M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — The Soviet Union became a
superpower during the rule of Josef Stalin, who terrorized those territories
that he did not immediately annex. After the 1939-45 war, the USSR controlled
Eastern Europe and challenged the primacy of the United States and its European
partners across the world.
But since Stalin’s death in 1953, Moscow
has almost always given way when confronted with a resolute Western response.
Nikita Khruschev blinked hard in Cuba in 1962, with the United States agreeing
only to avoid another invasion of Cuba -- a course that anyway had been shown
to be folly a short while earlier -- in exchange for a humiliating withdrawal
of Soviet missiles from the island.
Throughout the Cold War, although Moscow
enjoyed considerable conventional military superiority in Europe, its forces
never once strayed beyond the boundaries set in 1945. Had it done so, the
history of Europe may have been different in that such tensions would almost
certainly have affected the economic environment negatively.
As it turned out, it was the USSR that
imploded economically, drained both by a dysfunctional central-command system
as well as by military spending that would have been justified only if the
armaments so expensively procured were put to use to secure geopolitical gains.
The Afghan war most exposed the strategic
cowardice of the Soviet leadership. At any stage in the decade-long conflict,
an attack on Pakistan would have resulted in the immediate drying up of the
flow of supplies from across the border to the mujahideen. It is unlikely that
the United States and other NATO partners would have risked a flare-up of
Warsaw Pact-NATO tensions in Europe by seeking to protect Pakistan from a
Soviet assault. Peshawar and other centers of Afghan resistance would have been
pulverized by Soviet bombing, and international jihad -- which today has
morphed into a severe threat to international security -- would have lost its
Afghan-Pakistani sanctuary.
