Where War Is Like "a Good Affair'

The rebels are many in Tarakiland, and so are their causes

As the post-revolution turmoil went on in Iran, another rebellion with Islamic roots continued to gather force next door. In Afghanistan, the militantly pro-Moscow government of President Noor Mohammed Taraki is bitterly opposed by some tribesmen and mullahs who believe that the "democratic republic" he is building has put their customs and their Muslim heritage in jeopardy. Reflecting the Kremlin's concern about the troubles afflicting Kabul's new rulers only 13 months after a left-wing military coup put them in power, Pravda has declared the rebels to be "gangs of saboteurs and terrorists sent from the outside" and trained by the U.S., China and Egypt. For a firsthand look at how the regime and the rebellion are faring, TIME Correspondent David DeVoss spent five days touring the mountainous Texas-size land. His report:

My passport had just been stamped at the customs house at the Khyber Pass on the border with Pakistan when the shooting began. "It's the Muslim fanatics!" cried the Afghan immigration official, as he dived for cover into a pile of crumpled visa forms. Outside, border guards with flapping puttees, braying donkeys, and assorted smugglers and baggage handlers churned about in confusion. Quiet soon returned, but the rebels had made their point. "Very, very bad this jihad [holy war]," a local tea vendor muttered. "The mujahidin are everywhere."

The mujahidin, which in Afghanistan's Dari language means roughly "holy warriors," are armed mainly with shotguns and ancient Enfield rifles, and thus are no match for the Taraki regime's Soviet-equipped 80,000-man army. But the rebellion has spread to 15 of the country's 28 provinces, and while guerrilla activity is most intense in the remote areas bordering on Iran in the west and Pakistan in the east, the regime has been forced to tighten security everywhere. Foreign diplomats in Kabul reckon that more than 12,000 political prisoners have been jailed. Major intersections in the capital, where an 11 p.m. curfew is in effect, are patrolled by soldiers, and the country's few highways are under heavy guard; eight police checkpoints dot the 115-mile route from the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Where the rebellion really flourishes is in the rugged narrow canyons of rural Afghanistan. There a single rifleman can hold off an infantry battalion.

In some provinces, especially where the government's political operatives have been tortured and killed by rebellious villagers, MiGs have been sent in on retaliatory bombing raids. But after dark, the mujahidin rule the rebel areas. "Our men bring their guns down from the mountains after the sun sets," says Abdur Rahim, a former government bureaucrat who now coordinates rebel activities out of Peshawar, a provincial capital in the northwest. "The war is like a good love af fair. All the action happens at night."

Afghanistan is one of the least governable countries around. Its 16 million people are divided into more than 20 different ethnic groups; most of them lead nomadic, pastoral lives that have not changed much for centuries. Indeed, the only things that most Afghans seem to share, besides deep poverty and one of the world's highest illiteracy rates (80%), are an ancient legacy of violence passed on by transient conquerors and a powerful devotion to Islam. What order has existed has been imposed mainly by feudal landlords and the local mullahs.

The rebellion was touched off by well-intentioned reforms that the Taraki regime said would end "exploitation of man by man" in Afghanistan. To many Afghans, especially those in rural areas, the reforms were too much, too soon. When the regime banned the traditional marriage payments and large cash dowries, it wiped out what many Afghans regard as their country's equivalent of Social Security. Though the government said it would slice up large landholdings and parcel them out to peasants in 2 1/2-acre lots, some of the best land has not been redistributed. The government also abolished the usury system under which moneylenders kept peasants in perpetual debt by forcing them to borrow against future crops; yet, no new method of crop financing was substituted, and as a result many peasants have had no money to buy seed. Fathers have rebelled against new rules requiring school attendance for their daughters; the mullahs, who have long functioned as judges as well as holy men, are angered by the regime's assertion that while Islam will remain the state religion, the civil government will henceforth administer the law.

What keeps the rebellion spreading is resentment about the growing Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Over the past year, Kabul has signed 29 agreements with Moscow, involving more than $104 million in aid, and the corps of Soviet "advisers" has burgeoned along with the deals. Though Taraki insists that there are only 900 Soviets in the country, diplomats in Kabul put the total at about four times that. In Jalalabad, a market town east of Kabul, Soviet military advisers are driven about in motorcycle side-cars. In a Kabul suburb where 600 Soviets live in an apartment complex, many stores label their wares in Russian as well as in Dari.

Resentment of the regime and the big Soviet presence flared dramatically in Herat (pop. 100,000), a provincial capital 400 miles west of Kabul. One morning thousands of peasants took over the city's downtown bazaar wearing green Muslim flags and carrying wooden sticks and iron bars. Some tanks appeared, and what became a battle lasting several days for control of the city was on. All told, an estimated 8,000 civilians lost their lives, some of them in air attacks, before government forces quelled the uprising. During the fighting, Afghan rebels methodically rounded up Soviets in the area and killed a number of them. Says one employee with the American AID mission in Herat: "It was very brutal. They went for the ears first, then the nose, then the genitals."

Taraki, 62, a sometime journalist who heads Afghanistan's Khalq (People's) Party, does not have broad backing; some diplomats in Kabul believe his supporters in the military and among Afghanistan's small educated class number only 2,500 people. Yet the regime shows no sign of bending its rigid Marxist principles. While Taraki professes "full respect for holy Islam," his Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, angrily blames the bloodletting on the meddling of "imperialist lackeys from Iran and Pakistan."

Taraki and Amin are not the first reformers who have tried to tame Afghanistan. A half-century ago, King Amanullah launched a crash modernization effort that had some similarities to the Taraki program. But in 1929, after he had been on the throne only ten years, a civil war broke out and Amanullah went into exile, effectively ending his rule and the modernization drive. It is a chapter of Afghan history that the country's present rulers doubtless remember all too well.

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