Strife Among Recipients Blamed : U.S. Aid Fails to Reach Afghan Fighters, Leader Says

Strife among seven groups officially designated to receive millions of dollars in covert aid from the United States is crippling efforts to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, according to an Afghan resistance leader.

Taj Mohammed, who is in Southern California to visit relatives, said in an interview that only a trickle of covert aid from the United States--possibly as little as 10%--reaches resistance fighters inside the strife-torn nation.

And even then, he said, supplies of the arms, food and medicine go only to mountain fighting units with a relationship to one of the seven major resistance groups formed among millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, not to all those willing to fight.

Fight Each Other

Mohammed, former governor of the Afghan provinces of Badakhshan and Laghman during the decade before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979, said that in competing for aid and influence, the seven groups sometimes fight each other rather than the Soviets.

Mohammed is the senior adviser to S. Ahmad Gailani, leader of Mohazi-i-Millie-Islam, a resistance organization based in Peshawar, Pakistan, according to Nake M. Kamrany, a USC economics professor and publisher of the Los Angeles-based Afghanistan Times.

Kamrany, who interpreted Mohammed’s remarks, said the gray-bearded leader escaped from Afghanistan after imprisonment by the Soviet-installed Afghan government. Since then, he said, Mohammed has returned three times and learned firsthand about conditions inside the country.

What he has found, Mohammed said, are desperate countrymen who are willing to resist the Soviet Union but who lack food or the basic necessities to fight effectively.

Scoffs at Estimates

He scoffed at published media estimates that between $450 million and $480 million in covert U.S. aid has gone to the Afghan moujahedeen (holy warriors) this year alone.

“If we had received that much aid, we can assure you the war would have been on the other (Soviet) side of the border,” he said.

As for himself, Mohammed said he has no ill feelings toward the seven groups chosen to receive whatever aid does come through, but he said the divisiveness among them has become so severe that it is harming the fight to free Afghanistan.

“It’s just too complex now,” he said through Kamrany. “We have to start with a new entity where everyone will get justice and equity based upon population, their needs and the distribution of fighters and so on.”

State Their Aims

That new entity, Mohammed said, should be the Provisional Government of Free Afghanistan, which was proclaimed after a June meeting of Afghan patriots in Washington, with the stated aims of:

- Uniting disparate elements of the resistance into an effective and cohesive force.

- Providing a faction-free political institution to serve as a representative for all sections of the Afghan resistance.

- Generating greater awareness and world condemnation of the continuing Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

- Utilizing more effectively the aid provided to the Afghan resistance.

- Upgrading the guerrillas’ military capability.

- Intensifying negotiations directed at withdrawal of the Soviet forces.

Wants Accountability

Mohammed called for U.S. aid to be offered openly, with accounting and accountability from beginning to end. He said the officially designated seven political organizations have lost their credibility because they have not provided that accountability.

The Soviets, he said, are trying to create famine by burning crops, destroying the country’s irrigation canal system, killing livestock and closing roads. He particularly emphasized three forms of aid needed by the resistance: food, air-defense weapons for use against Soviet planes and helicopters, and long-range ground weapons that would permit attacks on Soviet strong points.

“What he is trying to say,” Kamrany volunteered, “is there is no evidence of $450 million in aid. Where does it go? Who gets it? The Afghans don’t see it. Why doesn’t the United States ask what has happened to it?”

1 Million Killed

Calculating the cost of the seven-year struggle, Kamrany estimated that more than 1 million people have been killed, 16,000 villages have been destroyed, 5 million Afghans--about one-third of the nation’s total population--have left their homes and live in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, and more than 50% of the population in villages has been moved.

He was critical of U.S. policy.

“You see, the problem is this,” Kamrany said. “The U.S. State Department has a policy of stalemate. They want this war to go on so that they can get some propaganda advantage out of it. What is happening is that in the long run the resistance will fold, and then the State Department will lose Afghanistan. What he (Mohammed) is saying is that we can win the war in the short run and bring freedom to Afghanistan.”