U.S. News & World Report

Pakistan

As Moscow and Washington try to end the Afghan War, the mujeheddin turn up the heat;

Rebel commander Massoud Ahmed Shah trekked back to his fastness in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley last week after conquering Islamabad. The best known and least seen of the mujeheddin warriors, who claims to control a 1,000-mile-long swath of territory along the Soviet border from China to Iran, was received like a head of state on his first visit to Pakistan since the Afghan War began. Everyone from the President and Army chief to the American ambassador took time off from Pakistan's political machinations to hear his warning: Don't gamble away the gains of our 12-year war.

This is a worrisome time for the mujeheddin and their patrons, as world attention turns to more-lethal conflicts elsewhere, their own struggle grinds down to a standoff and the superpowers prepare to do a deal that would leave Moscow's man, President Najibullah, in power in Kabul. Massoud brought a plan from resistance commanders, who have convened three times in recent months after going their own ways for a dozen years, to step up the intensity and coordination of their military operations in an effort to strangle Najibullah in his Kabul lair.

There now is fighting in about a third of the provinces, mostly along the south-east border with Pakistan and around Kabul. One diplomatic observer describes this upsurge as "more than potshots, but less than an offensive."

Finding boots

Last month, the guerrillas captured Tarin Kowt, the first provincial capital to fall since the Soviet withdrawal. But that leaves 24 of 29 capitals still in government hands. Not a fair measure, insists Massoud Khalili, a Massoud lieutenant. He says the new post-Soviet war requires not only new tactics ("We rushed to read books about how to make an army") but three times more weapons and equipment. "The world was expecting us to capture provinces, while we were trying to find boots for our men," he says.

Massoud and other commanders are determined to avoid more head-on collisions like last year's abortive siege of Jalalabad and, above all, any attempt to capture Kabul. But Massoud's chief rival, the fierce Islamic fundamentalist Gulbidden Hekmatyar, prefers a frontal attack on the Afghan capital, and Massoud's visit to Pakistan was largely devoted to lobbying against Hekmatyar's line, which commanders in the field are convinced would produce an unacceptable toll of civilian casualties.

Afghan watchers are skeptical that the rebel factions will ever stop feuding long enough to cobble together a credible alternative to the Kabul regime. And unless they do, any new military offensive will be doomed. Massoud and Hekmatyar have met at least twice and agreed to stop slaughtering each other's troops, but they have yet to reach any broad political or military understanding.

"Even to talk of success for a pure military option would be foolhardy," says a Pakistani brigadier. "What the mujeheddin are capable of doing is raising the temperature to remind the world that they count." Their minimum aim is to gain enough ground to bargain for the removal of President Najibullah.

Both the Pakistanis and the mujeheddin fear the Americans will sell them out. U.S. officials say a superpower pact on Afghanistan might be possible this year, though they are still dickering over what powers Najibullah would retain during a transition to United Nations-supervised elections. The Soviets are desperate to dispose of this $5 billion-a-year albatross, with its daily Soviet airlift bigger than Berlin's in 1949, but evidently not desperate enough to pull the prayer rug out from under Najibullah. The U.S. spends less each year on its surrogate warriors than the Soviets spend each month, but Congress recently cut this covert aid to $250 million.

But even if arms supplies were cut off tomorrow, the war would continue. "The U.S.-Soviet talks are irrelevant to the reality on the ground," says a Pakistani columnist, Mushahid Hussain. Najibullah could survive for two years if the Soviets abandoned him, says a Pakistani officer. The mujeheddin could use less sophisticated weapons and fight on "forever." The more cynical view from Islamabad is that "the Afghans will go on fighting until somebody pays them more to do something else." The most lucrative something else, which many Afghans already have taken up, is the heroin trade.

"An Afghan settlement is bound to be a messy process that could take years," notes a U.S. negotiator. The State Department likes to compare Afghanistan to Cambodia, where the United Nations Security Council subscribed to a peace formula a year before it was accepted by the warring parties. Yes, but. A senior U.S. official concedes that "Afghanistan makes Cambodia look easy."