Last chance for Afghanistan?

THE FAILED Communist coup in Kabul last month caused an resistance. A year ago it looked as if the mujahedin had defeated the Soviets and their puppet regime. Now U.S. diplomats and policy-makers are openly wondering if this should be the last year of American support for the mujahedin. How did this happen? And does Washington have the will to remedy the part of the problem it caused? The coup, which had been scheduled for late March, was forced to begin two weeks prematurely. News of it had leaked to the KGB, who put Moscow's puppet in Kabul, Najib, on the alert. The coup's organizer, Defense Minister Shahnawaz Tanai, a hard-line Communist of the Khalq faction, in turn got word of the leak and, on a March 6, called out Khalq ground and air troops in a pre-emptive attack on Najib and his ruling Parcham faction. For two days troops and tanks of the two factions (which have no noticeable ideological differences) battled in the streets of Kabul. First, Yhalq jet pilots bombed the presidential palace, barely missing the Afghan dictator, then Soviet fighters launched counter-attacks from bases inside the USSR.

Kabul itself suffered significant damage; the civilian and military airports were ruined and the regime's air force damaged severely. It will take Najib months to reorganize his forces. Early on, General Tanai fled to Pakistan. Yet the real loser turned out to be Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Muslim mujahed leader.

HEKMATYAR, a longtime favorite of Pakistans late president Mohammad Zia ul-haq and of the military officers still running Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence agency (ISI), receives more money and weapons than his support within Afghanistan warrants. Hekmatyar's vision of a hard-line, one-party Pan-Ialamic state, combining at bare minimum Pakistan and Afghanistan, appealed to Pakistani authorities far more than it does to Afghans, who, while devout, are almost exclusively low-key, traditionalist Muslims as well as committed nationalists.

Indeed, Hekmatyar's radical ideology and taste for internecine blood-letting made him hugely unpopular in refugee camps and in liberated Afghanistan. Similarly, he is feared in Kabul, where Najib's propagandists have been concocting bogus stories of his fundamentalist student days-stories that have him, for example, splashing acid on the faces of unveiled Muslim schoolgirls.

As Hekmatyar's popularity plummeted in the months following the Soviet withdrawal, the ISI orchestrated a number of publicity stunts for him. After each of the half-dozen publicized coup attempts in Kabul, Hekmatyar was urged to take credit. This time it backfired.

According to intelligence officers in other mujahed parties, Pakistani authorities and mujahed commanders were approached weeks before the scheduled March coup attempt by General Tanai's agents and asked to join in. No mujahed group agreed, for the Khalq Communists have as brutal and doctrinaire a history as Najib's Parcham faction. Even so, less than eight hours into the coup Hekmatyar announced his solid support for General Tanai.

The immediate reaction of the legitimate resistance and the refugees was disgust. Afghan mullahs strewed handbills through the refugee camps, asking rhetorically if General Tanai was a secret Muslim, or if Hekmatyar was so power-hungry that he would ally himself with Communists worse than Najib.

Radio Kabul had a field day linking General Tanai's forces with Hekmatyar. Indeed, Kabul civilians might have rallied on Tanai's side had they not been convinced that by doing so they might have been giving power to Hekmatyar.

Almost a week later, Pakistani newspapers were still beating the drum for the coup, while General Tanai and Hekmatyar party members were hustled across the border into Afghanistan's Logar Province for another staged meeting with the foreign press. But the coup was over.

Whereupon determined ISI officers tried another tack: in mid March, they contacted mujahed commanders from Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province, urging a combined attack on Jalalabad; the commanders refused for three reasons. First, under similar coercion from Pakistan last year, they went insufficiently armed into a siege of Jalalabad and it proved a debacle. Second, under no circumstances, they said, would they fight for Hekmatyar and Tanai. Finally, they had no intention of capturing a city only to hand it over to an entity as vacillating and incompetent as the so-called Afghan Interim Government-a creation of Pakistan.

American diplomats in Islamabad and Peshawar, speaking privately, are depressed and frustrated by the deadlock. A minority of them, sensing Capitol Hill's mounting impatience, seem willing to declare victory and wash their hands of Afghanistan altogether.

There are good reasons for frustration. Hekmatyar's supporters in the mid-level, decision-making portions of ISI are immune to reorganization: Benazir Bhutto's fledgling Pakistani government is too weak to pass a single bill, much less restructure a branch of the army.

Moreover, the resistance has clearly outgrown the seven mujahed parties thrust upon it by Pakistan a decade ago as a conduit for arms. The seven now agree on nothing but retaining power in Peshawar. The Afghan Interim Government's election program, slated for later this year, is seen as unworkable and ludicrously self-serving. What many Afghans want-a temporary government made up of real mujahed commanders inside Afghanistan seems to be a good idea that no one knows how to achieve. ELL," groaned one of the diplomats, "at least we achieved our objective and blackened Moscow's eye." Not exactly.

As former President Richard Nixon wrote in his Los Angeles Times column of February 11, cutting our support now would mean we had lost and the Soviets had won.

In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up their puppet government in Kabul. If that government remains, then Moscow has got what it wanted: a puppet regime, the use of Afghan airfields giving Soviet fighters access to the Straits of Hormuz, and an outpost from which to manipulate Pakistan and Iran. More broadly, our giving up would tell every other liberation movement that America uses freedom-fighters as cannon fodder.

Mr. Nixon's sensible answer is, first, increase weapons for the majahedin so that we can bargain from a position of strength. And the U.S. must ensure that weapons get to the mujahedin who are representative of Afghanistan, not of Pakistan.

Second, from that position of strength, negotiate with Moscow for the removal of Najib's regime, to be replaced by a real and representative interim government. A practical list could include former Afghan monarch Zahir Shah, leading tribal chiefs, oldline statesmen still living in Afghanistan, and cabinet-level resistance figures capable of commanding respect.

Such a proposal might appeal to the Soviets once they saw they were faced with a U.S. Administration committed to beefing up arm shipments to Afghanistan. Our only other alternative-refusing to recognize our role in creating the mujahedin's political problems, and just skulking away would waste a strategic opportunity, as well as $2 billion and more than a million Afghan lives.