Afghanistan We Really Must Go

By EDWARD W. DESMOND

Since the December summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow has been dropping ever more arresting hints of its readiness to bring home the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Last week the man at the top flashed the clearest signal yet, and it sent peace hopes soaring. In a move clearly timed to capture a wide audience, a Soviet broadcaster interrupted a prime-time television showing of the 1958 film based on Mikhail Sholokhov's classic, And Quiet Flows the Don, to read an announcement from Gorbachev. There are "considerable chances," said the General Secretary's statement, that the next round of peace talks on Afghanistan "will become the final one."

Senior Soviet officials have said just that many times since 1982, when the Geneva talks began, but the champion of glasnost sounded as if he meant business. He leavened his remarks with modest but significant new concessions on the last major unresolved issue at the talks, a timetable for a Soviet withdrawal. He said Moscow would evacuate its troops over ten months, a time span tantalizingly close to the eight months demanded by the West. Addressing a key U.S. concern, he said that a "relatively greater portion" of the forces could leave at the beginning of the period. If those gestures satisfied the other parties to the conflict, he said, Soviet tanks might start clanking homeward as soon as May 15 -- close to the date, not coincidentally, when Reagan is expected to arrive in Moscow for the next superpower summit.

Gorbachev's flourish did the trick. The next day Diego Cordovez, the United Nations mediator in the Afghan talks, announced that representatives from Pakistan and the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, the two formal parties to the talks, would sit down again in Geneva on March 2. Said the U.N. diplomat: "The gap ((on the time span)) has been closed to a point where I think a specific agreement at Geneva is clearly foreseeable." U.S. officials were also pleased. Said a senior Reagan official: "The move shows a boldness on the part of Gorbachev. If the Soviets withdraw, it will allow him to concentrate on perestroika ((economic restructuring))."

For months it has been apparent that Moscow wants to quit a war that has claimed as many as 30,000 Soviet and more than 1 million Afghan lives, and sent at least 3 million Afghans fleeing to Pakistan and Iran. But Gorbachev's unstated goal -- strikingly similar to the Nixon Administration's declared policy in Viet Nam -- seems to be two-pronged: not merely to pull out Soviet troops but also to prolong the life of the Soviet-installed government of Najibullah, also known as Najib, the former secret police chief who took power in 1986.

In the process, Gorbachev has thrown Washington, Pakistan and the rebel mujahedin off balance. "Gorbachev has taken the initiative," said a U.S. observer close to the Geneva talks. "If there is no peace agreement, people will blame us." The Reagan Administration seems unsure whether to trust Soviet intentions and the outcome of the Geneva talks. "Right now," said an Administration official, "there are loopholes big enough to drive a truck through."

Nonetheless, the Kremlin's willingness to deal at all reflects deep frustration with its eight-year misadventure in Afghanistan. In a recent poll of Muscovites by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the French polling organization IPSOS, 53% of respondents favored total withdrawal. Even worse, Najib has failed to gain significant support despite launching a "national reconciliation" effort in which the burly leader disavowed Communism and offered bribes to win supporters. The war, meanwhile, is going disastrously for the Soviets. Says Alex Alexiev, a senior analyst at the Rand Corp. "They are at their wits' end."

Just after Gorbachev took office in 1985, the Soviets intensified the war and appeared to gain ground. Deadly Mi-24 helicopters and elite Spetsnaz commando units regularly ambushed rebel units and supply caravans with devastating effect: mujahedin casualties rose to all-time highs. Then the Reagan Administration began shipping Stingers, those compact but lethal antiaircraft missiles, to the guerrillas. Soon the air war turned around. By one conservative estimate, the Soviets last year alone lost 270 aircraft worth about $2.2 billion.

Today the mujahedin have all but rid the skies of Mi-24s and MiG and Sukhoi jet fighter-bombers. Last week TIME's Robert Schultheis visited Jaji, an area in eastern Afghanistan where helicopter ambushes once forced the rebels to live like hunted hares. Resistance trucks now move through the area in daylight, and the guerrillas have built a rudimentary hospital. "When we were weak," says Commander Anwar, a local leader, "the Soviets didn't want to talk at all. They are only talking now because we are strong."

Yet as Washington, Islamabad and the rebels are all learning, success in negotiations can prove as tricky as winning on the battlefield. In Washington there has been widespread confusion in recent weeks about when the U.S. would cut off aid to the resistance under a peace agreement. Some U.S. officials have said that the assistance would be gradually reduced as the Soviets pull out. But the U.S. has already agreed, through the Pakistani negotiators in the U.N.-sponsored Geneva talks, to cut off military aid ($630 million in 1987) at the point when the Soviets begin to withdraw. Fearing that the mujahedin may be left exposed to attack by the Soviets, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz declared last month that the Soviet withdrawal must be "front-end loaded," meaning that large numbers of troops must leave early on. Gorbachev appeared to accept that demand last week. But U.S. officials still fear that the Soviets might wait until the last minute to pull out 20,000 men in elite units that do most of the fighting.

Some U.S. analysts believe that Washington is going too easy on Moscow. The Geneva talks, which the U.S. endorses, do not cover key issues like continued Soviet military aid to the Kabul regime that leave the door open for Moscow to exercise considerable influence in Afghanistan after withdrawal. In fact, in talks with the Soviets, the State Department has appeared willing to make concessions -- for instance, countenancing an Afghan-Soviet defense pact -- so long as the Soviets remove their troops. "It is high time," says Analyst Alexiev, "for the Administration to realize that the only way to stop the bloodshed in Afghanistan is an unconditional Soviet withdrawal."

The issue most likely to undermine the Geneva talks is the question of who will sign the peace agreement for Afghanistan. Six weeks ago Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced that Moscow would accept any neutral Kabul regime, even without a Communist element, and Gorbachev last week claimed that who governs Afghanistan is "none of our business."

However that sounded, Gorbachev was by no means washing his hands of Najib. Said a Pentagon analyst: "It is somewhat naive to think that the Soviets will withdraw and leave a Communist regime to collapse." Sure enough, Moscow last week pressed Islamabad to drop its objection to dealing with Najib. To drive home that point, Yuli Vorontsov, First Deputy Foreign Minister, visited Islamabad to deliver a vague threat. Said he: "Any delays in the signing of the accords from now on will not be of the Soviet Union's making. We don't know who will take that responsibility." Continued terrorist bombings in Pakistan, almost certainly the work of Kabul's agents, underscore Moscow's ire.

Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, as Moscow fully realizes, is in a tight spot. Says Zain Noorani, Pakistan's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs: "We don't just want an agreement, we want an agreement that can be implemented." Specifically, Pakistan needs the cooperation of the seven-party mujahedin alliance to proceed with the peace agreement. Yet the guerrilla leadership will not accept an agreement with Najib. If Pakistan deals with him anyway, the results will probably be chaotic. The rebels would lose their arms pipeline -- including the Stingers -- and face a potent Soviet force for at least several months. Continued fighting would deter the more than 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan from returning home. Skeptics like Yossef Bodansky, an analyst of Soviet military affairs, believe that Moscow relishes such a scenario: it would leave the resistance weakened, Pakistan drained by the refugees' presence and Najib, with Soviet help, in power.

The resistance leadership, based mostly in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, is not much help to its hosts. Islamabad is leaning heavily on the seven resistance leaders to propose, as an alternative to Najib's regime, a transitional government acceptable to Moscow and Kabul. "Zia is telling us not to be so stubborn," said one of the seven. Last week they agreed that a new government would be open to "good Muslims," but the proposal appeared too vague to have any practical value for Islamabad.

One reason for the lack of progress is that after so much sacrifice, the mujahedin simply do not want to do business with Najib. Says Mohammed Nuristani, a rebel fighter: "How can we sit down with a man who has killed so many of our friends?" Another reason is the rivalry among rebel leaders. They range from religious zealots like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-e-Islami (Gulbuddin), who want to erect a theocratic state, to Muslim moderates like Pir Gailani who favor the traditional Afghan way of life.

So far, the leaders have succeeded in sticking together. All sides are reportedly stockpiling weapons inside Afghanistan should arms supplies be cut or the alliance fall apart on the road to Kabul. Meanwhile, Gulbuddin forces are widely accused of attacking other mujahedin units. The guerrilla leaders, says an Afghan who deals with them, "are trying to transform themselves from a military alliance to a political alliance. It is very difficult." Moscow is not about to allow them much time for that transition, either.

With reporting by Ross H. Munro/Islamabad and Nancy Traver/Washington