Rebels Taking Afghanistan Piece by Piece

Talib the guerrilla leader found a mountainside Afghan army command bunker here Thursday. So he took it--tanks, ammo and all--without firing a single shot. He also got some broken bedsprings, a few mattresses, a sack of rice or two, a lot of blankets and a teapot.

Talib thanked the soldiers, who shook his hand as they “surrendered” the bunker and left on long journeys for home. Within hours, the rebel commander had put aside his automatic rifle for pen and notebook and was recording each item as it was loaded onto his truck.

Just down the road, a group of local guerrilla commanders had won a far bigger prize--literally, the power of Kabul.

It was the dam and the three hydroelectric power plants that provide all the electricity to the Afghan capital.

The commanders formed a shura, or Muslim council, and divided up the complex into a patchwork, with each of the more than 200 commanders from six major moujahedeen parties now the proud owner of his own small chunk of Kabul’s only power source.

Then, they divvied up the rest of the spoils: dozens of Soviet-made tanks, antiaircraft guns, artillery pieces, rocket launchers, ammunition, trucks, jeeps and buildings.

This is how the Afghan rebels, in just a few short days, have taken almost all of Afghanistan, literally piece by piece.

In reality, the war is over in the Afghan countryside. The moujahedeen , or Muslim holy warriors, have won. The guerrillas who have battled for more than 13 years to reclaim their nation from a succession of pro-Moscow socialist and Communist regimes have already taken control of almost every square inch of the regime’s final strongholds in the country, subdividing it the Afghan way into a checkerboard of new, Islamic ownership.

All that remains now is Kabul itself, where the dying government is struggling to hand over power without bloodshed. In fact, shuras of various rebel factions, some in coalition with former regime militiamen, now control every major entrance to the capital.

On Thursday, the dramatic military standoff over Kabul continued, pitting holdout rebel fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar--who has threatened to take the city by force--against a rainbow coalition of unified moujahedeen commanders, defecting regime militiamen and army generals.

And the threat of an urban guerrilla assault on Kabul, the nation’s biggest prize, remained.

But during a two-day tour by a Times reporter through newly liberated sections of the Afghan countryside this week, it was clear that the moujahedeen now have almost total control over the entire nation, down to the last mountain pass and mile of highway.

After last week’s fall of President Najibullah touched off a landslide collapse of his government in the last key provincial capitals and garrisons across the country, emergency ruling coalitions began forming that included relatively moderate rebels and disaffected government officials.

But that has all changed, and those coalitions have quickly evolved into moujahedeen shuras, councils of newly unified rebel parties. The shuras are headed by guerrilla commanders, tribal elders and, only occasionally, by representatives of the former regime who now take all their orders from the guerrillas.

In just the past two days, the regime’s remaining conscript officers and soldiers have begun leaving for home, abandoning hundreds of isolated command posts and military bases, which are now the property of a dizzying array of moujahedeen parties and subgroups and the former regime troops who have chosen to join them.

At a strategic sluice in the Kabul River on Thursday, Abjad Gul and Nabi Gul reflected the process in microcosm. Despite their names, the two men are not related. In fact, they fought against each other for years. But now, both young men said, they see themselves as brothers.

Abjad, a 20-year-old, weather-beaten private, was a soldier for 2 1/2 years, he said. Suddenly, on Thursday, there was no one left to order him to fight. So he waved goodby to his new companion, guerrilla commander Nabi. “I’m going home now,” Abjad said, “back to my village. Maybe I will farm. Whatever work there is, I will do.”

Nabi, who controls this important channel now, says he will remain here at least until “a Muslim king is in Kabul.” Then perhaps he, too, will go home.

There was no more dramatic example of how the moujahedeen are taking over the war-ravaged landscape--or of the possible shape of an Islamic government in Kabul--than the Sarobi Dam and hydroelectric complex, controlled for just two days by a regime-rebel coalition until it was firmly taken over by the moujahedeen council.

First, it demonstrated the power vacuum left by Najibullah’s fall.

Gen. Gurang, the regional military commander in Sarobi, stayed just long enough to supervise the turnover of power to the council before he and the last of his officers left for Kabul.

The distribution of Kabul’s only source of electric power also reflected the traditional Afghan reverence for possessions, particularly among the large Pushtun community that predominates in the region. In the Pushtun Wali, the code of conduct laid down by the Afghans’ nomadic forefathers, there is an expression for the most important things in life: zar, zan, zamin --gold, women and land.

There is also a historic dimension to the way the rebels are carving up places such as Sarobi and the ancient road that leads from there to Kabul.

From ancient times, when Afghanistan was a crossroads on the Silk Road trade route, ownership of the highway has meant the power to levy tolls--an easy source of income from traders moving between the wealthier empires of China and Persia. So ownership of even a mile or so of bomb-cratered roadway is a matter of prestige and prosperity even today, and the moujahedeen have already begun taxing passing travelers.

Here at the captured hydroelectric complex of Sarobi, where a flip of a switch could plunge the capital and its 1.5 million people into darkness, control is in the hands of a largely illiterate rebel force that is expert at war but little else. Nevertheless, the dam and the power plants are functioning normally, mostly because the regime’s technical staff has remained hard at work.

Among the workers are dedicated technicians like Mohammed Hassan Wardak, who feels far more strongly about his dam and his power plants than he does about who claims to own them.

Wardak has worked here since 1960, when he joined Russian advisers in the seven-year project to build the dam complex. And in explaining why he has continued to work here even after the moujahedeen took control, the 54-year-old control-room foreman said much about how an Islamic-based moujahedeen government could survive in Kabul.

“I have worked here under Zahir, Daoud, Taraki, Amin, Karmal, Najib and now the moujahedeen, “ Wardak said, naming each of the strongmen of Kabul who have disappeared, one by one, through coups, assassinations and exile during his tenure at the dam. “What’s the difference? Nothing. Power is power, and the people of Kabul need electricity.”

“The moujahedeen are Afghans, and the power plants belong to Afghanistan. If they wanted to wreck the plants, they could have done it with one rocket any time. And not once in 13 years did they harm this plant.

“No, we have no plans to move. All our families are here. Our homes are in Sarobi. And as long as this power plant is here and I’m alive, I’ll keep working here.”