Afghan Talks Resume in Geneva Amid Optimism

Negotiations to end the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan resumed Wednesday amid optimism that agreement is near, despite potentially serious sticking points.

“There is a real determination on both sides to have a settlement as soon as possible,” U.N. mediator Diego Cordovez told reporters before the talks were resumed. “We have to use the political will that I think exists on both sides.”

The veteran U.N. official cautioned, however, that the negotiations, aimed at the creation of an independent, nonaligned government in Afghanistan, will be difficult.

“In the concluding stage, people become particularly cautious, particularly tough, checking every comma,” he said. “There are still many difficult problems.”

Issue of Interim Regime

The negotiations could be further complicated by the position expressed Tuesday by Zain Noorani, Pakistan’s deputy foreign minister. In an arrival statement, he said that agreement on an interim Afghan government should be a condition of a Soviet withdrawal.

No other party seems to share this view--not Moscow, not its client regime in Kabul and not Washington.

The talks, now in their sixth year, involve representatives of the Soviet-backed Afghan government and the government of Pakistan, where major resistance groups fighting the Soviets have their headquarters and where millions of Afghan refugees have settled in to wait out the war.

Because Pakistan does not recognize the Marxist Afghan government, the two sides do not negotiate directly. The delegations are in separate rooms, and Cordovez shuttles back and forth across the hall between them.

Iran, where there are other resistance groups and more than a million additional Afghan refugees, has refused to take part in the talks, but it has agreed to abide by any eventual agreement.

Agreement has been reached in general terms on three of four elements:

-- A document outlining relations between the two countries, including a pledge of mutual non-interference.

-- A detailed plan for the orderly return of the estimated 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

-- International guarantees to safeguard Afghanistan’s independent, nonaligned political status.

The present negotiating session will deal with the last and most sensitive question: how the estimated 115,000 Soviet troops are to disengage from the fighting and leave Afghanistan.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has proposed a 10-month withdrawal period beginning May 15, providing the talks here produce an agreement by March 15. The United States wants the Soviet forces out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.

There are also differences on the issue of when Western military aid to the Afghan resistance should end. Moscow contends that it should stop when the agreement is signed. On Monday, the U.S. Senate adopted, by a vote of 77 to 0, a non-binding resolution urging the Reagan Administration to continue military aid to the resistence until the Soviet withdrawal is complete.

As Cordovez works to resolve the final points, questions about the interim government that Moscow would leave behind have raised potentially serious differences. Technically, the makeup of a caretaker government is beyond the scope of the talks and should be left to the Afghans, but Cordovez said he is prepared to act as a “communicator” between the Afghan factions if they ask him to do so.

Reversed Soviet Policy

Gorbachev recently reversed Soviet policy on Afghanistan, dropping a longstanding demand that the leaders of the unpopular regime in Kabul be guaranteed a significant role in the government.

Gorbachev washed his hands of any further Soviet involvement, saying that the makeup of the future government is up to the Afghans and should not affect the timing of a settlement.

The Reagan Administration apparently agrees. In testimony last week before a House subcommittee, Robert A. Peck, a deputy assistant secretary of state, said the formation of an interim government would be “highly desirable,” but he questioned whether it should be a condition for agreement in the Geneva talks.