The death of detente: SALT II and Afghanistan

Amid the domestic backlash against detente in the United States and the increasing Soviet activity in the Third World, the two superpowers still managed to negotiate a SALT II Treaty.

multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV)

A re-entry vehicle that breaks up into several nuclear warheads, each capable of reaching a different target. Not included in the SALT I agreements of 1972.

see Tables 11.1 and 11.2

Given that the 1972 treaty was of limited duration (five years), negotiations for SALT II had started already in November 1972. At the November 1974 Vladivostok summit the two sides had agreed to some tentative guidelines that were fleshed out over subsequent negotiations. The talks were complicated by a number of factors, including the American presidential elections of 1976, the

Table 11.1 Detente and the Soviet-American nuclear balance: strategic launcher parity

events in Angola and the Horn of Africa, the SS-20 deployment, and the American decision to move towards full normalization with China in late 1978.

As an arms control agreement SALT II far exceeded the terms of its predecessor. SALT II provided for numerical equality, included restrictions on the MIRVs and committed (but did not mandate) the two sides to reduce the number of their missiles by 1982. However, negotiating and even signing an agreement did not make it binding. Indeed, as Carter returned home from Vienna, opposition to the ratification of SALT II was already vocal inside the United States. While some wanted to tie the treaty to the Soviet Union's record on human rights (citing Carter's own rhetoric on this issue), others criticized SALT II as a treaty that did not go far enough to reduce the size of each side's nuclear arsenal, hence allowing both sides to continue their nuclear buildup. In the autumn of 1979 the treaty was intensely debated on Capitol Hill. As the ratification process dragged on, events in Central Asia intervened.

see Chapter 19

While the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79 is discussed usually in terms of its being the first manifestation of a collision between political Islam and the West, the impact of this crisis on the thinking of American foreign policy-makers is also important for understanding the death of detente. The fall of the shah and the success of the deeply anti-American Islamic Revolution in 1979 came at a time when doubts about the course of American foreign policy had already been expressed following events in Angola and the Horn of Africa. In November 1979, while the SALT II ratification process dragged on, the followers of the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the US embassy in Teheran and took sixty- six Americans hostage. Fifty-two of the captured Americans were not released until early 1981, after a long series of negotiations and an unsuccessful rescue attempt in 1980. By that year the Islamic fundamentalists had consolidated their control in Iran and a war between Iran and Iraq had sparked another of the many American shifts of allegiances in the region; throughout most of the 1970s Iraq had been considered a Soviet ally.

The significance of the Iranian Revolution to detente was twofold. On the one hand, the loss of yet another Cold War ally was an added blow to American prestige and paved the way for more aggressive leadership in Washington. Indeed, the hostage crisis contributed greatly to Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential elections and his determination to restore American credibility, primarily through building up military strength. On the other hand, the anti­Americanism of the Iranian Revolution was another factor that transformed the oil-rich Middle East into a key strategic concern in the late 1970s. Even more than the pan-Arab movement spearheaded by Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, the Iranian Revolution had severe implications for continued Western access to Middle East oil resources.

In this context, the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was easily perceived in the United States as a further menace to a beleaguered strategic nexus. In reality, the Soviets probably launched the invasion of Afghanistan not to threaten Western access to oil, but in order to prevent the rise of another fundamentalist Islamic regime on their own doorstep. In April 1978 the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had launched a successful coup against President Daoud's regime in Kabul. The PDPA, however, proved to be a deeply factional party, prone to infighting and incapable of consolidating its power within Afghanistan. This became evident in March 1979 when a four-day rebellion by a coalition of Islamist guerrillas and other anti-communist forces in the city of Herat left more than five thousand people dead (among them fifty Soviet citizens). In subsequent months the Soviets increased their presence and aid to the Afghan communists to no avail, for while opposition forces launched sporadic attacks on government strongholds, infighting within the PDPA continued. In October 1979 the deputy leader, Hafizullah Amin, killed President Nur Mohammad Taraki, the Soviet-backed Afghan communist leader, sparking an internal debate in Moscow that finally led to the decision to intervene on Christmas Day 1979.

Given the conditions inside Afghanistan, as well as the general state of international politics at the time, it is unlikely that the Soviets considered the invasion as the first step in a broad offensive to establish Soviet hegemony in Central Asia. Instead, two essentially defensive calculations lay behind what eventually amounted to a decade-long Soviet military presence. First, the Soviets were clearly concerned about the possible rise of fundamentalist Islam, which formed the major opposition to the PDPA's rule, as it presented a latent threat to Soviet control over its Central Asian republics. Second, the Soviets were aware that the United States was a major supporter of the Islamist rebels (and would for years provide major assistance to the mujahedeen fighting against Soviet inter­vention). Moreover, while the October killing of President Taraki was essentially a palace revolution, it also raised the spectre that the new leader might decide to shift Afghanistan towards the West and, possibly, to negotiate a truce with the rebels. The Soviet nightmare was that the United States would support the rise and spread of anti-Soviet fundamentalist Islam to the southern belly of the USSR. Coming on top of the Carter administration's emphasis on human rights abuses in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, these factors meant that what was at stake was ultimately the legitimacy of the Soviet regime.

mujahedeen (Arabic: those who struggle in the way of God)

Term used for the Muslim guerrillas who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979-89.

While the Soviets may have viewed their actions as essentially a defensive move required to safeguard the USSR's national security, the American reaction to Soviet intervention was harsh. President Carter claimed that Afghanistan represented a ‘quantum jump in the nature of Soviet behaviour' and posed a serious threat to peace. He was seemingly correct, for the invasion of Afghanistan did, after all, require the largest deployment of Soviet troops outside its territory since the Second World War.

At least in the short term, Carter's efforts failed. The Soviets did not withdraw from Afghanistan and the American absence from the Moscow Olympics simply translated into more gold medals for the Soviet bloc. If anything, Carter's confrontational rhetoric and increased aid to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen guerrillas in Afghanistan probably confirmed to the Soviet leadership that their suspicions of American motives had been correct. At home, Carter found that his policies had won him few new friends and probably alienated a number of old ones. In the 1980 presidential election he was voted out of office. He had, however, paved the way for even more confrontational rhetoric, that of Ronald Reagan. In the early 1980s confrontation once again replaced detente in Soviet—American relations.