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North of the Khyber

By Hamilton Fish Armstrong
July 1956
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HAMILTON FISH ARMSTRONG, Editor of Foreign Affairs

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THE reason the Soviet Union feels confident of attaining its ultimate objectives in Afghanistan is indicated by Sir Isaac Newton's formula: the attraction of one body for another is in proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. The great landmass of the Soviet Union, frustratingly landlocked along all its southern borders, has a common frontier with Afghanistan 1,458 miles long; the United States, the competing magnet for Afghan friendship, lies on the other side of the world. There can be little doubt as to which pull is, by the laws of nature, stronger.

But the laws of nature can be qualified by human factors, in this case the foresight and calculated self-restraint of the Afghan leaders. Whether these come into play adequately and in time will depend largely on the methods used by the Soviets in pushing toward their ultimate goal. Thus our problem is not so much to identify the goal, which by our reckoning is plain, as to guess how Moscow is planning to attain it. For not only will this determine the attitude of the Afghan leaders toward the Communist and free worlds in the period while they still retain some freedom of choice; it will, in addition, carry tremendous weight with neighboring countries now hesitating whether to be neutral in fact or "neutral on the side of the Soviets."

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