Afghanistan Hot Pursuit

Each year Pakistan commemorates the fateful moment in 1940 when Indian Muslims demanded a homeland all their own. "Pakistan Day" fell last Monday, and, as is traditional, the celebrations included a splashy military parade outside the capital city of Islamabad that tied up most of the Pakistan air force. This year, however, the festivities carried a steep price. With 72 Pakistani bomber and fighter planes diverted for a ceremonial flyover, the Soviet-backed Afghan air force took advantage of the security breach and struck three villages just inside Pakistan's northwestern border, where more than 1 million Afghan refugees live. At least 181 people were killed, and 200 others injured.

It was the most punishing cross-border assault on Pakistan since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Pakistani officials speculated that the raids were a direct response to an earlier mujahedin attack on targets inside the Soviet Union. That too was news last week. Since Western correspondents are rarely allowed inside Afghanistan, battle accounts are slow to emerge and cannot be verified. According to rebel leaders and Western diplomats in Islamabad, guerrillas based in northern Afghanistan fired rockets across the Soviet border three weeks ago, killing twelve. It was the first report in several years of a mujahedin attack on Soviet territory.

In Washington, officials saw more than revenge at work in the bombing of Pakistan. The State Department charged Moscow with pressuring Pakistan to stop aiding the rebels and agree to a political settlement in Afghanistan that would leave a Communist-backed regime in Kabul. When the latest session of the U.N.-sponsored peace talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan recessed on March 10, there was cause for optimism. The gap between Islamabad and Kabul over a timetable for withdrawal of the 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan had narrowed from 45 months to a difference of just eleven months. Last week, however, State Department Spokesman Charles Redman denounced the "sharp contrast" between the raids and Moscow's stated goal "to achieve a peaceful, negotiated settlement."

Indeed, the bombings could provoke Pakistan to refuse to return to the talks, which are being held in Geneva. Last Thursday, Afghan jets struck anew at Teri Mangal, one of the border villages hit just three days earlier. This time five Afghan refugees were killed, and eight others injured. The attack seemed to mock the angry diplomatic note of protest issued just one day earlier by the Pakistani government. It demanded that the regime in Kabul "desist from these barbarous and wanton attacks on defenseless civilians."