Powerful Militia Unit in Open Revolt Against Kabul Regime : Afghanistan: Food is short, there are rumors of coups and the president concedes that with peace at hand, the situation is deteriorating rapidly.

Through a decade of war, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostam commanded the fiercest Afghan militia division, up to 40,000 heavily armed mercenaries known as the Jauzjan, who were used as storm troopers by the Soviet Red Army and Kabul’s authoritarian regimes against a nationwide, U.S.-backed Islamic rebellion.

Now, with peace at hand, Gen. Dostam is in open revolt against Afghanistan’s strongman President Najibullah and the army commanders he once loyally served.

Recently, he and his men hijacked 50 truckloads of ammunition, linked up with two other powerful militia commanders in the north, and now, at 60,000 strong, they control fully one-third of the nation’s provinces--Afghanistan’s entire border region with the former Soviet Union.

During those same war years, even a hint of opposition from within Najibullah’s ruling party was unthinkable. But, in hushed tones and with his radio turned up, a senior ruling party member sat the other day in a room 50 yards from Najibullah’s presidential suite and said: “All of these steps in the north are to get Najibullah out. He will not go quietly. But go, he must. We have our sleeves rolled up, and we are ready for the fight.”

So is Najibullah.

The man who has ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist, first for the Soviet occupation army and later for the former Communists in his party, conceded in an interview with The Times that the situation in his war-ravaged country is deteriorating rapidly.

“Now, we are at a turning point, a transition from war into peace,” Najibullah said. “I have faced in my time many big waves . . . and I have learned in this time not only how to swim well but how to pass through the waves.

“But these are the circumstances of this turning point now. . . . And I have said that at the time we turn toward peace, a Satanic ghost will move. This is what is happening now.”

Indeed, as U.N. special envoy Benon Sevan arrived in Kabul on Saturday with hopes of completing a peace plan that could end one of the world’s most intractable wars--a Cold War conflict that left 1 million dead, 3 million disabled and 5 million refugees--this remote South Asian nation appeared near collapse.

Against the backdrop of the mutinous standoff in the north, Najibullah’s long-bankrupt government has been unable to feed even his senior party workers and members of the elite secret police who have protected his regime through a harsh, lingering winter.

With the mountain peaks surrounding Kabul still covered with snow, stocks of grain for the regular army are so low that there are reports of renegade units’ looting villages in a province south of Kabul in search of food--and clothing as well.

Professors at government-run Kabul University went on strike last week, boycotting final exams, to protest Najibullah’s inability to provide them an additional week of bread rations. Riots have erupted outside flour-rationing shops for other government workers. Street crime is soaring in Kabul, as is highway robbery on vital roads linking the capital with free-market food supplies in Pakistan and former Soviet Central Asia.

With the nation’s long-anemic economy now in ruins--a dollar today fetches three times the amount of local currency that it did a year ago--Najibullah’s own party leaders have launched unprecedented attacks on his crumbling regime. So brazen has that criticism become in recent weeks that the president accused some of his closest advisers of betrayal at a major party meeting recently.

He reportedly acknowledged in that meeting the toll being taken on him by the country’s troubles by conceding, “Two years ago when I addressed you, my mustache was black. Now look, it is white.”

There are constant rumors of imminent coups and crackdowns. Once-loyal party men speak only with loud music in the background, a tactic aimed at jamming the wiretaps of Najibullah’s secret police. Factions are splitting and new alliances are forming daily.

Increasingly, the plots and counterplots threaten to reignite old hatreds and mistrust among Afghanistan’s three major ethnic groups: the majority Pushtuns, the large Tajik minority and the Hazaras. These divisions are being manipulated by ruling party leaders in tactics that ultimately could divide the nation into three separate parts.

As Najibullah’s deputy party leader, Farid Mazdak, said in an interview, “I don’t think the people will bear it if the U.N. peace plan is delayed from now until later. The sooner the better . . . because, if this plan fails, there is no chance for anybody. . . . Afghanistan will simply disintegrate and cease to exist.”

The heart of the U.N. plan, which has engaged envoy Sevan in more than a year of shuttle diplomacy between Kabul and the headquarters of the Islamic moujahedeen rebels in Pakistan and Iran, calls for a meeting of credible, “non-controversial” Afghans who can select an interim government to replace Najibullah.

Ideally, such a government would broker a cease-fire among the many warring factions on both sides of the conflict and eventually usher in democratic elections and pave the way for a concerted U.N.-sponsored effort to rebuild a nation in which 35,000 villages are in ruins.

The United States and Russia both support the peace plan and, in an effort to ensure its success, Washington and Moscow formally agreed last September to stop arming the two main sides in the conflict, officially ending what had become a classic, proxy showdown of the Cold War era.

A major hurdle of the U.N. effort is to get Najibullah and the more extremist rebel factions to agree to a final list of delegates to the first of two “intra-Afghan dialogues,” now tentatively scheduled to begin next month. Najibullah, a former head of the Afghan secret police who was installed by the Soviets at the height of their military occupation of Afghanistan in 1986, vowed several times lately that he will not be an obstacle to the peace process.

But Najibullah indicated in his interview with The Times that he would resign only if the interim government orders it, and not before. And he continued to insist that members of his ruling Homeland Party attend the meeting, which the fundamentalist rebel factions flatly reject.

Similarly, the extremist rebel factions headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, which were both heavily armed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with the aid of covert U.S. assistance during the war, insist that the meeting include hard-line Islamic fundamentalists, a demand Najibullah and his army commanders refuse to accept.

“This is all at an extremely delicate stage right now,” one U.N. official conceded. “It’s not so much that Benon Sevan’s (delegate) lists have to match. There are ways around that. The real key at the moment is keeping the country together long enough to help save it.”

The gravest threat to the unity of the nation, which has historically resisted central control from Kabul, is symbolized dramatically by Gen. Dostam’s open rebellion in the north, a confrontation in which, despite its disastrous potential, no shots have yet been fired.

Gen. Dostam and most of his men are Uzbeks, one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. He has joined hands with Gen. Momen, who, like Najibullah, uses only one name. Momen is a Tajik, the country’s largest ethnic minority and one that has traditionally viewed Kabul’s long-ruling Pushtun majority with suspicion. Momen commands the northern city of Hairitan, a principal supply depot for the Afghan armed forces and a vital way station en route to the former Soviet republics.

Both generals have formed an alliance with a militia division of Ismaelis, a minority Muslim sect which fought alongside Najibullah’s government forces against Sunni and Shiite moujahedeen rebels. The division is commanded by a general with a brutal reputation.

The three commanders’ demand is that Najibullah withdraw three recently appointed Pushtun regular army commanders in the north, whom they assert the president deliberately sent to their region to provoke ethnic minorities.

“This is all a plot by Najibullah to block the U.N. peace plan by stirring up the old ethnic nationalities problem,” said a senior party member who asked not to be identified by name. “Najibullah is only pretending to support Mr. Sevan’s plan. He knows that if it is implemented, he’s finished. He has become mad with power. He will not go willingly.”

The president’s supporters counter by charging that the Tajiks within the ruling party are trying to sabotage the U.N. plan. The Tajiks are behind Gen. Dostam’s rebellion as part of a play for power now that a peace meeting appears imminent, Najibullah’s supporters assert.

“This is a very dangerous game that these adventurists in the party are playing,” said Suleiman Layeq, a hard-line leftist, a close Pushtun presidential adviser and one of the founder’s of the ruling party. “These plots could destroy Afghanistan--break it to pieces.”

“What’s actually happening now is everyone is consolidating their regions for the future,” said an Asian diplomat in Kabul in a more balanced assessment of the rebellion in the north. “They’re just asserting themselves now that the fighting is over.

“But I wouldn’t consider this to be an unreasonable demand,” he continued. “Gen. Dostam and his men have been used as storm troopers throughout the war. The Pushtun ruling class in Kabul has made these people do their dirty work. They have fought without regard for their life and limb; they fought only for money. But, if they fought battles for the Pushtuns, why should the Pushtuns dominate now?”

In refusing the commanders’ demands, however, Najibullah is also sending more than 15,000 fresh troops, all of them Pushtuns, to keep the rebellious militias in check. And the continuing standoff is, according to one senior diplomatic analyst here, “like strapping a nuclear bomb to the heart of the country and waiting for someone to come defuse it. These are very dangerous games.”

“The ethnic divide has always been there in Afghanistan,” another diplomat said. “The only difference now is that they’re all armed to the teeth.”

In assessing the potential for ultimate disaster in the north during a conference on the Afghan peace process in January, veteran Afghanistan analyst Barnett Rubin noted that Gen. Dostam’s Uzbek division is indeed “the most powerful pro-government ethnic militia in Afghanistan.” What is more, he said, it also controls all of the nation’s rich natural gas fields and its strategic border with the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

“The Jauzjani Uzbeks expelled Pushtun landowners settled in the area a century ago and will resist any attempt to re-establish central Pushtun power in their area,” he observed.

Rubin, a Columbia University expert who frequently has testified before the U.S. Congress and advised the United Nations on Afghanistan, also predicted that the ethnic divisions would be Sevan’s greatest obstacles in his campaign to bring peace to Afghanistan.

“The 12 years of war have created a crisis which cannot be ended solely by a political settlement,” Rubin said.

In a nation “threatened with economic collapse and ethnic and sectarian conflict,” he added, “the war in Afghanistan today is not solely or even mainly about who is to govern in Kabul and under what rules of the game; it is about the nature of the state of Afghanistan itself.”