From the archives: ‘Hired Guns’ Help Afghan Regime Maintain Power

HERAT, Afghanistan -- At 13, Abdul Rasik has already killed his first man.

He cannot even grow a beard, but the government of Afghan President Najibullah has entrusted him with an AK-47 assault rifle--and the responsibility of helping to protect this key city on Afghanistan’s western flank, just a few dozen miles from both the Iranian and Soviet borders.

But Rasik doesn’t really know what he is fighting for. He has never been to school. He has never even been to the Afghan capital of Kabul. And he knows little about the man who armed him or his policies.

Rasik and the other 250 boys in his “kiddie militia” answer only to their local commander, just like the tens of thousands of other tribal militiamen Najibullah has put on salary as “hired guns” in this ancient city and in other key regions throughout war-torn Afghanistan.

Yet it is largely through such civilian militias, many of them made up of former moujahedeen rebels, that Najibullah and his beleaguered Soviet-backed regime have desperately clung to power for the last seven months, since the Feb. 15 Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

And it is through such militias, which are now so heavily armed and well paid that their arsenal includes tanks and artillery, that Najibullah claims to be regaining control of the Afghan countryside, where the rebels have long dominated.

But it remains unclear just who is controlling whom.

In Herat, the militias keep a semblance of order by day but later explode in a nightly display of prime-time violence, filling the evening air with a cacophony of rocket, grenade, mortar and machine-gun fire as they clash with each other along ancient feudal and clan lines until bedtime.

And in Kabul, the government last week was powerless either to stop or to punish a visiting tribal commander from the province of Faryab, which borders the Soviet Union, after he attacked and terrorized three visiting foreign journalists inside a government hotel for more than three hours, during which the police and army were too frightened to intervene.

In short, half a year after the last of the Red Army left Afghanistan, ending a decade of intervention, the Afghan war is rapidly degenerating into loosely controlled chaos--a factional, Lebanon-style internal conflict in which ancient tribal and clan feuds have replaced the original ideological clash between communism and fundamentalist Islam.

“Afghanistan just went back 50 years before the so-called Communist revolution ever happened,” one European diplomat in Kabul said, referring to the decade-old uprising that brought Najibullah’s ruling People’s Democratic Party to power.

“Najib has survived mostly because he has abandoned most of the principles of that revolution and returned to the old tribal ways. Just one problem: Now, they’ve all got tanks.”

Risky Future Foreseen

Although most of Najibullah’s advisers reject the Lebanon analogy, most conceded during a week of interviews with The Times that the government’s policy of arming the militia is sowing the seeds of potential disaster.

“I agree that the mere presence of all these weapons is very dangerous for our future,” said Suleiman Leik, minister for tribal affairs in Najibullah’s Cabinet. Leik is a hard-line Marxist who was so committed to the original revolution that he wrote the country’s Communist-inspired national anthem. “Obviously there are some feuds, some points of contradiction. And before they were solved with fists. Now they will solve them with machine guns and tanks.

“It is certainly one of the challenges that we must overcome in the future.”

In many ways, war-torn Herat, a patchwork of often-competing yet heavily armed private armies such as the “kiddie militia” of teen-ager Rasik, is a stage for the darker side of that future Afghanistan.

The city’s Bikr Abad neighborhood is a dramatic backdrop. More than 14,000 homes were destroyed there by Soviet bombers in 1980 when Moscow used its military power to put down Herat’s popular uprising against the Soviet invasion in 1979.

High Cost of Rebuilding

“Roughly, we estimate it will cost $2.5 billion to reconstruct the city and the province,” said Herat’s governor, Fazul Haq Khalikyar, who also serves as a minister in Najibullah’s Cabinet.

But very little of the tens of millions of dollars worth of bilateral aid that the Soviet Union has poured into Herat province has been used for reconstruction.

The city streets are pitted with gaping potholes from 10 harsh winters and endless tank traffic. The bullet-pocked markets are filled with food, but at almost unaffordable prices. Few children attend the city’s damaged schools. And the only money spent on physical reconstruction has gone into Herat’s famous, 1,500-year-old Persian-style mosque, an attempt by Najibullah to regain the loyalties of the U.S.-backed moujahedeen who continue their guerrilla war against his government.

“This is more important than roads,” conceded one of the governor’s aides.

Even the local officials said that most of the Soviet aid to Herat has been spent on guns and food, which, in turn, have been used by the government to recruit tribal armies, buy clan loyalties and raise revenue to pay government salaries.

‘Veneer’ of Control

“In Herat, you can see how Najibullah’s government is hanging on,” said a foreign observer in Kabul. “Food and guns buy support, but it is part-time support. And his control is just a veneer.

“Just beneath the surface, it is a mini-Beirut, and if the Americans had the money and logistics to offer more, these tribal militias and clans would join the moujahedeen tomorrow.”

The tribal commander who went berserk Tuesday night in the state-owned Kabul Hotel was a stark illustration of the government’s limited control over the vast “civilian army” Najibullah has attempted to assemble.

In addition, the incident reinforced the fears of independent analysts that, despite a continuing state of national emergency, the government now has only a marginal ability to provide effective security in the Afghan capital, which most Western embassies left within weeks of the Soviet pullout.

But the attack by the drunken commander also revealed much about the complexities of Afghanistan’s militarist tribal culture, which has mystified both the Soviet Union and the moujahedeen’s American benefactors throughout the war. Those traditions now appear to have overpowered even the 1978 Marxist revolution that sparked Afghanistan’s war.

No Effective Force

When Habibullah Beg attacked the three foreign journalists--among them The Times’ correspondent--there was no force in Kabul willing or able to stop him.

Beg, a khan, or major tribal chief, later explained that he controls a heavily armed tribal army of 3,500 in Faryab province. To his men, he is not a commander but a ruler. When he sided with the moujahedeen for much of the war, they followed. And when Beg “turned coat” earlier this year with the promise of massive supplies of arms and ammunition from the government, his men again blindly followed.

On Tuesday, Beg and a dozen of his lieutenants checked into the Kabul Hotel with machine guns and ammunition belts as the personal guests of President Najibullah, who had summoned all of his new tribal commanders from the northern regions to discuss preparations for the hard Afghan winter ahead.

But, that night, Beg, the great khan from the north, got hopelessly drunk.

“The man was in psychological shock,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman explained during a press conference the following day. “He has watched his two brothers and mother shot to death. That day, he saw a man who resembled his brother, and he lost his mind.

“He went to his room, started drinking very heavily, and, well, we are very sorry about what happened.”

Drunken Spree

Drunk and crazed, Beg slapped around one journalist, beat a second severely and chased both of them to the room of the third, where he broke down the door, stole everything in his path and continued to pursue the reporters for three hours through every corner of the hotel.

When the beatings began, the few guards at the hotel simply fled. The police, when informed that the khan was involved, delayed for several hours in responding to pleas for help. And, when they finally did come to the journalists’ rescue, they refused to file charges or even take down an official report on the attack.

Instead, the khan prepared a feast for the following night.

The government apologized profusely and appealed to the three journalists to attend the khan’s “ceremony of apology,” a feast “to free this tortured man from the sin he has committed against you.”

The journalists agreed, and, for nearly two hours, over slaughtered lamb and chickens, watched the khan again get hopelessly drunk while offering scores of apologies and the occasional insult. At one point, the khan mixed cheap American wine with German beer, chugged it down and chased it with another beer.

The government filmed the ceremony, complete with the khan’s handing over of gifts--an Afghan rug and box of candy. An aide then carried the khan to his room, where his doctor injected him with strong sedatives.

“You will be safe tonight,” the doctor told the journalists. “He’s out cold.”

At lunch the day after the feast of apology, with a full bottle of imported whiskey in front of him, the khan pointed toward the foreign journalists and asked the government official beside him, “What are those people still doing in my hotel?”