Despite Aid, U.S. Holds Little Sway Over Rebels : Afghanistan: Washington says influence ended with arms shipments. Now officials fear radicals will win.

For more than a decade, the U.S. government sent hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid--mostly bombs, guns, bullets and other weaponry--to assorted Afghan resistance groups. Now, as its former clients prepare to take power in Kabul, the Bush Administration can do little more than watch nervously from the sidelines.

U.S. officials admit that Washington lost most of its leverage over the Afghan moujahedeen groups when the United States and Russia jointly stopped arming opposing sides in the Afghan civil war last Jan. 1 in a futile attempt to reduce the level of violence.

With the guerrillas poised to finish off the Soviet-installed government, this should be a happy time for U.S. strategists, who have been striving for such an outcome since Soviet tanks poured into Afghanistan in 1979. But, officials now admit, there is no certainty that the successor government will be to Washington’s liking.

A State Department official said that the United States wants to see a “pluralistic” government, picked by all of the Afghan factions, replace ousted President Najibullah’s regime. But pluralism and democracy are not traditional Afghan traits. And there is very little that will hold the resistance groups together once the Marxist government is gone.

“In our view, all sides should work closely with the United Nations secretary general’s special representative, who is in a unique position to assist in resolving the conflict,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday. “We condemn inflammatory statements and calls for military action. Such actions increase the danger of a resumed conflict, which is against the interest of all Afghans.”

Boucher declined to identify publicly the groups he is accusing of trying to inflame the situation. But other officials said that he referred to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a hard-line Islamic fundamentalist who has ruled out a negotiated solution and has vowed to use military force to complete the rout of the collapsing government. These officials said that Washington would prefer a more moderate faction of guerrillas led by Ahmed Shah Masoud, a longtime rival of Hekmatyar.

For most of the Afghan civil war, Washington bankrolled both Masoud and Hekmatyar. The objective was to oust Najibullah and, in the process, give the Soviet Union a bloody nose. And Washington did not differentiate among the disparate resistance groups.

From a global standpoint, the policy was an unabashed success. The Soviet government’s inability to cope with the moujahedeen played an important role in the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union.

But now Afghanistan faces the real danger of governmental chaos, a situation that could destabilize much of Central Asia, including the former Soviet republics that Washington and Moscow hope to keep out of the hands of Islamic radicals. Hekmatyar now personifies Washington’s worst nightmare.

“Hekmatyar is a nut, an extremist and a very violent man,” said Robert Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. “He was built up by the Pakistanis. Unfortunately, our government went along with the Pakistanis. We were supplying the money and the weapons, but they (Pakistani officials) were making the policy.

“You can blame both the Pakistanis and the Americans for having built up Hekmatyar and failing to bring him down long before this,” added Neumann, now director of Middle East studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But there isn’t anything that can be done now.”

Referring to the State Department’s frequent appeals for restraint, Neumann said: “This thing of urging people to be nice and peaceful always makes me raise my eyebrows in despair. This is what governments say when they don’t know what else to say.”

Boucher insisted that the United States will be able to make its views known, even though it has stopped sending weapons to the Afghan factions. He said that the Administration is providing the humanitarian assistance that the next Afghan government will need if it hopes to heal the wounds of war.

But humanitarian aid will not provide much leverage in dealing with the battle-hardened rebels.

The U.S. government has never publicly revealed the size of its military support for the moujahedeen, but the aid is generally believed to have totaled about $250 million a year.