Weary Afghan Opponents Reunite in Zeal for Peace : Conflict: There are scenes of camaraderie as soldiers and Islamic rebels hope for end of the 13-year war.

The two regiment commanders sat just a few miles from each other this week, separately taking stock of the war that so devastated their lives and their nation--and of the strange new peace that is emerging throughout the ravaged land.

One had fought for Islam, the other for his bread. One wore a long beard, the symbol of the moujahedeen holy warriors, the other a mustache, like that of the fallen dictator who had sent him into battle. One had lost three brothers, the other had lost two. One had spent the past three years in prison, 80 men to a cell, the other in a prison of another sort, a Communist army that had long since lost its will to fight.

On Monday, as their armies were joining forces in cities, towns and villages throughout the country over bread and tea and a common zeal for peace, the two commanders in this strategic town east of Kabul gave living testimony to the strangest--and perhaps the last--phase of Afghanistan’s 13-year Cold War conflict: the Afghans themselves beginning to reunite in the nation’s most critical hour.

Throughout a landscape flattened by bombing runs, shredded by rocket fire, starved through years-long sieges and robbed of more than a million sons, there were jokes and gibes and heartening scenes of newfound camaraderie between soldiers no longer interested in the fight.

“Ah, I see you’re growing a beard now. So we have won?” a smiling Muslim guerrilla told an unshaven Afghan army soldier in one of the many emerging coalition forces outside Kabul. Elsewhere, a regime militiaman walking with moujahedeen fighters put down his government-issued submachine gun, reached into his pocket and, winking to his new friends, produced an ID card from one of the Muslim rebel parties. “Yesterday, government,” he said. “Today, moujahedeen. “

And here in the town of Pol-i-Charki, in the separate telling of their own lives, the two commanders brought to life the rare peace process that is sweeping this mysterious land. As they sat in their individual camps, awaiting the order to embrace, their words gave a human face to a conflict that has killed nearly 2 million people, disabled 2 million more and driven 5 million others into exile.

Zabiullah, the guerrilla, had paid perhaps the biggest price: He was captured and imprisoned while fighting in the mountains alongside a legendary rebel commander, Ahmed Shah Masoud, who has now massed a huge coalition force just outside the capital and, some say, has the power to change the face of the nation.

At 29, Zabiullah was released from prison Sunday. He was among hundreds of moujahedeen commanders freed from the nation’s most dreaded prison, located in Pol-i-Charki, as part of a general amnesty declared by the generals and politicians who ousted President Najibullah last week.

“Yes, I feel tired sometimes,” the wiry and bearded guerrilla said on his first day of freedom in three years. “But if peace comes to Afghanistan, I won’t feel tired anymore.

“Of course, I will continue to serve the moujahedeen. This is my job. I am commander. But my orders now are to sit and wait for the peace. What we want is to join hands with our brothers in the army. And that time, I think, is very soon.”

As he sat on a floor of carpets and pillows in his family’s modest house of mud and stone just a mile or so from the prison that had been his home, Zabiullah explained that he joined the guerrilla movement in 1978, after the Soviet-backed Communist revolution that overthrew the Afghan monarchy and imposed authoritarian rule on a Muslim nation of fiercely independent tribes. For years, he walked the mountains of the north, commanding a guerrilla regiment of 150 holy warriors, until he was captured in 1989 in a clash with a regular army regiment--one much like that of Capt. Mohammed Usman.

Capt. Usman still hasn’t met Commander Zabiullah or the other guerrillas who--still underground for now--abound within the mud walls of Pol-i-Charki village, men who would emerge and join a combined military force as part of an interim moujahedeen government whose composition is now being debated in Kabul.

There are deep and gnawing doubts about such a peaceful accord in the capital. The guerrillas remain deeply divided between Islamic moderates and extremists. Regime hard-liners, fearing for their lives, are struggling to hold onto bits of power.

But in his shabby command bunker near the banks of the rushing Kabul River well outside the city, the army captain, at least, was certain that the time of peace is at hand.

“We expect the moujahedeen to come along at any moment,” he said, shivering inside the headquarters of his 583rd Regiment, which has guarded the eastern approach road to Kabul from inside the spectacular Sarobi Gorge. “They’ll come to look the place over. They won’t try to take our weapons. And we won’t take theirs. Before, you see, we were fighting for the government. Now, we’re with anybody who wants to be friends.”

Analysts say that Afghanistan is at a crossroads and that its future will almost certainly bring either a moujahedeen- led government to power or an all-out civil war between ethnic Pushtuns in the south and non-Pushtuns in the north. But Capt. Usman, who was drafted into the Soviet-trained army of Afghan Communists seven years ago, didn’t want to talk much about ideology or politics.

“I think we’re going in the direction of peace,” was all he wished to say on the subject. “If the problem between north and south is solved, then the rest of these problems also will be solved.”

When asked why for years he had kept fighting a war that killed so many of his brothers and friends and forced him to kill those of fellow Afghans like Commander Zabiullah, Usman picked up a chunk of bread from the battered little table in his tiny bunker.

“The reason is just to get enough of this to feed our families,” he said. “But now, there is no reason left to fight.”

And as he continued, one began to discern the real motivation behind the fast-moving process of reconciliation between the two armies.

“We’re tired of war now. So we’re asking each other, and we are asking our moujahedeen brothers: ‘What are we fighting for? What is the point?’ ”

The army’s meager resources were reflected in the captain’s small command bunker, a freezing shack fashioned out of scrap wood from empty ammunition boxes on a mountainside overlooking the strategic Jalalabad highway.

“But the hardest thing about this war was brother fighting brother,” the captain went on. “Now, there is only one reason to fight: for peace. When we come to peace, the victory is Afghanistan’s. Both sides are Afghan, and the victory is a common one.”

There are other reasons, too, Usman said, for his confidence that the long-warring forces will now unite--reasons deep within his nation’s culture.

“It’s in the Afghan nature. Maybe we’ll fight for 100 years, but if one side extends the hand of friendship, the other accepts it,” he said.

He was dismissive about the communist ideology, which never seemed to take hold among mid-level regime officers like the captain despite intensive political indoctrination and a decade of battle alongside a huge Soviet occupation army. “I am a Muslim,” Usman said simply. “Islam is the most important factor.”

That is why, he concluded, it is not so strange for him now to serve in an Islamic army. In fact, he would be happy to join, he said. But, after seven years of fighting as a battle-hardened professional soldier, the captain quickly added that he will probably retire when the war is over, leaving such jobs to more committed men like Commander Zabiullah.

“Maybe I’ll become a driver, anything that lets me move around, anything that lets me be free,” he said before escorting his guests back down the mountainside to the muddy, surging river.

Back toward Kabul, inside the mud-walled village of Pol-i-Charki, Commander Zabiullah, who spent his entire prison term reading religious books and praying to Allah, confirmed both Capt. Usman’s predictions and his optimism.

“Last night, after I left the prison, I met with the leaders of Commander Ahmed Shah Masoud in our village,” said Zabiullah, whose town, like most throughout the rugged Afghan countryside, has been a moujahedeen stronghold throughout their guerrilla war.

“Their instructions were to stay here at home for now, and when I am needed, I will be called.”

Zabiullah said he expects this week’s intensive negotiations between Masoud’s growing rebel alliance and the last vestiges of Najibullah’s regime to produce an Islamic government of moujahedeen commanders and political leaders to govern a new but moderate nation of Islam.

“When that happens, yes, yes, of course, I will serve in the new national army,” Zabiullah said. And perhaps, only then, will the commander pick up the normal life he suspended when the war began.

“I have no children. No wife,” he said. “I had vowed not to marry until peace came to Afghanistan. And now, God willing, I think that time is very soon.”

TRANSITION APPROVED: Acting president says regime will cede power to rebels. A6