Thinking About Afghanistan

Commentary is a regular feature of the Crimson editorial page that provides a forum for opinion from members of the Harvard community. Those interested in contributing pieces should contact the editorial chairman.

DOES HARVARD BOTHER about Afghanistan? It doesn't seem so. Afghanistan has been the topic of discussion on only a very few occasions, during my year and a half at first the Kennedy School and then the Center for International Affairs.

Campus seems to ignore Afghanistan.

And yet, the war continues. Refugees keep pouring into Pakistan and Iran, augmenting the refugee population which now exceeds 4.5 million people. This is by far the world's largest refugee tragedy. It is the result of a deliberate Soviet policy aimed at destroying civilian life in Afghanistan.

It is the Soviet hope that a countryside depleted of its population will be a meager ground for the resistance. A recent United Nations' report describes the war as genocide. At least 500,000 Afghans, and 20,000 Soviet soldiers, have died in the war since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Afghans are a special breed; unlike most people in the third world they never have been colonized. Three British attempts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to extend British India's border into Afghanistan were fended off by the fiercly independent Afghans.

WE CAN BE SURE they will continue to doggedly resist this new invasion quite independently of receiving outside military aid. The Afghan war is not a superpower-confrontation, but a war between a superpower and a small, non-aligned nation fighting for it's survival and independence. It is, hopefully, also the last grand colonial war. The only way of imposing Pax Sovietica in Afghanistan is to bleed the nation to death. And that will take many more years.

The Soviets ought, of course, to think about the detrimental effect this colonial war is having on their society, in urgent need of modernization. It is my guess that the Soviets would like to get out of this messy Afghan situation. But they can't. Their puppet regime would not survive a Soviet withdrawal. A departure from Afghanistan would, in the Soviet mind, deal a blow to their strenuously achieved superpower position.

So the Afghan war is likely to stay with us for another decade, and we had better take careful notice of what's going on.

Some aspects of the war should interest campus more than others, in particular the threat it represents to Afghan society and culture.

THE DESTRUCTION OF NATIVE CULTURES has often been the aim of colonizing powers. It is doubtful whether it has ever happened on such a massive scale as in today's Afghanistan.

At a conference held in Stockholm a year ago at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, some of the best international scholars on Afghanistan listed the horrifying effects of the war.

Some 25,00 Afghan children have been sent to the Soviet Union for 'education' in the obvious Soviet hope of creating a future pro-Soviet elite. Afghanistan's history is being rewritten in order to suit the new regime. Russian has been substituted for English as the first foreign language in Afghan schools. The rudimentary education system which existed in the countryside, where 80 percent of the population lives, has been swept away. Many of Afganistan's ancestral monuments, for example the mosques in Herat (considered as international landmarks by UNESCO) have been seriously damaged by the fighting.

The scholars gathered in Stockholm also took notice of another collateral damage caused by the war--namely, that they are being cut off from their field of research. Funding for Afghan research are therefore planning to move on to new research fields. The pool of Afghan specialists is being drained.

This trend must be reversed. There is an urgent need to study the effects of war on Afghan society and culture for both scholarly and humanitarian reasons. Western scholars should help the Afghans preserve their cultural and scientific heritage.

They, and we, need it, regardless of the outcome of the war.

There are still many good scholars who would like to go back to their Afghan research. And new students ought to be brought into the field. Efforts and money should be urgently chanelled into Afghan studies.

Who at Harvard is examining the possibility of bringing about a negotiated settlement for Afghanistan? About how the historical landmarks can be defended and the Afghan archives saved? Or what will be the effects of the war on the Afghan women's situation?

Harvard's rich human resources should be applied to concrete steps to end the destruction and bring about refief to the Afghans. Harvard should definitely bother about Afghanistan.

Katarina Enberg is a fellow at the Center for International Affairs. She is the program director at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and a foreign correspondent for the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet. She is on the board of trustees for the Swedish-Afghanistan Committee.