War at the Top of the World

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

One of very few Western journalists to have spent time with
Afghanistan’s Mujahedin, Margolis describes experiences with those
whom he rightfully credits with a major role in ending the Cold War. His
portrayal of the India–Pakistan border as the most dangerous place on
earth—with religious dogmatists who control nuclear weapons on either
side, both with conflicting territorial claims—is accurate. He has a
good understanding of Afghan politics and Kashmiri geography. His
writing style is vivid and exciting.

However, Margolis’s expertise outside South Asia is limited. He
thinks that the Soviets had significant influence in Egypt as late as
1980, President Sadat’s last year! He wonders whether Soviet archives
will ever reveal Soviet aims at the time of the 1979 invasion of
Afghanistan. In fact, they already have. Brezhnev and his associates
feared that events in Iran, where the hostage crisis was taking place,
might provoke a U.S. invasion. U.S. troops in Iran might then move close
to the Soviet and Afghan borders. Soviet leaders also sought to keep
Afghan Communists in power, in part to thwart Muslim fundamentalists
whose impact might cross the Afghan–Soviet border.

Margolis’s information on China appears dated. He refers to the
province of Xinjiang as “Sinkiang,” a translation as anachronistic
as “Peking” for “Beijing.” Surely he exaggerates any Chinese
threat to peace and the status quo. Millions of Chinese enter the middle
class every year and do not want to jeopardize their rising standard of
living. Since 1974, most Chinese families have had only one child, whose
life they would not want to risk in war over a frozen wasteland in the
Himalayas, let alone more distant places. Despite the rhetoric, Taiwan
is both highly fortified and a source of formidable revenue for the
People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s pragmatic, nonideological
leaders realize that a war to seize Taiwan would be horrendously costly.

The author makes unsubstantiated (probably unverifiable) and erroneous
statements. He believes that the U.S. and Soviet governments conspired
to arrange the 1988 air crash in which Pakistani leader Zia died. He
suggests that India inherited more than its share of Kashmir because
Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy of India, was
having an affair with Nehru. He says that generals invariably restrain
their civilian superiors from rash military actions. That was certainly
not the case at the time of the Berlin blockade or the Cuban missile
crisis.