SATURDAY, MAY 14, 1988

Think of Afghanistan As a Soviet 'Spain'

Robert S. McElvaine

Jackson, Miss.

When the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979, many of us predicted that the involvement would be that country's "Vietnam." As Soviet troops begin their withdrawal, that assessment would seem to have been confirmed. But there is an even more apt historical analogy for the attempted Soviet subjugation: Afghanistan has been the Soviet "Spain."

The Vietnam analogy was not mistaken. Though the geography of Vietnam and Afghanistan is vastly different, the terrain in each lends itself to effective guerrilla warfare carried on by irregular forces enjoying widespread support from the local populace.

More important, the difficulty faced by the great power in trying to subdue a small foreign people, a substantial portion of whom fervently wish to be independent, was the same in both cases.

There was an element in the Afghan struggle that was of much smaller significance in Vietnam: deep religious commitment combined with nationalism. For this reason, the best historical analogy for the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan is Napoleon's in Spain.

In an attempt to complete the closure of Europe to British trade by forcing the Iberian Peninsula into his continental system, Napoleon sent French troops into Spain in 1808. The French Emperor forced king Charles IV off the throne and replaced him with Joseph Bonaparte. Under his brother's instructions, Joseph instituted "reforms" similar to those Napoleon had consolidated from the French Revolution. A strong Spanish resistance formed almost immediately.

Spanish hostility to the French invaders and the imposed ruler was based in part on nationalism. Much more, though, it resulted from the deep attachment of most Spaniards to their Roman Catholic faith.

They viewed the Napoleonic invaders as the heirs to the "godless villains" of the French Revolution, who had overturned the position of the church in France -- and the more extreme of whom had attempted to institute a program of "de-Christianization" and complete secularism.

Some reforms the Bonapartes introduced in Spain such as ending the inquisition and abolishing several monastic orders served to confirm the fears of the faithful.

To the Moslem faithful of Afghanistan, the heirs to the Russian Revolution and its militant atheism appeared in much the same light as the French did to the Spanish Catholics. Their resolve to resist was greatly strengthened by the belief that their struggle was more a holy war than it was merely a nationalist movement.

The Spanish resistance forces, possessing the conviction that they were fighting for God as well as Spain -- and with considerable assistance from the British -- soon inflected defeats on French regulars.

Napoleon eventually sent a 370,000-man army into Spain. It had become his "Spanish ulcer," slowly bleeding his empire. The defeats his forces suffered in Spain destroyed Napoleon's aura of invincibility and encouraged others to resist the French.

The story of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan has been much the same. The combination of the Afghans' spirit and belief that they were fighting for Allah against the godless forces of atheistic Communism gave the rebels the capacity -- with some assistance from America -- to inflict serious reverses on the Russians and to demoralize their troops. More than 100,000 Soviet regulars proved insufficient to defeat the Afghan resistance.

The major question remaining is whether the Soviet Union's "Afghan ulcer" will have an effect on the viability of the Soviet empire similar to the one that the "Spanish ulcer" had on Napoleon's empire. Already there are signs of growing unrest in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics in Central Asia.

The Soviet empire is being haunted by two ghosts of Napoleon. He began the spread of a powerful wave of nationalism eastward from France. It took a century for that wave to reach Eastern Europe and inundate the multinational Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. After nearly another century, the tide has reached Central Asia and threatens to do the same to the multinational Soviet Empire.

At just the time the ripples of nationalism were hitting Soviet central Asia with increasing force, Leonid I. Brezhnev made the same mistake that Napoleon did and tried to impose his imperial will on an adjacent nation with deep religious convictions and a fierce desire to be independent.

Being struck by one legacy of Napoleon, Mr. Brezhnev picked up another with which to try to knock it down. It was a disastrous combination, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been left with the task of trying to extricate the Soviet Union from the mess.

Robert S. McElvaine is professor of History at Millsaps College.