This would threaten the security of all nations including, of course, the United States, our allies, and our friends. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic, and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed. The United States wants all nations in the region to be free and to be independent. A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies. We must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people. This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world. Only several days later was the new puppet leader even brought into Afghanistan by the Soviets. But the President, who had been the leader of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, was assassinated – along with several members of his family – after the Soviets gained control of the capital city of Kabul. The Soviets claim, falsely, that they were invited into Afghanistan to help protect that country from some unnamed outside threat. Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan, which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union.įifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.
I come to you this evening to discuss the extremely important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available online from Gerhard Peters and John T. Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1980-81, Book I (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
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