‘The Ox’ Underestimated Threats : Afghanistan: Overconfident leader didn’t see seriousness of plots against him.

The man so big in stature and so brutal in technique that he was nicknamed “The Ox” was clearly in a good mood that day, beaming broadly as he predicted confidently that history would remember him as the savior of his nation.

Seated at the big wooden conference table in an office ringed by security men, President Najibullah banged the table time and again to make his point. He belly-laughed, told stories of swimming against virtual tidal waves in the Caspian Sea and finally lowered his voice, narrowed his eyes and jabbed the air with a beefy finger as he summed up his five years at the helm of a nation at war with itself.

“If the objectives are honorable, if it is all ended by the man himself or even by someone else, then the honors will go to the one who has begun that,” Najibullah told The Times that chilly afternoon in mid-March.

“When you bring the broken boat to the coast, if somebody else unloads it, no problem. Everybody who is on board that boat will see who has saved them.”

That was one of the 44-year-old Najibullah’s last interviews as president. On Thursday, under intense pressure both from within his authoritarian regime and from the Muslim rebels closing in on his capital, he gave up the ship.

The collapse of Najibullah’s government, more than three years after his Soviet military backers left him, followed weeks of internal plotting in which some of his staunchest supporters within the ruling Homeland Party abandoned him. It brought to an end a succession of Soviet-installed leaders who were used by Moscow to rule its southern neighbor by proxy. And it ended an era of rule that confounded outside analysts by the sheer longevity of a leader so besieged.

The president, known almost universally among Afghans simply as Najib, was largely a Soviet creation. Trained as a physician, he was the chief of Afghanistan’s dreaded, KGB-trained secret police when he was elevated to the presidency by the Soviet military leadership that occupied Afghanistan at the time. Earlier, during a period of extended exile in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1978 and 1979, he was housed, fed and financed by the Soviet government.

Born Najib Ahmadzai in a small Pushtun tribal village near the Pakistani border, Najibullah spent most of his life as a committed Communist cadre, working his way up through the ranks of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which took power in a Moscow-inspired leftist coup in 1978.

During the past three years since the Soviets withdrew the last of their estimated 115,000 troops, Najibullah spent much of his energy simply trying to survive, largely by recasting himself as a born-again democrat in the eyes of a world fast rejecting the communist ideology of his ruling party. He changed the party’s name, spoke of privatization, a free-market economy and the joys of Islam in his speeches and even added uddin (“of God”) to the end of his name. He soon began granting interviews to most of the Western journalists who had long been shut out by his secretive regime.

Najibullah was aided by his shrewd ability to manipulate the nation’s ancient ethnic divisions through the generous Soviet arms shipments that he used to buy off his potential enemies within the country.

Under an agreement reached between Moscow and the United States, the rebels’ largest benefactor, those arms shipments stopped at the end of last year. And it began to become clear that the regime that had resembled a monolith was merely a carefully crafted facade.

By the end, Najibullah had lost all popular support, with most residents of Kabul confiding their hatred for him and their respect for Ahmed Shah Masoud, the rebel commander who joined forces with Najibullah’s own military leaders in easing him out Thursday.

Even within the ruling party, cracks began appearing. By last month, the government clearly was in tatters, divided along traditional ethnic lines. Less than 100 yards from the office where he spoke with a Times reporter that day, in the heart of the Homeland Party’s compound, the party’s deputy leader, a dynamic Tajik, already was plotting against him.

“Of course not,” the man said when asked whether Najibullah would quietly cede power and leave Kabul. “But he is bound to have to. Four days ago at our party conference, he said: ‘Two years ago, my mustache was black. Now it is white.’ All of these steps we are taking now are to get him out.”

Indeed, when Najibullah was interviewed on that day in March, his mustache was heavily flecked with gray and white. He tried to brush aside the subject of an internal plot--a strategic alliance being formed among minority Tajik army generals, party leaders and ultimately the moujahedeen leader, Masoud.

“In the course of the last 13 years of war in the country, a number of forces, personnel and individuals were shifted to battle--to war,” he said of the several divisions of largely Tajik militia that had once fought for him but had recently turned against him. “Now we are in a turning point--a transition from war into peace. When you are going to shift these forces from war to peace, of course something has to give.

“When you are transferring water from one barrel to another, some of it spills. We are in charge of the situation.”

His apparent inability to read the seriousness of the internal threat against him was, according to several Afghans close to him, typical of Najibullah’s self-image of indestructibility. One of his key supporters once described it as “an iciness in his veins.”

Suleiman Layeq, a poet, fellow Pushtun and lifelong ideologue who helped form Afghanistan’s Communist Party, happened to be in an adjacent office in the presidential palace in March, 1990, when Najibullah’s defense minister recruited a disgruntled faction of the Afghan air force to attempt a coup against the regime.

“I wanted just to run away,” Layeq told The Times the day after the coup had failed. “But when the president came out of his office, he was calm. He said, ‘You must remain coldblooded, my old friend.’ ”

And it was with that same bravado that he met the intricate plots being woven against him.

“Najibullah has faced in this time many waves,” the president said, concluding last month’s interview and referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person. “I think in the course of the last five years, even if I did not know how to swim, in this course I have not only learned how to swim well, I learned to pass through the waves. And I know how to swim both on sea and on land.”

Then he gave a deep laugh, pounded the table several times and began to reminisce.

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “In the last 13 years, I have gone on vacation only twice--both times in the Soviet Union. Once we were by the seaside, and when the intensity of the waves is too much, they hoisted three balls on a station on the beach and they didn’t let you swim.

“On this day I remember there were five balls. My hosts wouldn’t permit me to swim. But when they were trying to prevent me, I just dove into the water.

“So, you see, one should know how to live in water and on the land. And one should also know how to live in a balanced way, both in the domestic environment and the foreign environment.”

On Thursday, it appeared that Najibullah may have the chance to demonstrate that adaptability. Sources close to the president said that, if he leaves Kabul alive, he has accepted the inevitability of living the rest of his life in exile.