Afghan Rebels’ Arms Loss Put at $80 Million : Key Weapons Destroyed by Sabotage in Pakistan

Rebels battling Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed regime lost at least $80 million in American and Saudi Arabian-supplied weapons destined for their forces when saboteurs blew up a major arms dump in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on April 10, U.S. sources say.

The blast, which killed 100 Afghan and Pakistani workers and bystanders, destroyed up to 10% of the cash value of U.S. and Saudi arms sent annually to the rebels, the sources said late last week. Because most of the weapons were rockets, mortars and other heavy arms and not small-arms ammunition, the volume of munitions lost was less than their cash value suggests.

The sources, officials in Congress and the Reagan Administration and outside experts, differ over how greatly the loss might affect the U.S.-backed moujahedeen’s eight-year war against the Afghan army.

Shift in War Tactics

But there was general agreement that the blast has deprived the guerrillas of the sorts of weapons needed to launch assaults on heavily defended towns at the very time when the war is shifting from a hit-and-run guerrilla campaign to a more conventional military operation.

“You can’t take Kabul (Afghanistan’s heavily fortified capital) without things like mine-clearing equipment and mortars, and that’s what’s short now,” one informed official said. “You figure out whether it’s a problem.”

Reports from Pakistan in recent days have suggested that the guerrillas are scoring victories in the field as the Afghan regular army prepares for the withdrawal of the estimated 115,000 Soviet troops that have supported its operations. The Soviets are leaving, starting in mid-May, under the terms of an Afghan peace accord signed last month.

Under that accord, both the United States and the Soviet Union would reduce arms shipments to the opposing sides in the war and eventually simultaneously end the shipments when the last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan, probably by early 1989.

The moujahedeen captured several towns on the Afghan-Pakistani border last week as Afghan government forces began retreating from outposts that they cannot hold without Soviet support.

The Rawalpindi blast is one of three explosions last month that struck arms dumps and factories that supplied the Afghan resistance forces. Blasts also destroyed a moujahedeen arms dump at Chaman, on the Pakistani-Afghan border, and damaged an ammunition factory at Lahore, Pakistan. The Chaman blast was almost certainly sabotage, but many analysts say that the Lahore explosion was accidental.

Most observers agreed that the loss of the arms does not hurt the rebel cause in the short run because heavier weapons will not be needed in quantity for several months. But there was some question whether the arms could be replaced and smuggled inside Afghanistan months from now, when the peace treaty, with its ban on arms shipments, begins to take hold.

Official U.S. experts on the Afghan war, interviewed last week, declined comment on the weapons dump explosions. However, they indicated that they have scaled back their own previous forecasts that the moujahedeen are headed for an early victory over Afghan President Najibullah’s government forces.

Kabul Heavily Defended

The government experts--informed observers of the conflict who refused to be identified--said that the moujahedeen may be unable to topple Najibullah after Soviet troops leave without a potentially long and difficult siege of Kabul, which has been ringed with heavy defenses.

That evaluation is less optimistic than a State Department view of the resistance forces issued only last February. At that time, the department’s top Near Eastern official, Deputy Assistant Secretary Robert A. Peck, said the Kabul government could “splinter and fall of its own weight even before the final Soviet pullout.”

Last week, however, the government experts played down talk of a quick triumph over the Afghan army, saying instead that the Najibullah regime “cannot hold out over the long term” and that the moujahedeen “are better prepared for a protracted struggle” than the Afghan army.

Few Defections Noted

That official view is based in part on the relatively few Communist defectors who have fled Afghanistan in recent weeks and on reported successes by the Kabul government in stabilizing its lackadaisical army.

These and other experts expect the moujahedeen to take over the countryside as Soviet forces begin their pullback from rural outposts. But they say it will be difficult for the moujahedeen to seize the seat of government, Kabul, with their current weapons and military tactics.

The Soviets have erected three rings of defenses around Kabul, a city of 2 million, placing rows of mine fields and 8,000 to 10,000 Afghan soldiers between the city and the moujahedeen armies.

The official experts said it is unclear how or whether the United States will supply the resistance should the Kabul regime cling to power long after Soviet troops leave.

Arms Shipments Curbed

Congressional experts note that the United States and the Saudis will one day be legally barred from sending arms into Afghanistan under the Afghan peace treaty.

The Reagan Administration “has made a series of assumptions--first, that the Soviets will pull out completely, second that the regime in Kabul will collapse, and third that the resistance will take over the country,” one of the government experts said last week.

“No one has really made any plans for the possibility that these assumptions might not turn out to be true.”

For the moment, the Najibullah regime is showing little outward concern about the resistance, they said. A stream of high-level defectors, a long-awaited “sign of nervousness” within the Afghan government, has failed to materialize, the experts said.

Government officials say there have been a handful of recent defections from the Kabul regime, including an economics minister and two diplomats in Rome and in Warsaw.

Najibullah’s own brother defected to Pakistan last year, but one U.S. source described him as “a Billy Carter kind of character,” referring to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s brother.

“There are signs of turmoil (in Kabul), but no high-level or even mid-level defectors that we know of,” said one source. “We also have not seen high-level military defectors or pilots. We would have expected to see more signs of nervousness than we’re seeing. It may be that the reality hasn’t set in yet.”