Afghanistan Show 'Em the Way To Go Home

By Michael S. Serrill

The rebels' timing was impeccable. Najibullah, leader of the Moscow-backed regime in Afghanistan, was 15 minutes into his opening address at a National Assembly session called to adopt a new constitution giving him vast powers as President. Suddenly a rocket explosion shook the meeting hall. Three more blasts, each louder than the last, followed during the next few minutes. The beefy Najibullah, 41, known to his countrymen as "the Ox," never flinched as he outlined a policy of national reconciliation aimed at ending eight years of civil war. The rockets killed five people outside the hall, helping the rebels make a brutal point: they are closing in on a government that is growing steadily weaker and more dependent on the 115,000 Soviet troops who keep it in power.

Najibullah (like many Afghans, he uses no first name) was trying to consolidate his grip on the affairs of state, but the ground was moving beneath him. His effort to coax rebels back into the fold with offers of amnesty has failed. His army has become a demoralized shambles. Soldiers often refuse to fight and are deserting to the rebels in large numbers. Now he must face the most daunting prospect of all: a possible pullout of Soviet troops.

For weeks the government of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev has been sending signals that it is ready -- even desperate -- to disentangle itself from Afghanistan. On the eve of this week's summit meeting between the Soviet leader and President Ronald Reagan, the pace of the diplomatic maneuvering quickened. Before leaving Moscow for Washington, Gorbachev told NBC's Tom Brokaw that if the U.S. really wanted to find a "political" solution to the conflict, "it could be done very quickly." For his part, Reagan said in a speech last week that it was time for the Soviet troops in Afghanistan to "pack up, pull out and go home" and that he would push for such a withdrawal at the summit.

In Kabul, Najibullah and his Moscow backers began climbing down from their insistence on a 16-month schedule for the removal of Soviet troops. Now the Afghan leader, installed by Moscow in May 1986, proposed a twelve-month timetable. Significantly, he said his proposal "has already been negotiated with the Soviet side." Concluded a Western envoy in Kabul: "This is the summit proposal. This is the timetable they are offering."

U.S. officials responded cautiously. "If they indicate a reasonable time frame for getting out, then there are perhaps ways in which we can help," said Michael Armacost, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. U.S. negotiators fear, however, that a deal will falter because of two Soviet preconditions for withdrawal: the formation of an interim government that includes Najibullah's People's Democratic Party, and the end of U.S., Chinese and other foreign military support of the rebel mujahedin. U.S. aid alone has been estimated at $600 million a year.

% Other elements of a peace plan are already in place, ready to go into effect if a timetable for withdrawal can be agreed upon. The settlement, worked out at United Nations talks in Geneva, would include the return home of some 3 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and Iran and the establishment of a provisional government to supervise elections.

Though it is by no means certain that a Soviet pullout is imminent, Najibullah was hard at work last week trying to legitimize his regime in the eyes of his overwhelmingly Islamic countrymen. He billed the National Assembly meeting as a loya jirgah, an Afghan Muslim tradition in which village elders and religious leaders gather to consult in times of national crisis. Though the Afghan leader, who joined the Communist Party in 1965, has never been notably religious, he opened all his speeches with the Islamic preamble, "In the name of Allah, the beneficent and merciful . . ." To downplay his connections to Moscow, he dropped the red star from the national emblem and said it would no longer be necessary to address him as comrade. He even insisted, "We do not want to build a Communist society, and we are not a Communist Party."

The statements were almost certainly made with Soviet approval, an indication of the visitors' eagerness to start packing. The occupation has cost more than 25,000 Soviet lives, and drains as much as $6 billion a year from the military budget. In addition, Soviet relations with the Muslim world have deteriorated, the Red Army's reputation for effectiveness has been tarnished, and Gorbachev's overtures to China and the U.S. have been hindered. One strong indication of the war's diplomatic cost was last month's 123-to-19 vote in the U.N. General Assembly demanding withdrawal of Soviet troops, which came despite a Soviet public relations campaign seeking to justify the occupation.

However keen Moscow may be to cut its losses, some analysts are certain that the U.S.S.R. will prolong the occupation rather than allow a mass killing of Afghan Communists or the installation of an openly anti-Soviet government. But the latter may be unavoidable in the long run. Said a Western diplomat in Kabul last week: "Without Soviet troops, this government could not last six months. This is the dying gasp."

The likelihood of a dignified Soviet withdrawal has been diminished by a major development in the war: after years of stalemate, the rebels are everywhere on the offensive. Soviet and government troops have firm control only over the largest cities, while the rebels, thought to be 200,000 strong, are more unified and better armed than ever and range freely across the countryside. An important reason for their new mobility: U.S.-supplied Stinger antiaircraft missiles that are being used with increasing success to deprive Soviet ground forces of the air support they long used to protect troops and supply lines.

In Kunar province, northeast of Kabul, the rebels recently succeeded in organizing one of the largest and most complex offensives of the war. Long columns of mujahedin, armed with everything from 19th century Mausers to brand-new Egyptian- and Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifles, trudged up the forested ridges along the Pakistan-Afghan border. On Nov. 13 some 10,000 rebels attacked Soviet and Afghan government troops along a 60-mile front. In the first hour of the fighting, a mujahedin Chinese-made BM-12 rocket launcher at Nawa Pass, southeast of Asadabad, completely annihilated an Afghan army post in the valley below. In the past an operation of such scope and intensity would have been rendered impossible by attacking Soviet aircraft. "We are not afraid of the Russian jets anymore," a Stinger operator boasted to TIME's Rob Schultheis. "If they fly high enough to escape the Stingers, they are too high to hit us with their bombs anyway."

On the battlefield at Kunar, the once dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships were taken almost entirely out of the fighting by the Stingers. They flew only a few sorties under cover of night, when Stingers are difficult to aim. Said mujahedin Leader Massood Khalili of the helicopters' decline: "For nine years the dragon ruled the skies over Afghanistan. Now the dragon is dead."

Najibullah has tried to deny the rebels new recruits by offering refugees land and jobs if they will return to their farms and villages. But barely 80,000 have taken him up on the offer, and no more than 10,000 rebels have given up the insurgency. Moreover, animosity lingers between some of the returned rebels and government forces. One day last week the morning calm in Kabul was shattered by bursts of machine-gun fire. It seems a tribal leader, a former rebel who is now a general in the Afghan army, took exception when security troops refused to let his armed bodyguards past a checkpoint not far from the National Assembly meeting hall. The ensuing fire fight left eleven dead and the general nursing wounds in a hospital.

With reporting by Ken Olsen/Kabul and Nancy Traver/Washington