Will Afghan Regime Remain or Fall? : Propaganda, Rumor Fuel Intrigue in Jittery Kabul

There’s a tense little drama being played out in the streets of this Central Asian capital these days, and here are some of the main characters and props:

-- The Trojan, also known as the lonely American: He’s clever, provocative, fluent in Russian and Persian. He honed his political skills in the campus elections at USC.

-- The Fat Russian: He’s probably KGB, has a loud, crude laugh and moves in the shadows but defers to no one. But two bodyguards are at his side day and night.

-- The Ox: He’s the dark, broad-shouldered Afghan leader, a former commander of the dreaded Afghan secret police. But he speaks Persian “sweetly, like a Sufi poet.”

-- The Bactrian gold: A priceless, breathtaking, 2,000-year-old collection of jewelry and tokens unearthed by Soviet archeologists in 1978 but not publicly seen in Kabul for two years now. It is rumored to have been hidden in the palace of the former khan or spirited away to safety in the Soviet Union.

The Trojan. The Fat Russian. The Ox. The gold. The ingredients for an overwritten spy script?

Welcome to overwrought, overanxious Kabul, Afghanistan, May, 1988.

The withdrawal of the more than 100,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan that began May 15 has this city spooked. Kabul, never a stranger to intrigue anyway, is a war zone of propaganda and rumor spread from both East and West.

At the center of the propaganda war is uncertainty about the precarious future of the Soviet-backed Afghan government after all the Soviet troops are gone.

Serious fighting between government troops and the U.S.-backed moujahedeen rebels is still miles away. Kabul will be the last place that Soviet troops leave when their nine-month withdrawal timetable expires next February.

The city has been fortified with new concrete bunkers. Elite Afghan commando units in camouflage uniforms are now on city streets. Such solid protection makes a siege by the moujahedeen a difficult and bloody prospect.

Therefore, U.S. officials are hoping that the Afghan regime will unravel from the inside and remove the necessity of a set-piece battle. The Soviets, of course, want the regime to stand tough.

So the name of the game in Kabul, played with equal intensity in the ancient bazaars and the diplomatic cocktail circuit, is to either inflate or deflate the regime’s confidence. It is a game that produces some surprising exchanges between the big players, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Americans, both here and in Washington, have publicly opined that the regime is doomed, not likely to last more than a few months after the majority of the Soviet troops have left. Their opinions are so blatantly expressed that it all has the air of a strategy, a well-informed gamble, perhaps even a bluff.

“Our estimate is that the government could splinter and fall of its own weight even before the final Soviet pullout,” Robert A. Peck, deputy assistant secretary of state, told a House subcommittee in February. “ . . . Once the Soviet protectors are gone, the regime will be unable to project power into the countryside, and its early demise will be inevitable.”

Smell a Victory

Peck is one of a small group of bright, ambitious American diplomats who smell a victory for American policy in this mountainous land.

Other members of the “early demise” school include the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold L. Raphel, 45, and the U.S. charge d’affaires here in Kabul, John Glassman, as well several unnamed officials with the CIA, which has conducted an eight-year, $2-billion program to supply weapons to the moujahedeen.

The “early demise” school has its detractors, particularly in the Department of Defense and other Western embassies.

The policy pivots on the early fall of Kabul. It is a clear, short-term objective.

‘Vietnam Lesson’

“We want to teach the Russians their Vietnam lesson and get out,” said one adherent of that thinking.

The main American in the front-line is Glassman, 44, a Russian-speaking Californian with previous postings in Cuba and Mexico and special assignments in El Salvador and other countries. Tall, balding, given to speaking in staccato bursts, he is the ranking U.S. diplomat here.

Compared to previous envoys here, he has been an especially provocative figure.

“John stirs things up,” said another Western diplomat. “That’s why they brought him in.”

Glassman has a graduate degree from Columbia University. But he says he learned all his political and diplomatic skills on the campus of USC, where some of his schoolmates included Dwight L. Chapin, Donald H. Segretti and Gordon C. Strachan, who all later figured in the Watergate scandal.

Briefly Detained

Within days of his arrival less than a year ago, Glassman had made a splash by getting himself briefly detained by Soviet soldiers when he protested their harassment of a British television crew.

Using his fluent Russian, he constantly needles Soviet and Russian-speaking East European diplomats on the lively Kabul cocktail circuit. He asks them, for example, how they plan to evacuate once the Afghan regime crumbles. He asks if they are worried that the Muslim moujahedeen rebels will spread their jihad (holy war) into Muslim communities in the Soviet republics.

Meanwhile, a Polish adviser to the Afghan government said that his contact in the government has suddenly switched from speaking Russian to English. The same phenomenon was noted by an Austrian adviser.

Cocktail Parties

Despite the bitter differences that exist here, Kabul has continued to enjoy a fairly open exchange between diplomats. In his relatively short time here, Glassman has opened it up even more. Shortly before Christmas, Soviet diplomats began appearing at American cocktail parties.

Initially warned that it was not safe to venture outside the U.S. Embassy compound and the grounds of his residence, Glassman now can be seen striding down Chicken Street, the shopping avenue dating back to prewar hippie days, or chatting up security guards in Persian and Russian in front of the government ministries.

Soviet Line

For its part, the large Soviet community--including diplomats, advisers, journalists and soldiers--has countered the American line by stressing the disunity and religious fundamentalism of the moujahedeen.

In the streets and the universities, the Soviets and their friends concentrate on the female population. More than 80% of the students at Kabul University are women. Compared to the strict isolation of women found in the moujahedeen communities and in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the women in Kabul are relatively free.

They are unveiled, wear Western clothes and hold jobs--all impossible in the strict atmosphere of the refugee camps. If the Muslim rebels capture Kabul, the women here are told--probably correctly--that their freedoms will be lost. As a result, they are among the strongest supporters of the regime.

Threat of the Veil

“Because of the threat of the veil, women are naturally drawn to the government,” said a diplomat from another Western country, who believes the Americans have underestimated the regime’s staying power.

The Soviets and their allies hold their own in the acid repartee of the cocktail circuit.

A common rejoinder to cracks from Western diplomats about the instability of the Kabul regime is to compare some of the more fundamentalist elements of the moujahedeen to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran.

One of the more powerful and fundamentalist Afghan rebel leaders, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizbi-i Islami (Islamic Party) comes in for special ridicule. As a student leader at Kabul University 20 years ago, Hekmatyar led a campaign to force women students to wear veils. His moujahedeen group has been one of the principal recipients of CIA-supplied arms.

“If you liked Khomeini,” the East Europeans tell the Westerners, “you’ll love Hekmatyar.”

At Each Other’s Throats

Conflicts between the constantly feuding moujahedeen organizations are also highlighted by the Soviets. In much the same way that American diplomats are counting on the Kabul regime to disintegrate, so the Soviets are betting that the rebels will be at each other’s throats before they can form a viable alternative government to the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah.

Unlike the Americans’ scenario, the Soviets’ does not necessarily pivot on Kabul. Even if the rebels do manage to take Kabul, the Soviets appear to be preparing a fall-back position.

A hint of this possible strategy could be seen in the northern Afghanistan city of Mazar-i-Sharif this month. Western journalists were invited to the northern province to witness the withdrawal of the first units of Soviet troops.

However, at a luncheon hosted in their honor by a local businessman, they caught a glimpse of one of the more powerful men in Afghanistan. Viktor Polyanichko, in his early 50s, is a tall, strong but considerably heavyset man who wears safari-style leisure suits and travels with two very alert bodyguards.

“Some years from now, when this war is forgotten,” a Soviet journalist based in Kabul told a Western reporter later, “I will tell you about Viktor Polyanichko.”

Of course, the suggestion was that he is director of the Soviet KGB in Afghanistan. A Soviet translator said he is the second-highest ranking official at the Soviet Embassy, although minister-counselor Vsevolod Ozhegov is officially listed as the No. 2.

Two American reporters, in an apparently spontaneous gesture of glasnost by Sevruk, were invited to attend the private-room luncheon where Polyanichko, joking and laughing much of the time, was holding court at a table with several senior Afghan officials.

Dropping an oblique hint that his Afghan host should provide liquor, Polyanichko first asked if this were a dry province. Then, when his host failed to take the hint, he noted that under the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, drinking was no longer an approved activity in the Soviet Union. Looking pointedly at the Afghan deputy foreign minister sitting across from him at the table he added:

“Of course, if the deputy foreign minister were to request alcohol, it would become a matter of protocol and we would have to drink.”

A Round of Toasts

Suddenly getting the point, one Afghan official, Farouk Karman, whispered to the host, Rasul Barat, who jumped up, banging his knees on the table, and ran outside to order liquor. Soon several bottles of vodka and two bottles of Crown Royal, a Canadian blended whiskey, arrived at the table and a round of Soviet-style toasts began.

Unlike the other Soviet officials present, Polyanichko did not appear to be concerned about the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Rather, he appeared preoccupied with ensuring that the Soviet connections to the northern provinces were intact.

Isolated on the other side of the Hindu Kush mountains from Kabul, geographically and ethnically tied to the Soviet Union, the northern provinces have been rumored as a place to which the Soviet-supported government could retreat if Kabul were to fall.

“Our age-old friendship shall continue after the Soviet soldiers, who have fulfilled their international duty, have gone,” said Najibullah Masir, the deputy prime minister for the northern provinces, in his toast.

Imposing Size

For the Afghan regime itself, the chore of building confidence in the post-Soviet period falls on the broad shoulders of one man. Nicknamed “the Ox” because of his imposing size--perhaps 6-feet-2 and nearly 300 pounds--President Najibullah appears slow to Westerners.

But to the Afghans, he apparently gives a more positive impression. Ethnically, Najibullah, 41, is a Pushtun, a member of the majority population from the southern half of the country where most of the fighting has taken place.

Pushtuns admire size and physical strength. Unlike his predecessor, the mercurial and more effete Babrak Karmal, Najibullah appears to demonstrate some of the graces and complicated niceties of the Afghan Islamic society.

He has attempted to inculcate the aura of Islam in his government. He quotes authoritatively from the Koran. Unlike the secular Karmal, he attends Friday prayers.

In press conferences, he has unblinkingly fielded questions about the ability of his regime to survive after the Soviets are gone.

At times when another politician might get angry, Najibullah plods steadily ahead. One questioner from Norway asked Najibullah what he thought his chances of survival were, given the fact that three of the previous four Afghan presidents were assassinated and one was in forced exile.

“I am an optimist,” he replied, smiling.

“Every day he remains in power after the Soviet withdrawal beginning May 15,” one Western diplomat warned, “he gets stronger.”

His background as the former commander of the notorious, East German-trained secret police, khad, still arouses suspicion.

“If it were not for that, the people would love him,” said Abdul Ahmad Javed, a former president of Kabul University who is now a professor of Persian language.

‘Speaks Sweetly’

“He speaks very nicely, sweetly,” said Javed, who remained at the university even after many of his colleagues, including some who later became leaders of moujahedeen groups, left to protest the Soviet invasion. “He uses beautiful, flowery expressions in dari ,” the Afghan dialect of Persian.

Despite his flowery Persian and his impressive bulk, Najibullah is also the personification of the regime--and its fall-guy, if one is needed. Like others before him--Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam, Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua--he has been accused of amassing great wealth in the two years he has served as the Soviet-backed Afghan leader.

The latest story haunting his government involves the fabulous Bactrian gold collection dug up by Soviet archeologists in Sherberghan in 1978.

20,000 Pieces of Gold

The collection of 20,000 pieces, ranging from delicately crafted crowns to solid gold bowls, is from the Kushan Dynasty of around 100 BC, centered near the Amu Darya River.

After it was discovered and catalogued, the treasure was displayed to great international acclaim in the National Museum in Kabul. Two years ago, however, the collection was packed up. No Westerner has seen it since. The prestigious French newspaper Le Monde recently reported that it had been taken from the country. The government denies that the gold has left Afghanistan.

In the supercharged atmosphere of rumor and plot, intrigue and propaganda that dominates this nervous capital, this affair naturally became the object of delighted speculation among the Western diplomats. One even suggested the plot of a future book:

“The fabulous Bactrian gold is hidden in the basement of the palace of the former khan where the president has put it to pay for his escape,” the diplomat suggested mischievously. “As the Soviet regime begins to disintegrate, the guards abandon their posts.

“But several men, Western diplomats perhaps, have been waiting outside. They rush into the vaults and grab armloads of the fabulous gold. . . .”