Guerrillas’ Eyes on Kabul as Soviets Pull Back From Border

Soviet and Afghan army forces have begun to abandon precarious border positions in preparation for the first withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan next month under the recent Geneva agreement, Afghan rebel and Western sources here said this week.

Their pullback has spurred hopes among some Western supporters of the Afghan guerrillas that the Afghan government, deprived of Soviet military forces, will soon collapse and the guerrillas will march into Kabul.

But more conservative analysts caution that the pullback may be only to more defensible positions, that the Kabul area is well-fortified and that barring a coup or sizable defections by Afghan army commanders, the Kabul regime could hold out for some time.

The most significant garrison evacuated so far is Barikot, a border post of more than 1,000 Afghan troops and militia and about two dozen Soviet advisers in Kunar province 100 miles north of Peshawar.

Beginning last Saturday night, witnesses said, squadrons of Soviet MI-8 and MI-24 helicopters descended on Barikot village, situated in a valley flanked by the Hindu Kush Mountains to the west and the Kunar River to the east.

As the MI-24 helicopter gunships and Soviet jets strafed the surrounding terrain, the MI-8 transport helicopters made at least 200 landings to evacuate not only the Afghan soldiers, militia members and their families, but also an estimated 3,000 villagers.

Only a few elderly men were left behind by the departing forces. Under heavy fire from moujahedeen rebels the whole time, the government forces also abandoned five armored personnel carriers, 35 trucks, anti-aircraft guns and four 76-millimeter artillery weapons, all apparently in working order, according to witnesses and journalists who visited the city this week.

The Soviets lost two helicopters and one jet fighter in the evacuation, they reported.

Allusions to Vietnam

The Soviet evacuation of at least four other garrisons this week in Kunar, Paktia and Logar provinces--all near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan--has fueled hope among U.S. and other Western backers of the Afghan resistance that it will spark a chain reaction of liberated cities leading to the capture of the main jewel sought by the rebels in their 8 1/2-year war against the Soviets, the Afghan capital city, Kabul.

The takeover of Kabul is seen by many U.S. officials as a fitting sequel to the fall of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, to Soviet-backed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in 1975. Their conversations are peppered with allusions to Vietnam.

“Kabul will not fall to a frontal military assault,” one Western diplomat said this week. “What is much more likely is what happened in Saigon. It will unravel from the inside. Some people will decide it is time to go visit their village. Some officers will take out their freshly printed ‘I’m a secret moujahedeen’ cards.”

Under terms of the agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan signed earlier this month in Geneva, with the United States and Soviet Union as guarantors, Moscow has pledged to withdraw half of its estimated 115,000 troops in Afghanistan over a three-month period beginning May 15. The remaining Soviet forces would be withdrawn by Feb. 15, 1989.

The dominant theory among U.S. officials is that once the majority of Soviet troops have gone, the Soviet-backed Afghan regime headed by President Najibullah will not be able to last more than a few months in Kabul.

“One year from today,” one senior Western official said confidently, “Najibullah will either be sunning himself in exile on the Black Sea, or he will be dead meat.”

Reagan Administration officials also see an early fall of Kabul as a potential boost to the Republican presidential candidacy of Vice President George Bush in November. Although CIA aid to the Afghan guerrillas, which last year totaled over $600 million, was begun during President Carter’s Administration, the bulk of the support has come under President Reagan.

More conservative Western analysts of the Afghan situation are not as confident as the Americans of an early success in Kabul. British diplomats in Kabul, where the British army suffered its worst defeat in history about 150 years ago, contend that the Soviet-backed Kabul regime and its supporters in the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan may have more staying power than American analysts estimate.

Rebels Cautious

Some of the Afghan guerrilla groups also have cautioned the Americans not to be overly optimistic, especially about the rapid fall of Kabul.

Masood Khalili, a political officer with the Jamiat-i-Islami rebel organization, one of the largest and most effective moujahedeen fighting forces, said:

“It is very difficult to predict what the government in Kabul will be able to do without the Soviets. One or two weeks without the Soviets will show us how strong their cadres and militias are. Americans tend to be too optimistic.”

The commander upon whom any future attack on Kabul will probably depend is Abdul Haq of the Hizb-i-Islami Khalis.

The short, slightly pudgy Haq is a Kabul native whose men all know the back alleys and filthy canals of the capital.

A map on the wall of his office in Peshawar, where most of the resistance leaders have their headquarters, has hundreds of colored markers indicating Soviet and Afghan army positions in the capital.

“Kabul will be the last place the Soviets leave,” Haq warned.

He said there are three major Soviet bases and three large Afghan army bases, as well as 1,500 other armed positions in Kabul.

Unlike other Afghan cities, the areas surrounding Kabul are mostly deserts or hills with well-fortified Soviet positions.

For that reason, Haq said in an interview this week, the rebel cause will need help from internal Kabul uprisings--a political coup or an army rebellion--if the city is to fall quickly. “We will try to use their own army defectors rather than have some force come in from the outside,” Haq said.

Haq and other leaders say they have been contacted by Afghan army officers offering to deliver their troops to the rebel side.

Afghan government forces are estimated at no more than 150,000. The big question is how many of these generally poorly trained and equipped men will stand and fight after the Soviets depart.

Of all the government units, Haq said, the one he fears most is the Frontier Security Force, composed of the government’s most committed Communists, many of whom were trained in the Soviet Union.

“They (the Frontier Security Force) know that they will be fighting for their survival,” he said. “They know they are marked as Communists.”