Rebels Struggle to Rule a Divided Kabul : Afghanistan: The forces of an Islamic holy war may have conquered the capital. But they are finding that ruling as a unified group is proving difficult.

Guerrilla commander Haidar Basir is the proud new owner of more than 50 long-range Scud missiles, identical to the Soviet-built weapons that Iraq fired into Israel last year.

Basir claimed the missiles, along with tons of rocket fuel, on behalf of his pro-Iranian party when he and his men seized the fallen Afghan regime’s strategic missile-launching facility in Kabul during the guerrillas’ race to claim the capital April 25.

But Basir hasn’t seen his new missiles yet. They’re locked inside five fortified bunkers, and the commander hasn’t found anyone who knows how to open them, let alone launch them.

Things are a bit further along at the national telecommunications building. Guerrilla commander Anwar Khan’s men own that one now, the tallest building in Kabul. They seized it the same morning on behalf of their pro-Saudi party and its leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

But Khan’s 30-man guerrilla occupation force knew nothing about their new possession, so all 22,000 of Kabul’s telephones were out for the past five days.

It wasn’t until Allah Mohammed, a 17-year veteran of the state-run phone company, and half his staff showed up for the first time to work Saturday that Kabul’s nearly 2 million people slowly started talking to each other again.

Then, of course, there’s the city’s central grain silo, the prime source of Kabul’s bread, which is now controlled by another pro-Iranian group and only now starting to fill up again. There’s the airport, Kabul’s only reliable link to the outside world, which is controlled by the Jauzjan, a militia of the former regime, and which has been closed to all civilian traffic. And there’s the Ministry of Power, which is controlled by the forces of rebel leader Ahmed Shah Masoud, who could not quite manage to restore power to the city that Masoud was so instrumental in capturing.

In short, Kabul may well have been conquered by the forces of an Islamic holy war--the singular goal of the divided moujahedeen’s 13-year guerrilla war against a succession of Soviet-style regimes--but its power to rule as a unified group is proving as difficult in peace as it was during the war.

At the moment, Afghanistan has no effective government, no constitution, no national flag and no official military chain of command. And the country is an ethnically and tribally diverse nation that has been chopped into bits by dozens of armed and self-directed political groups.

What the country does have is a president, the moderate Islamic scholar Sibghatullah Mojaddidi, who has the backing of some of the armed guerrilla factions, particularly Masoud’s. There also is an emerging interim ruling council, which managed to bring its membership up to 26 on the weekend. Finally, there is, among all but one of the groups, a shared and heartfelt desire for peace after a war that has left nearly 2 million dead.

But their quest to bring law, order and a semblance of government to a traditionally autonomous and fiercely independent nation--where Mojaddidi remains under threat from forces both within and outside his coalition council--is still fraught with dangers so powerful they could deepen and prolong Afghanistan’s war for years, even decades.

As he sat at one end of a 20-foot-long conference table in Kabul’s Foreign Ministry building recently, Hamid Karzai, the president’s chief political aide, placed his hand on the table’s edge.

“Now, we are here,” he said. Then, gazing at the far end of the table, he added, “That’s where we need to be.”

The most immediate and critical challenges are the twin threats from the country’s two political extremes: the fierce militiamen from the former regime, who joined Masoud in driving out President Najibullah and dismembering his authoritarian government from within, and the well-armed and strategically positioned fundamentalist forces of guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was the prime target of Masoud’s three-day battle for control of Kabul.

To defeat the extremist moujahedeen, or holy warriors, loyal to Hekmatyar and reclaim the strongholds that their Hezb-i-Islami party had occupied in the capital, Masoud needed the help of the militiamen, particularly the mercenaries of the Jauzjan, ethnic Uzbeks loyal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostam.

As a result, the Jauzjanis control such key installations as Kabul’s airport--important bargaining chips for a delegation that Gen. Dostam sent to meet with Mojaddidi and demand Uzbek representation in the ruling council.

The problem: The Jauzjanis were paid well and fought mercilessly for Najibullah against all Muslim rebel groups that are now lined up in the armed coalition behind Mojaddidi, including Masoud’s Jamaat-i-Islami forces. The rebels are united in their hatred for the militias. And, each day that the militiamen remain on Kabul’s streets, amid increasing reports of looting and murder, the coalition behind Mojaddidi risks splitting further and reigniting urban warfare between the moujahedeen and the militias.

With the city still carved up into a patchwork of armed groups whose loyalties are far from certain, such a confrontation would have devastating results.

The Ittihad forces of rebel leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who are in control of the nation’s telecommunications and its Education Ministry complex, are Sunni Muslim fundamentalists of the Wahhabi sect who have joined with Hekmatyar in past battles. So, too, have the Shiite Muslim forces of the Wahdat and Haraqat parties, which represent the ethnic group that makes up at least 40% of Kabul’s population and which control key military facilities, the eastern and western approach roads and many strategic buildings within the city.

“If Mojaddidi and Masoud cannot satisfy the demands of all these groups, and diversify representation on the ruling council, last week’s battle for Kabul will look like a picnic at the playground,” one European diplomat said.

“The key to the solution is getting Dostam’s Jauzjanis off the streets, satisfying the demands of the Shiites and getting all parties to leave their positions of power to a unified paramilitary force.”

It is with just that goal in mind that Mojaddidi and Masoud are trying to form a 2,000-man force similar to France’s gendarmerie, to which each party--except Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami and Gen. Dostam’s Jauzjanis--would contribute 200 men. The new force would take over all key facilities in the capital and function as an integrated, armed police force directly under Masoud’s command.

Acknowledging the plan, Hamid Karzai said, “Right now, what is on the table is the security of the city, as well as the provision of services for the people--health, food, water, power.”

Although Karzai did not comment on the city’s explosive patchwork of competing armed groups, he stressed that to accomplish the power transfer to an effective ruling council, “You cannot allow states within the state.”

Karzai also confirmed Mojaddidi’s recent statements that there is still no room in the coalition for Hekmatyar, whose large armored force of tanks and men just to the southwest has continued to rocket the capital and on Saturday blocked 70 truckloads of vitally needed food aid sent to Kabul from Pakistan.

“There will be a security threat whether he is in here or outside of here,” Karzai said.

On Monday, scores of rockets fired by Hekmatyar’s forces exploded in Kabul, killing at least a dozen people, and troops loyal to the new coalition blasted Hekmatyar’s positions in the hills south of the city.

Meanwhile, three senior rebel leaders, including Afghanistan’s next president, arrived in the capital and were greeted by Mojaddidi. Burhanuddin Rabbani--who, under a leadership formula worked out among the guerrilla factions last month, is due to take over from Mojaddidi in two months--and the other leaders arrived in a large convoy from their base across the Pakistani border in the city of Peshawar.

Complicating the search for a workable government, several commanders in the liberated southern provinces of the country indicated they would not support the Kabul coalition unless Hekmatyar’s ethnic Pushtun representatives are included in what stands as a largely northern Tajik and Uzbek ruling council.

It is against this backdrop of potential civil war that Masoud and Mojaddidi are trying to enlist the aid of former regime generals and bureaucrats to restore even minimal services to the capital, where scores have been killed in the cross-fire and people have lived without water, power, fuel and telephones for a week.

On that front, at least, there has been some progress. On the fourth floor of the telecommunications headquarters, for example, Mohammed and his staff were hard at work over the weekend restoring Kabul’s telephone exchanges.

By the end of the day Saturday, all but one neighborhood and 5,000 phones were back on line, and Mohammed said he looked forward to better times.

“About 80% of the male employees and 20% of the women have come to work today,” he said, confirming a pattern throughout the socialist-trained bureaucracy now fearful of the impact of Islamic law on women.

But, in a nation where a failed experiment in Soviet-style socialism has left behind a broken economy, a tattered bureaucracy and a near-empty national treasury, just re-creating what was there before Kabul became an urban war zone is hardly enough to make the new Islamic government succeed. Outside aid is desperately needed throughout the war-ravaged Afghan countryside, and already the regional race is on to secure new alliances with the geographically strategic nation.

Sensing the needs of its new Muslim neighbor to the west, Pakistan, which was the moujahedeen’s staunchest international backer throughout the war, sent its prime minister to Kabul and pledged aid.