AFGHANISTAN: Toward the Khyber

From the time of Alexander the Great, the road to Indian conquest has led down from the north through the Khyber Pass. To keep the encroaching Russians away from this gateway to their empire, the British built up the buffer state of Afghanistan across the Khyber’s mountainous northern approaches. Last week, only nine years after the British turned over the Khyber’s defenses to the new and troubled state of Pakistan, the long-feared penetration of Russian military influence into Afghanistan was announced as a fact. In Kabul, Afghanistan’s Strongman Mohammed Daoud Khan, who last winter accepted a $100 million economic credit from the touring Soviet twins, Bulganin and Khrushchev, announced that his government had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union “for strengthening Afghanistan’s defenses.” The whole deal, he added, was made “without any political strings attached.”

Before signing, the Afghans had made a try at buying arms from the West. But the U.S. knows that its ally Pakistan would object violently if it sold arms to a neighbor that claims a lot of its territory, including the Khyber Pass itself. Besides, the U.S. has not taken kindly to Afghanistan’s flirtations with the Communists. Already, Afghanistan’s debt to Soviet Russia tops $120 million—quite a load for a country with a $25 million budget—and the latest deal will drive the figure higher.

Well on their way to killing their neighbors with kindness, the Russians have built several huge grain elevators, a flour mill, an automatic bakery that can supply all Kabul with baked goods. Almost every drop of gasoline used in the country now flows down from the north in caravans of 20 to 50 Russian gas trucks to sell for a giveaway 25¢ a gallon in Kabul. Exports (furs, fruit, carpets) that used to stop and go at the Khyber Pass with every Pakistani whim now travel north to more cer tain Soviet markets. U.S. officials estimate that there are already several thousand Soviet do-gooders spreading their blessings in Afghanistan. Last week Kabul’s only modern hotel was jammed with members of the 200-man Russian delegation to the city’s international trade fair (the U.S. sent three representatives). So benevolent are the Russians that they are not only building and improving roads from their border to the capital, they are also at work on the road that leads from Kabul to the Khyber Pass.