As Afghan War Fades, U.N. Peace Plan Gains : Asia: The U.S.-Soviet proxy battle is over. Pakistan has had enough. And once-fiery guerrilla commanders now favor a compromise settlement.

After waging guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan for 13 years, rebel Commander Syed Hussein Anwari sat beneath an oil painting of his hero, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, and tried to resign himself to the notion of peace.

“Since I am a moujahedeen commander, I still prefer the military option--to take Kabul (the Afghan capital) by force and install an Islamic government in my country,” said the rebel leader whose Islamic forces fought, first, to drive away 110,000 Soviet occupation troops and, afterward, to try to wrest Kabul from the former Communists who still control it.

But there’s a new mood in the air, he conceded last week. A U.N. peace plan is winning support for a compromise resolution to fighting that has killed a million Afghans and forced 4 million others to become refugees. Not only have Washington and Moscow abandoned the Afghan war that they once fought by proxy, but Pakistan, long the staunchest supporter of the moujahedeen ‘s holy war, is now backing the U.N. plan.

“The big powers are abandoning us,” Anwari acknowledged sadly, huddled in his black robes against the chill in the headquarters of his Islamic Party here in Peshawar, a Pakistani border city that has served as the moujahedeen ‘s ideological and logistics base throughout the war. “So, I am supporting this U.N. plan. It is, I suppose, the second-best option.”

A majority of Anwari’s fellow commanders also seem to be backing the plan, as are all of the nations that spent billions of dollars to underwrite one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

The U.N. plan for peace in Afghanistan is hardly a new one. The five-point proposal calls for an Afghan loya jirgha , or grand assembly, that would install a compromise interim government in Kabul, which, in turn, would pave the way for elections and the eventual return of 4 million Afghan refugees now in Pakistan and Iran. The plan has been on the negotiating table for more than a year.

Three weeks ago, the plan suddenly became more viable than ever when the secretive “Afghan cell” of the Pakistani government quietly decided that even Islamabad had had enough of the war.

For most analysts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that decision by a nation that had stubbornly clung to hopes of installing a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Kabul through a moujahedeen military victory marked the final turning point.

“Effectively, the war already has wound down,” one Western diplomat said, noting agreements that have stopped all arms supplies to both the moujahedeen and the embattled Afghan regime of President Najibullah. “What we’re doing now is really just tying up the loose ends. The jihad (holy war) is really over.”

A senior Pakistani official who was partly responsible for the policy shift put it more strongly.

“This is the most significant development of the war, because it marks a major shift in Pakistan’s attitude,” said Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali, deputy minister for economic affairs. During an official visit in December to the newly independent republics of Soviet Central Asia, Ali had stressed the need for an Afghan settlement that would reopen old, lucrative trade routes for Pakistan to the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union.

“For the first time, we’ve said we’re in favor of a political settlement,” Ali said last week about the Pakistani change. “This marks a watershed for Pakistan on a very wide spectrum of the country.”

But for Riaz Mohammed Khan, director general of the “Afghan cell” who helped chart that policy shift, the January decision was merely the culmination of a long process pushed by a series of events. The most significant event was the collapse of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan’s once-powerful northern neighbor, which helped engineer the leftist coup that brought Afghanistan’s People’s Democratic Party to power in 1978 and, the next year, invaded and occupied the country.

Among Moscow’s first official acts after last August’s failed coup by Soviet hard-liners--the same Kremlin leaders who had staunchly supported Najibullah’s military regime in Kabul with billions of dollars in arms and materiel--was an agreement with Washington known as “negative symmetry,” a commitment to end all arms supplies to both sides in the Afghan civil war.

That agreement left Pakistan, which had served as a conduit for billions of dollars in covert CIA arms to the moujahedeen , with little to offer the rebels. Then, late last year, Pakistan was embarrassed when it promised to deliver three Soviet prisoners of war to a high-level Russian delegation in Islamabad, only to find that the moujahedeen holding them refused to make good on the promise.

“That really ticked off everybody,” said a Western diplomat who follows the Afghan situation from Islamabad. “The Russians wanted something it cost nothing to deliver. And Pakistan was betrayed by the very groups it had stood by all these years.”

The POW debacle, combined with the arms cutoff, ultimately persuaded Pakistan’s new military leader, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Asif Nawaz Janjua, a moderate compared to the more fundamentalist predecessors who had micro-managed the Afghan war from Islamabad for years, to back away from the military conflict and fully support the U.N. peace initiative.

According to Khan, though, the two events not only bolstered Pakistan’s gradually shifting policy, but they were also clear indications that Islamabad has far less leverage to solve the conflict than most analysts attribute to it.

Indeed, the point man in the U.N. negotiating process is finding the road to peace almost as difficult as the moujahedeen ‘s military struggle. Benon Sevan, emissary of the U.N. secretary general, has managed to persuade only the most moderate of the seven major, Pakistan-based rebel groups to publicly endorse the plan.

Although some of the fundamentalist moujahedeen leaders privately say they will support a compromise Kabul government provided it excludes members of Najibullah’s ruling Watan (Homeland) Party, Sevan is finding his current effort to gather names of non-controversial Afghans for the grand assembly to be painstaking.

“The Afghan situation has now become very difficult,” Khan observed. “It’s all fragmented. Everybody has their own interest.”

And the time frame seen by most analysts for Sevan to lay the groundwork for the grand assembly meeting, which is tentatively slated to be held in either Turkey or Switzerland, is fast narrowing.

“What’s working for him is a sense of urgency among the (rebel) commanders that was not there before,” one senior Western diplomat said in Islamabad. “If Najibullah lasts for several more months without support from anyone, then he will become legitimate by default. They’re fast realizing that the only way to get rid of him now is through a political settlement.”