Russia's Bold Challenge

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on January 14, 1980, two weeks after 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 steppingstone 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 détente. 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.)

Had a new cold war erupted between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? Not quite. At least not yet. But it seemed certain that the policy known as détente, which stressed cooperation between the two competing nuclear giants, had not survived the 1970s. The events of last week stood also as a grim reminder that it is not the American hostages in Iran that are the central object of U.S. foreign policy, but rather the potentially life-and-death relationship with the Soviet Union.

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 lunatics or 2) to move forcefully to take control of events.

A Soviet foreign affairs analyst told TIME 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 live up to our commitments. We can't wash our hands of them. There was no other choice."