The Soldiers of Apartheid

THE SOLDIERS OF APARTHEID Kurt M. Campbell JX "uring the last two decades South Africa has assembled the most powerful and feared armed forces on the continent. While foot soldiers patrol South Africa's borders, Afrikanerdom's senior military leaders are preparing to make a final stand to preserve white hegemony on the southern tip ofAfrica. To date, however, the military's most decisive victories have occurred not on the battlefield but within South Africa's decisionmaking bureaucracy. In dramatic contrast with the despair and pessimism found in South Africa's business community and among some black activists, there is growing confidence easily sensed along Pretoria's corridors of power. While South Africa has continued to slip toward civil war during the past two years, Pretoria's military and intelligence elite have emerged as the dominant force in the formulation and execution of government policy. The South African regime sees itself as engaged in nothing less than an all-out struggle for national survival— a fight to the finish. Police Commissioner Johan Coetzee has characterized it as "a war of attrition [in which there] is no cutoff point. He who lasts the longest wins because, in the final analysis, it is about the will of the nation to exist and that ofothers to wear them down."1 As country after country in southern Africa 1. Deon Geldenhuys, Some Foreign Policy Implications of South Africa's "Total National Strategy" (Braamfontein: South African Institute of International Affairs, March 1981), 3. Kurt M. Campbell is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and assistant director of the school's Center for Science and International Affairs. He is the author of Soviet Policyfor South Africa (Macmillan, 1986) and was chosen as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow for 1987. Dr. Campbell spent three months in southern Africa last year, a significant portion with the South African army in Pretoria and on the northern border of Namibia. 43 44 SAIS REVIEW has made the transition from minority to majority rule, Pretoria's sense of being surrounded by hostile governments has been compounded by what it views as a communist-inspired internal enemy. Pretoria believes itself under seige from a "total onslaught" conducted on both sides of South Africa's borders—by the African National Congress (ANC) internally and by the Soviet-backed states in the region. South African Defense Minister General Magnus Malan describes this "total onslaught" as an "ideologically motivated struggle [aimed at] the implacable and unconditional imposition of the aggressor's will on the target state."2 Military spokesmen speak menacingly about further escalation of domestic repression and regional destabilization to counter this threat to the last outpost of white civilization.3 "We have not even started to use our muscle and capabilities," warned General Malan, speaking at the ruling Nationalist party congress in 1986. It is South Africa's muscle— its highly motivated armed forces, ruthlessly efficient intelligence services, extensive domestic arms industry (born of past sanctions), and even its nuclear know-how— that will play a critical role in the widening war to determine the country's destiny. Although South Africa has the firepower to meet almost any regional contingency, the ultimate test of the military's weapons, objectives, and tactics will be inside South Africa's black townships. Building South Africa's Military Muscle Currently, South Africa's military is waging operations on three separate fronts. Elite divisions of the army and air force are staging combined operations against rebel groups and the Front Line States to the north with devastating results. (South African kommando teams have destroyed military targets, fuel storage tanks, and transportation lines in the countries to the north.) Meanwhile, the generals in Pretoria are fighting pitched battles against competing factions in the government to gain control over the decisionmaking process. Finally, contingents of the army have been deployed in the townships since the first state of emergency was imposed over two years ago. And while the security forces have largely accomplished their objectives in the first two theaters ofoperations , it is in this third arena of conflict—inside such ungovernable black cities as Soweto — that South Africa's...