U.S. Split by Kremlin Afghan Move : Pullout Pledge Raises Issue of Continuing Aid to Rebels

Eshan Jan Areef, the Washington representative of one of the leading Afghan resistance groups, has a quick and easy answer ready for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“When a country brings over 100,000 troops into a country in less than one week, it can pull them out in the same time,” he says. “If not one week, then two weeks.”

For the Reagan Administration, however, the issue is not so simple. The Kremlin offer this week to remove all of the 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan over a 10-month period beginning May 15 has revived old divisions within the U.S. government over how to deal with Gorbachev.

Some officials, particularly in the State Department, view Gorbachev’s move as a dramatic breakthrough, one that reflects a desire to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible and hints at efforts to change Soviet policy toward other regional disputes, such as those in Angola and Cambodia.

Likened to Lyndon Johnson

“He was saying, ‘We’re serious about getting out.’ This almost sounded like Lyndon Johnson in 1968,” one high-ranking State Department official said, referring to Johnson’s decision to begin extricating the United States from Vietnam.

But others within the U.S. government view Gorbachev’s offer as a ruse, one geared to bring pressure for a quick cutoff in U.S. aid for the resistance groups that have been battling Soviet forces since they invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

“What they’re saying now is just words, and words can be geared to deception,” says Elie Krakowsi of the Pentagon’s Office of Regional Defense.

The principal question facing the United States now is whether, or when, to cut off American support to the Afghan rebel groups, known as the moujahedeen , which are based in Pakistan.

That American support program is now believed to be the largest single covert operation since the Vietnam War. The aid, mostly in the form of military equipment and including such high-technology hardware as Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, is estimated at more than $600 million a year--far surpassing U.S. government aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

U.S. Must Work Out Details

In the past, the United States has promised that it would terminate this aid to the Afghan resistance when the Soviets removed their troops from the country. Now, U.S. policy-makers are being forced to work out the specifics of this commitment--in effect, dealing with new problems caused by success in obtaining a hard Soviet offer to withdraw. Among the issues are:

At what point in the Soviet withdrawal would the United States cut off all aid to the Afghan guerrillas? Does the American promise of a cutoff apply exclusively to military aid, or to other aid as well? What about the aid supplied to the resistance groups by other governments, such as Saudi Arabia? What should be the shape of a new Afghan government, and exactly when would it take power?

These are the questions being examined now as the United States seeks to come up with a response to Gorbachev. U.S. officials say that they expect Afghanistan to be one of the subjects on the agenda when Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze meet in Moscow later this month.

Gorbachev’s offer Monday to withdraw Soviet forces had one condition: that by March 15, Pakistan and the Soviet-backed Afghan regime should reach agreement on an end to the war in the U.N.-sponsored indirect negotiations in Geneva.

Timetable Long the Issue

U.S. and Pakistani officials said this week that Gorbachev’s condition, by itself, does not amount to much because the only outstanding issue in the negotiations has been a timetable for withdrawal of Soviet troops.

The two governments already have agreed on provisions that would open the way for the return of an estimated 3 million Afghan refugees from Pakistan and would pledge non-interference in each other’s affairs. The Geneva talks are scheduled to resume March 2.

Soviet Embassy officials in Washington said this week that “only a few words” must be agreed upon to reach final agreement. The differences between the two sides are relatively minor and “will be satisfied soon,” they said.

The 10-month timetable Gorbachev proposed was shorter than previous Soviet offers. A State Department official said that over the last few years, the Soviet Union and Afghanistan have proposed a withdrawal of Soviet troops over a period of 48 months, and then gradually shortened the period to 16 months.

On the other side, Pakistan has most recently called upon the Soviets to pull their forces out within eight months. Thus, the two sides are now only two months apart, and it seems likely that they will be able to reach agreement.

“The Soviets say it is not so easy to leave,” one State Department official said. “They don’t want to be shot in the back while they are leaving. Our military analysts say that once they get half their troops out, the pressure would be on the rest of them to leave. There’s no reason for the remaining ones to linger on. They’d be exposed and vulnerable.”

Still, settling on a timetable for Soviet withdrawal does not settle all the outstanding issues. Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq has said he does not want to sign an agreement with the existing Afghan regime, which Pakistan does not recognize. Instead, he wants to reach agreement first on a new Afghan government, presumably a coalition between forces backing the current government and resistance groups.

Gorbachev said this week that formation of a coalition government is “a purely internal Afghan issue,” one that should be kept separate from Soviet troop withdrawals. A State Department official said this week that the United States would “prefer” to have an agreement on a coalition government in Afghanistan, suggesting that the United States may not insist on this point as strongly as Zia has.

The more serious question facing the United States involves closing down aid to the moujahed ee n .

Shultz on Aid Cutoff

Shultz has said that the United States would continue its military aid program until it is clear that the Soviet troop pullout is irreversible, but would then cut it off.

“Once we have an agreement on a timetable for Soviet withdrawal which is short and has enough safeguards in it to make it irreversible, we would, as a guarantor (of the Geneva agreement), be obligated to terminate arms to the resistance at the time the troop withdrawals begin,” a State Department official said.

But this week, Afghan resistance groups and some officials within the Administration were urging that the U.S. aid should stop not when the Soviets begin to leave Afghanistan but after they finish pulling out all their troops.

“By cutting off the aid, they (U.S. officials) will crush the resistance,” Areef said. “Maybe the Soviets will start pulling out a part of their troops, but still they will have troops in Afghanistan. Who can guarantee that the Soviets will not use some pretext to remain?”

“Why don’t we tell them, ‘You created this mess, so you get out and then we’ll stop the aid’?” one Pentagon official asked. “Would you take a credit card or a check from someone you don’t trust who has a long record of passing bad checks and being caught doing it?”

U.S. officials say recent intelligence reports indicate that the Soviet Union has been increasing the amount of military equipment it is sending to Afghanistan. Moscow has also signed several new economic accords with Afghanistan.

Some Pentagon officials point to these facts as evidence that the Soviets may not intend to leave. A State Department official said, however, that “they’re doing in Afghanistan what we did in Vietnam in 1973”--that is, trying to open the way for Afghan troops to fight the war on their own when the troops are withdrawn.

The divisions within the U.S. government over Afghan policy are an outgrowth of the broader debate over how to respond to the Soviet Union and to Gorbachev’s diplomatic initiatives.

Privately, U.S. officials acknowledge that there are some within the Administration who believe that the United States should make it as difficult as possible for the Soviet Union to get out of Afghanistan.

These officials argue that the longer the Soviets go on suffering casualties, spending money and incurring international criticism in Afghanistan, the better it is for the United States. (U.S. officials estimate that Soviet troops have suffered 30,000 to 35,000 casualties in Afghanistan, including 10,000 to 15,000 dead).

Some Favor ‘Bleeding’

“There are some people in the U.S. government who want to keep bleeding the Soviets,” one Pentagon source said. “But I think a Soviet withdrawal would be important. It would have serious consequences for Soviet client states around the world.”

“Leaving the Soviets in would be too dangerous,” a State Department official said. “If they (the Soviets) decided to press on, time might be on their side. In 10 years, Afghanistan might have no people left inside it, but the Soviets could win, at great cost.”

Within the Administration, some officials were carefully studying some passages of Gorbachev’s announcement Monday that hinted there might be a new Soviet approach in other areas of the world besides Afghanistan.

The Soviet leader spoke of the proposed troop withdrawal as a reflection “of our new, modern view of the world.” He also spoke of regional conflicts around the world as “bleeding wounds” and said that a settlement in Afghanistan will be “an important rupture in the chain of regional conflicts.”

“What does that mean for Indochina, for Angola and so on?” one senior State Department official asked. “What he said intrigues everyone. He (Gorbachev) is saying as baldly as he can to his people, ‘We can’t continue to act like barbarians.’ ”

Times staff writer Robert C. Toth contributed to this story.