NEW DELHI: Indian support of the Soviet backed Najibullah regime in Afghanistan was critically examined by Jagat S, Mehta, a former Foreign Secretary in an article published in the Indian Express.

“Indian future in Afghanistan has got very narrowly identified with a government which overwhelming majority of Afghan people distrust and much of the International community considers as military besieged and politically at bay,” the article said.

“Future historians with no vested interest in present politics are likely to be critical at the avoidable jeopardy of our (Indian) interests, and the damage to the traditional regard of the Afghan people for India,” the article observes.

“We sided with the Soviet Union not because of non-aligned principles which have been fundamentally on the side of nationalism, liberation struggles and against great power interventions but because in the superimposition of the cold war on the subcontinent the USSR had been a well-tested friend of India,” the article said.

The author noted that India voted for the Soviet Union in the UN vote on Afghanistan. The vote was at odds with those of India’s neighbors it said. It retarded the developing ties with China the author noted.

India activated its diplomacy only after 1988 after “Afghanistan was not considered worth the Soviet blood and treasure.”

We would no doubt prefer a secular dispensation in the country but for us to have invited President Najibullah on a state visit to Delhi in April 1988 (President Gorbachev only met the Afghan President in Tashkent) was proof of a failure to comprehend Soviet Union’s priorities and policies. “It has been a sound tenent of non-alignment that outside intervention to shape internal regimes is wrong in principle and generally doomed in result,” the author said.

“A million and a half Afghans are said to have died; some five million are refugees; some 10 million mines have been strewn in pathways all over the country. The number of mained will increase even if the violence ends”, the author said.

The Indian community, long resident in Afghanistan may have to suffer taunts from the returning Mujahideen in what Afghans will look upon as their struggle for liberation the former

foreign secretary concluded.

Article extracted from this publication >>  April 21, 1989