Afghan Rebels, Troops Gird for Move on Kabul

Moderate Islamic rebels backing Afghanistan’s ruling coalition of politicians and army generals took up positions alongside regular army troops Saturday as Kabul girded for an expected assault by approaching fundamentalist rebels that could plunge the nation into another civil war.

The spectacle of the armed moujahedeen rebels in beards and turbans beside clean-shaven, Soviet-style regular Afghan army troops whom the rebels have fought for so many years was one of the most incongruous sights here in recent memory.

The presence of the moujahedeen here resulted from an equally incongruous development: a historic meeting between Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil and Islamic rebel leader Ahmed Shah Masoud in that field commander’s stronghold of Charikar north of Kabul. Masoud has long despised all such figures as Wakil, who was a key figure in President Najibullah’s government from the moment it was installed during the Soviet occupation in 1986 until he became one of the coup plotters who toppled Najibullah on Thursday.

Earlier, one of the last major strongholds of the coalition regime, the strategic city of Herat near the Iranian border, was overrun by an alliance of rebel forces and militiamen who had once been loyal to Najibullah. Regular army troops in Herat apparently abandoned their garrison, an action that left only two important Afghan cities firmly in the hands of elements supporting the fragile coalition regime now in control in Kabul.

The echo of sporadic gunfire and a host of dire rumors spread panic and a deepening sense of dread throughout this capital, which has been functioning in a state of shock since Najibullah was ousted.

Markets were suddenly shuttered, families fled for home, the dollar stopped trading at Kabul’s resilient money market, and about 650 remaining foreigners began preparing for the worst.

The United Nations evacuated 30 nonessential personnel on the only passenger flight to leave Kabul on Saturday, and the diplomatic corps met to draft emergency plans for mass evacuation if fundamentalist rebels, reportedly advancing on the capital from the south, enter the city and street fighting breaks out.

“This is the quite critical moment,” said businessman V. D. Sehi. “Everyone is afraid the worst is coming. Everyone is afraid of most everything.”

Trying to sound a note of reassurance, Wakil played down the threat of an assault on Kabul by extremist rebel leaders who have been left out of the ruling coalition.

Acting as spokesman for coalition leaders who are struggling to avoid a power vacuum and anarchy, Wakil issued an appeal to fundamentalist rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who left the Pakistani border town of Peshawar on Saturday to join his fighters in Logar province, just south of Kabul.

Wakil urged Hekmatyar to talk rather than fight. And, on a note of bravado, he vowed that any attempt by Hekmatyar’s forces to invade the capital would be met with “a befitting and resolute blow.”

Wakil spoke soon after returning from his talks with Masoud, and he insisted that the governing coalition is still “urgently and sincerely” backing an effort by U.N. special envoy Benon Sevan to put together a broad-based, compromise ruling council to take interim power in Kabul.

“Both sides (the regime and Masoud) were fully convinced that these contacts will in no way harm the five-step U.N. peace plan of Secretary General (Boutros Boutros-Ghali),” Wakil said of his extraordinary meeting. “On the contrary, it would strengthen the process.”

It was the first known direct contact between a hard-liner of the former Najibullah regime and a member of the Islamic moujahedeen rebel leadership that fought against that regime for 13 years.

“We do not see any obstacle in the way of the U.N. peace process,” Wakil said. “Now it is high time for all our moujahedeen brothers to adopt a calm and sympathetic position. In short, the ball is in the court of our moujahedeen brothers.”

But the foreign minister later added, “My meeting with the honorable Ahmed Shah Masoud indicates the beginning of the inter-Afghan dialogue.” And several diplomatic analysts in Kabul said that intense negotiations under way between coalition regime leaders and rebel commanders throughout the country are fast eclipsing the United Nations’ exhaustive, years-long effort to broker a lasting peace in Afghanistan after a war that has left more than 1 million dead and 5 million in exile.

“What happened during the meeting is simple: Wakil gave Masoud a green light to move in, and suddenly his moujahedeen troops started moving into armed positions in the city,” said one European Afghan expert in the capital. “It’s a typical Afghan story. They kill each other, then they kiss each other. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the United Nations. The U.N., I think, is all but finished here.”

Further impeding the U.N. effort was a hardening impasse over the fate of Najibullah, who has been holed up in a U.N. compound since early Thursday, when his own rebellious troops prevented his boarding a plane to fly into exile.

U.N. envoy Sevan, who has been meeting regularly with Wakil and other coalition leaders, has spent most of his time bargaining for Najibullah’s safe departure, which is a key requirement of the five-point U.N. peace plan.

Sevan, whose U.N. aircraft remains at the Kabul airport, reportedly has promised the coalition that he will not attempt to sneak the fallen strongman out of the country. But he has been unable to secure permission, let alone guarantees, for Najibullah’s safe passage into exile.

“Even if he gets permission for Najib to leave, Benon is very concerned about what will happen on the way to the airport,” said one regime source close to the negotiations. “The problem is, even if they say, ‘We agree to set him free,’ who could promise he’ll get out safely?”

The biggest threat to an orderly transfer of power from the present shaky coalition to a U.N.-sponsored interim council is the ethnic divisions that are becoming more explosive by the day.

The ruling coalition is predominantly Tajik, a large ethnic majority in Kabul but a minority overall in a nation traditionally ruled by the majority Pushtuns. Although several factions of the coalition are urgently seeking to draw in Pushtun politicians, army generals and even Pushtun rebel commanders, traditional ethnic divisions that have triggered conflict throughout Afghan history already are on the verge of erupting into battle.

Hekmatyar, the fundamentalist leader commanding rebel forces just south of Kabul, is an ethnic Pushtun, and he has been vigorously negotiating alliances for several months--alliances similar to the Tajik coalition that has taken power here in the capital and another that has been ruling peacefully and effectively in the nation’s 11 northern provinces after forming a base in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

“What we’re talking about here is really all-out civil war between north and south,” said one expert with an international agency in the capital.

The only formula to avert ethnic civil war from breaking out in Kabul now, he insisted, is the almost universal fear in the capital of Hekmatyar’s firebrand fundamentalism and his forces’ record for brutality.