Afghan Leader Steps Up War Against Guerrillas : Soviets Also Bolster Military Activity as Hopes for a Political Settlement Dim

The new leader of Afghanistan, Najib, is reaching for the sword, not the olive branch, calling for a sharp escalation in the war against guerrilla forces.

Najib, who has only the one name, has ordered a buildup in the Afghan army, along with an end to draft exemptions for college students and a crackdown on draft dodgers and deserters. He has appealed to students, workers and peasants to sign up for military duty in the war against the anti-government moujahedeen, already in its seventh year, and has urged young women to serve as nurses.

“Today you hear the voice of the motherland calling you,” he recently told a group of army recruits. “There exists no more noble and sacred task than defense of the dear homeland when it has encountered aggression and interference.”

Civilians have also been organized to bolster security against the guerrillas. In villages near Kabul, self-defense militias have been formed of older men and women, and boys as young as 14. They post guards even though they say there have been no rebel attacks for many months.

The Soviet troops here, estimated to number 120,000, are stepping up their activity, too, employing elite commando units, advanced weapons and new tactics in what is seen as a drive for an all-out victory over the guerrillas.

Early Accord Unlikely

These developments appear to have doomed any chance for an early agreement in talks sponsored by the United Nations aimed at halting the fighting and speeding the withdrawal of the Soviet forces. The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan have been holding such talks in Geneva off and on since 1982 in search of a political solution to end the war.

Zia Aziz, a spokesman for the ruling People’s Democratic Party, said the talking and fighting may continue for many years. Diplomats in Kabul say that the guerrillas now seem to be less capable of mounting a major attack or of penetrating to the northern part of the country than they once were.

Najib, 38, is not holding out the prospect of a quick or easy victory over the insurgents.

“Years will pass by, our revolutionary people will annihilate the enemy and purge their suffering land of the marauding bandits, mercenary terrorists, provocateurs and their patrons,” he told the recruits.

A Western diplomat in Moscow who follows developments in Afghanistan said of Najib, who took over as general secretary of the People’s Democratic Party in May, “He’s young and tough, and he’s pursuing the war more vigorously.”

Youths Pressed Into Army

One sign of the new resolve is an increase in street roundups of young men who have not served in the army. During a recent visit, journalists saw many youths in civilian clothing being herded into army trucks for immediate induction.

Moreover, there is a new regulation that eliminates the draft exemption for college students. It subjects young men to two years in the military as soon as they reach their 18th birthday. The new regulation is aimed at closing a loophole that had allowed youths from well-to-do families to delay or even avoid military service.

The new measures will be canceled, officials in Kabul said, only after “full and complete eradication of the counterrevolutionaries and a guarantee of peace and security in the country.”

In Peshawar, across the frontier in Pakistan, rebel leaders have confirmed that Soviet military pressure has intensified in recent weeks.

“In all the years of war, we had never seen anything like it,” Rahim Wardak, a guerrilla commander, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying after a recent engagement. “They bombed us night and day.”

Rebel sources, as well as Western diplomatic and intelligence officials, say the fighting has increased markedly in the past year, and the guerrillas are on the defensive after earlier having controlled much of the countryside.

The Soviets are using new counterinsurgency tactics, calling on a 3,000-man commando unit known as spetsnaz (special purpose) that arrived in Afghanistan earlier this year. They have also reinforced their conventional forces with advanced aircraft, artillery with a range up to 25 miles and helicopters that have been used in night operations.

The commandos, skilled in setting up surprise attacks, have been known to surround guerrilla strongholds, sometimes by climbing sheer cliffs in the middle of the night. Once they have cut off escape routes, the commandos call in helicopter gunships and long-range artillery and rockets.

In March, the guerrillas lost one of their largest bases, at Zhawar in eastern Afghanistan, to a quick-hitting assault by two battalions of the airborne commandos. The base was destroyed, and hundreds were killed or wounded on both sides.

Soviet soldiers are rarely seen in the streets of Kabul, but outside the city they maintain fixed positions on major highways and on mountaintops that control the approaches to the capital. Soviet tanks and artillery, partly hidden with camouflage netting, were seen by correspondents not far from Kabul.

Active in Border Area

Soviet officials will say nothing about how many troops they maintain here, or their locations, but Soviet forces are reported to have been more active recently in the southern border area in an effort to reduce infiltration from Pakistan. Except for occasional dispatches glorifying Soviet soldiers in combat, the Soviet Union is extremely close-mouthed about its military role in Afghanistan.

Najib took over from Babrak Karmal on May 4 as general secretary of the People’s Democratic Party, the most powerful position in this one-party state. Some Western diplomats said the Soviet Union wanted Najib, a former head of the Afghan secret police, to whip the Afghan army into shape and take some of the combat pressure off the Soviet troops.

Najib, in an interview with the correspondents, belittled the military power of the rebels and said they were losing the war. “The war on the bandit front is dwindling,” Najib said. “The situation is getting stabilized and peace is going to be assured throughout the country.” At one point, he asserted that the guerrillas had “no power” any more inside Afghanistan.

But a diplomat in Kabul, the representative of a nonaligned nation, said the insurgents still control major areas around the provincial cities of Herat and Kandahar. And Afghan officials said the military commander of Kandahar had been dismissed for failing to cope with the guerrillas.

Also, the diplomat said, the rebels continue to hold major positions in the mountains south of Kabul, so that travel by road in the area is hazardous for government vehicles.

The frontier with Pakistan, which the rebels crossed easily in the past, is now the scene of heavy fighting as the government and the Soviets seek to prevent rebel infiltration.

In Kabul, a series of security measures taken by the Soviets and the Afghan army appear to have made the city less vulnerable than in the past. For a time it was bombarded regularly with rockets, but now it is attacked only rarely in this way. A Western diplomat said a triple ring of security outposts has been set up to deter rocket attacks on the airport and government buildings, and the rebels have found it difficult to penetrate.

Still, the atmosphere in Kabul is far from calm. A strict curfew is enforced from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Searchlights sweep the nearby mountains, and bright flares are dropped to detect any guerrilla movements.

Policemen and soldiers, armed with Soviet-made Kalashnikov assault rifles, patrol the streets and guard almost every major building.

At the Kabul airport, planes landing or taking off drop decoy flares to divert heat-seeking missiles that might be fired by rebels in nearby mountain positions. Two military helicopters provide this service when Soviet airliners arrive and depart twice a week.

Security measures are tight in the city. Even guests arriving at hotels for wedding parties are frisked by policemen before they are allowed to enter. Not long ago, according to officials here, several people were killed by a car bomb outside a hotel. The guerrillas were blamed.

Factory workers are searched for explosives, an official said. At one plant about 200 men are assigned to security duty.

Leaving Countryside

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have left the countryside to seek refuge in Kabul in the past six years, doubling its population to about 2 million. Occasionally, small groups of insurgents slip into the city and place bombs or mines, an official acknowledged. He said this accounts for the hundreds of armed security men in the city, where weapons are carried as casually as umbrellas or walking sticks.

At night, the poorly lit streets are all but deserted long before the curfew hour.

On a recent evening, dozens of shots were fired near the German Club, in a residential section of the city, and guests threw themselves to the floor for safety. But no one was hurt. A club member said the shooting is still a mystery.