs television program about the Soviet military incursion into Afghanistan. But why can’t he?
It’s his job to know what the Soviets will do. To those who have studied the Communist dialectic and Soviet military doctrine, the Soviet move into Afghanistan was as predictable as the movement of the sun and planets.
“What’s ours is ours, but what’s yours is negotiable.” That fundamental principle has always guided the Soviets in their negotiations, conferences, agreements, and relations with other nations.
That maxim was cast in steel in 1968 by the ostentatious demonstration of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Here is its definition: Once the Communists attain government status in any country, the Soviets will intervene with armed forces to sustain the Communists against any attack or overthrow.
The Czech Defense Minister, General Martin Dzur, told a secret session of his government that the Soviets used 650,000 occupation troops in the August 20, 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. In addition, the Soviets used thousands of tanks, armored cars, trucks, self-propelled artillery and rocket launchers — against a people with practically no weapons and an army of only 175,000.
The Soviets moved more troops into Czechoslovakia in five days than the Johnson Administration moved into Vietnam in five years, and the Soviets did it with complete Surprise. They also, incidentally, attacked in violation of a treaty guaranteeing Czech independence signed only seventeen days before, on August 3, as well as of 16 additional international agreements.
The Soviets, careful planners that they are, always test the will of the current U.S. President before they make a major move. The Soviets tested us shortly before the invasion of Czechoslovakia by having their North Korean stooges seize the Pueblo and hold its crew. This act of piracy not only humiliated the United States before the world, but it proved again, as Khrushchev told the poet Robert Frost, “You are too liberal to fight, even in defense of your own vital interests” — or even for the lives of our servicemen.
Before moving into Afghanistan with tens of thousands of troops, while the Western world was observing the Christmas holidays, the Soviets watched the test of our national will in Teheran. If the Carter Administration would do nothing except whine to the United Nations about 50 American citizens tied up and held incommunicado for weeks by the student street-fighters in Iran, it certainly would not interfere with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Once the Soviets installed a Marxist regime in Afghanistan some 20 months ago, the Brezhnev Doctrine made Soviet military action inevitable because the Soviets would always protect what was “theirs.” The Soviets would never be the slightest bit embarrassed by having “outraged” the world community.
The Kremlin justified its estimated 50,000 armed troops, with armored formations, heavy tanks, and motorized infantry, with the false accusation that the attack was a defensive measure designed to counter “imperialist (i.e., U.S.) interference in the internal affairs of democratic Afghanistan.”
Without a touch of facetiousness or sarcasm, Pravda charged that “the reactionaries (i.e., the anti-Communists) were actually receiving unlimited backing from the imperialist circles of the U.S. that (is) lavishly supplying the counterrevolutionary gangs with weapons, equipment and money.” That’s not only false; it’s ridiculous. Even the U.S. State Department managed to call it “a patently contrived excuse.”
Soviet military doctrine has long called for the launching of a preemptive or preventive nuclear attack on the United States under cover of the charge that the United States is planning an attack on the Soviet Union. It’s time we put into advisory positions in the White House some persons who can predict Soviet actions and prepare our nation to cope with them. As former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird wrote, “Communism cannot change; and to believe in the possibility of change is a madness almost as far from the true ordering of reason as the ideology itself.”
