Dark Horses

With President Reagan’s rescission of Jimmy Carter’s embargo on U.S. grain shipment to the Soviet Union, a major substantive penalty levied on the Kremlin in retaliation for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was removed. By the time Reagan lifted the embargo—in one of his successful trade-offs with congressmen whose votes he needed to win his proposed austerity budget-the international “incident” that provoked it had been nearly forgotten. That, at any rate, would be the opinion of Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell, authors of a superior book, The Struggle for Afghanistan (Cornell, $14.95), which seeks to put the Soviet invasion into historical and political perspective.

Nancy and Richard Newell sketch the history of the country over millennia. Afghanistan, they remind us, has historically been a crossroads of Asian and European trade and political intrigue. Afghanistan’s rulers have maintained. their precarious neutrality and independence by cautiously and often expertly balancing one foreign power against another. In the late nineteenth century this meant playing a careful game with Britain on the one hand and imperial Russia on the other; after World War 11, it meant attempting to prevent Soviet influence from overwhelming all other.

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About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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With President Reagan’s rescission of Jimmy Carter’s embargo on U.S. grain shipment to the Soviet Union, a major substantive penalty levied on the Kremlin in retaliation for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was removed. By the time Reagan lifted the embargo—in one of his successful trade-offs with congressmen whose votes he needed to win his proposed austerity budget-the international “incident” that provoked it had been nearly forgotten. That, at any rate, would be the opinion of Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell, authors of a superior book, The Struggle for Afghanistan (Cornell, $14.95), which seeks to put the Soviet invasion into historical and political perspective.

Nancy and Richard Newell sketch the history of the country over millennia. Afghanistan, they remind us, has historically been a crossroads of Asian and European trade and political intrigue. Afghanistan’s rulers have maintained. their precarious neutrality and independence by cautiously and often expertly balancing one foreign power against another. In the late nineteenth century this meant playing a careful game with Britain on the one hand and imperial Russia on the other; after World War 11, it meant attempting to prevent Soviet influence from overwhelming all other.