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i n South Asia I A Kremlin policymaker looking beyond Soviet borders toward Asia in mid-1979 must have found the view depressing. An ally as close as Afghanistan grapples with persistent instability; there is alienation from the neighbors to the South, Iran and Pakistan; and rebels who rise up in those countries are enjoying an increasingly sympathetic response from the native populations. The people of Iran have overthrown the Shahs regime, but their suspicion of the Soviet Union remains. And the new order propounds its Islamic ideology loudly enough for its voice to be heard in those neighboring Soviet Asian republics with substantial Muslim population. In Pakistan, Zulfigar Ali Bhutto, whose ”progressive” credentials were readily accepted by Soviet publicists, has been executed; General Zia-ulHag ’s outlook is markedly different. The Janata Party Government in India, now fallen, adhered faithfully to the long established policy of nonalignment; but the adjective “genuine” which it used to describe that policy reflects its determination to correct what it regarded as Indira Gandhi’s tilt towards Moscow. And Bangladesh is wary of the Soviet Union’s policies, remembering Soviet support for Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. Its preference for China is no secret. After prolonged negotiations, Japan, too, has made its choice. It rejected the draft of a treaty on “good neighborliness and cooperation” which the Soviet Union proposed in February, 1978, because it ignored Japan’s claims to the Northern territories under Soviet occupation. Instead, Japan signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with China on August 12, 1978, in spite of threats of reprisals from the Soviet Union. Another Soviet ally, Vietnam, has had to face a humiliating attack from China which was unabashedly launched in the name of “punishment.” The SovietUnion chose not to intervene militarily, despite the treaty it had signed with Vietnam just over three months before the attack. China has eminently succeeded in mending its fenceswith the West, much to the exasperation of the Soviets: within a few months of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, Peking abrogated its 1950 treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. But the strain of such diplomatic set-backs has not been limited to Soviet relations with the Asian countries. In 1978, Soviet-Americannegotiations on A. G. Noorani is a lawyer in private practice in Bombay. He has written widely on security and political issues dealing with South Asia. 31 International Security I 32 the demilitarization of the Indian Ocean were suspended by the United States as a reaction to increased Soviet military involvement in the Horn of Africa. The result: an American military presence in the Ocean that, in the wake of the developments in Iran, the Gulf States, and the Arabian Peninsula , was far greater in mid-1979 than before. These many set-backs are all the more galling because for a decade and a half the Soviet Union has been assiduously promoting itself as an Asian power. It is not for want of effort that it has met with diplomatic reverses. There have been successes; but they must fall far short of expectations, and are scarcely commensurate with Soviet money and effort expended. “Asia Needs Security” is an appropriate title of an editorial in the Moscow weekly New Times which declared that ”the Peking aggression against Socialist Vietnam has imparted added urgency to the problem of security in Asia, especially in the south-eastern part of the continent.” For it is at this juncture that the strategic interests of China, the United States, and Japan meet. ”The USSR views with understanding the idea, as advanced by the countries of the region, that their homeland should be made a zone of peace,” the editorial continues. “To realize this idea, a collective quest for constructive measures that would guarantee security, as well as concerted action by the countries concerned, is needed.“’ The reference, no doubt, is to Leonid Brezhnev’s proposal for ”a system of collective security in Asia,” made in his address to the International Meeting of Communist and Worker’s Parties at Moscow on June 7, 1969. It was there that the Soviet leader laid the foundations of a plan which the Soviet Union has doggedly pursued...

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