9 January 1980, the Security Council adopted Resolution 462 by
which – without explicitly mentioned the Uniting for Peace
Resolution – it decided to call an Emergency Special Session of
the General Assembly. Since this resolution was procedural, the
Soviet dissenting vote did not amount to a veto, and the
Emergency Special Session thus went ahead, from 10–14 January.
Since there had been no Emergency Special Session since the 1967
Six-Day War, the mere convoking of the session was a notable
event, and an embarrassment for the Soviet Union. However, the
Session also adopted (104 to 18, with 18 abstentions) Resolution
ES–6/2 of 14 January 1980, which called for ‘the immediate,
unconditional and total withdrawal of the foreign troops from
Afghanistan’. While not binding in a legal sense, this signalled
extreme disapproval of Soviet actions, and became the model for a
resolution adopted at regular sessions of the General Assembly
from 1980 until the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1988 which
reiterated the demand for a troop withdrawal. On the last occasion
on which such a resolution was put, in 1987, it passed by 123
votes to 19, with 11 abstentions. The ongoing strength of support
for the resolution contrasted sharply with dwindling support for
General Assembly resolutions dealing with Indonesia’s 1975 inva-
sion of East Timor; after 1982, Portugal had ceased to put forward
such resolutions, for fear that they would not secure sufficient sup-
port (Maley, 2000b: 65).
However, while this clear condemnation of the invasion of
Afghanistan provided valuable legitimation for popular resistance,
in another respect the UN’s response to the invasion was remark-
ably clumsy. The UN is an organisation of states, of which the
state of Afghanistan had been a member since 1946. In most cases,
the question of who should represent a state is uncontroversial, but
where a ‘government’ has been installed by invasion, there is a
strong case for not accepting the credentials of its representatives.
Unfortunately, this issue was overlooked at the time of the January
1980 Emergency Special Session: one ‘reason for lack of attention
given to the credentials issue’, according to the Pakistani diplomat
Riaz M. Khan, ‘was the fast pace of developments, especially
The Development of Afghan Resistance 77