U.S. Offers to Back Afghan Accord if Soviets Pull Out

The Reagan Administration has given written assurances that it is ready to back a negotiated settlement to the six-year-old civil war in Afghanistan if the Soviet Union agrees to withdraw its troops from the country, State Department officials said Thursday.

The U.S. offer, which is to be made public today in a speech by Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, is intended to encourage the Soviet Union to decide to withdraw and to boost talks next week between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

“We are trying to demonstrate that the United States is in no way holding things up,” one official said.

Still uncertain, U.S. aides said, is whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has won a clear decision from his government on seeking a withdrawal of the more than 100,000 Red Army troops propping up the Afghan regime of Babrak Karmal.

At their summit meeting in Geneva last month, Gorbachev told President Reagan that he was interested in negotiating what Reagan called “an end to this problem.” But Soviet government statements since the summit have returned to a harder line on the issue and have not shown any signs of flexibility, officials said.

“We do not know whether they have yet made the political decision to withdraw,” said one.

The U.S. assurances are important because Soviet and Indian officials have reportedly questioned whether the Administration is genuinely committed to refrain from intervening in Afghanistan if Soviet forces pull out.

The assurance says that the United States is willing to join the Soviet Union in guaranteeing a negotiated settlement once the Soviet Union adopts a timetable for withdrawing its troops, officials said.

Talks in Geneva

The written commitment was given in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar earlier this week, they said. The United Nations is sponsoring the Afghan-Pakistani talks, which are scheduled to resume Monday in Geneva.

Those negotiations have produced drafts of three accords to end the Afghan war, officials said: an agreement for an internationally guaranteed settlement between the Marxist government and the Muslim rebels, a commitment by outside powers not to intervene and an agreement for the return home of more than 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran.

The missing element, they said, remains a timetable for a Soviet withdrawal.

The Administration has maintained a two-track policy on Afghanistan, increasing both overt and covert support for the guerrillas to a reported $300 million per year while simultaneously pressing for a political settlement.

Other Terms

Officials have said such a settlement should include international recognition of Afghanistan’s independence and some process to allow the Afghan people to choose their form of government.

They have said a U.S. commitment to nonintervention in Afghanistan would imply phasing out American support for the rebels as the Soviet Union reduces its military support for the regime.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up the Marxist regime, which had seized power a year earlier but was disintegrating in the face of rebel attacks. The invasion sparked an outcry around the world and imposed a deep chill on U.S.-Soviet relations.

Since then, the rebels have received aid from China and Saudi Arabia as well as the United States and have battled the Red Army to a stalemate.