Even fewer can identify the languages (there are several) that the Afghans speak or the peoples (several again) that make up the population. Not many Westerners, even among the well educated, can confidently plant a thumb over Afghanistan's place on the map. Is there a new game-are there perhaps several games-afoot? Is Russia so alarmed by the resurgence of Islam that it plans to crush its prophets before they can shake the grip of communism on the Soviet Moslem republics? Or is its purpose offensive rather than pre-emptive? Does it perhaps hope to further the fragmentation of Pakistan, a country already halved in population as a result of the defection of Bangladesh, and now sandwiched between unneighborly India and the predatory USSR? Or are its ambitions larger still-nothing less than the annexation of territory as far south as the shores of the Indian Ocean, and the opportunity to confront the United States Navy with the challenge of a new and critically important oceanic frontier at the point least accessible to that navy's reach? These questions all flow from the Soviet Union's decision to invade Afghanistan, which astounded the world at Christmas, 1979. Its stakes were, and remain, high-in essence, the right to call the strategic tune in the great wedge of territory that stretches between the Himalayas, the Arabian-Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. What game is Russia playing in Afghanistan? Certainly the Great Game, that contest for power on the borders of the Indian subcontinent which enthralled the spies and soldiers of the czars and of British royalty throughout Queen Victoria's reign and after.
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