Red Flag over a Mountain Cauldron

Moscow's new client presents it with problems as well as opportunities

Making his first trip out of his isolated, primitive country since he seized power in a military coup seven months ago, Afghanistan's leftist President Noor Mohammed Taraki naturally headed for Moscow, which was the first foreign capital that recognized his regime. After a warm greeting from Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, Taraki, 61, happily signed a 20-year "treaty of friendship, good neighborliness and cooperation" that is sure to increase concern in the West (as well as in Peking) that Afghanistan has become a new base for Soviet adventurism, one that spells particular trouble for the country's already unstable neighbors, Pakistan and Iran.

Though the treaty is vaguer than the friendship pacts that the Soviets have signed in the past two months with Viet Nam and Ethiopia, it further confirms the fact that the softspoken, sometime journalist who heads Afghanistan's leftist Khalq (People's) Party "considers Moscow his friend, benefactor and protector," as a senior State Department official puts it. Indeed, the pro-Soviet tilt of the new rulers in Kabul, the Afghan capital, is already stirring some recriminations in Washington. U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, an ardent hawk on the subject of Soviet expansionism, growled to a U.S. diplomat visiting from Kabul this summer: "You lost Afghanistan." Yet while Taraki has steered his country out of its traditional nonaligned path, he has leavened his pro-Moscow rhetoric with occasional mentions of a desire to maintain ties with the U.S., which continues to provide aid to Kabul. TIME New Delhi Bureau Chief Lawrence Malkin, who was in the Afghan capital last week as Taraki left for Moscow, reports that the country probably presents as many problems as opportunities to its new rulers and their Soviet allies:

"They haggle worse than Afghans," complains a grocer, pointing to some Soviet technicians shopping in Kabul's bazaars. The grocer hides his best produce when he sees the Russians coming. A jeweler has a simpler defense: he just doubles his prices to the Russians. While the 3,000 to 4,000 Soviet civilian and military advisers in Afghanistan attest to Moscow's interest in the country, Kabul is not Prague or Budapest, where tanks can be rolled in quickly to enforce the Brezhnev Doctrine. Afghanistan does have one main highway, but it merely connects the four main cities like a huge beltway. The country is bisected by the towering Hindu Kush Mountains, and there are few feeder roads. One result: there are still only loose connections between the dominant Pathans and the Uzbek, Hazara, Turkoman, Baluchi and nomadic tribes that make Afghanistan, as James A. Michener once described it, "one of the world's great cauldrons."

The Russians' land link with Kabul is a single road snaking north through the 11,000-ft.-high Salang Pass. A mile-long tunnel there could be dynamited by rebels, and it has been under military guard since April. At the border the Amu Darya River must be crossed by a ferry, though negotiations are under way for the Soviets to build a bridge.

While the Russians in Afghanistan try to keep a low profile, Taraki's government has boldly waved the country's new red flag, which has a yellow star (symbolizing the Khalq Party) surrounded by some wheat instead of a hammer and sickle. After it unfurled this banner in October, the regime promptly 1) withdrew recognition from South Korea in favor of the Communist North, 2) described its accession to power as a "continuation" of the Russian Revolution, and 3) gratuitously parroted Brezhnev's charge of "imperialist" interference by the U.S. in Iran. But except for the ever suspicious Chinese, diplomats in Kabul have found no evidence that all this was on Moscow's orders. In fact, Soviet representatives in Afghanistan confide that they have advised the feudal country's new rulers to move and talk with caution. Apparently the Russians are wary of being drawn into civil strife in a country on their border, should the Taraki regime run into trouble.

One Soviet official says that "we insist that the Afghans make all policy decisions" lest Moscow be blamed for the regime's failures. At the same time, the Afghans seem to be playing a tricky game with Moscow. Explains a diplomat from a nonaligned country: "The Afghans want to limit the Russians' options, just the way [the pro-U.S.] regimes did with you Americans in Viet Nam by forcing you to become prisoners of their rhetoric."

The potential for civil strife is there. This summer young Khalq Party ideologues were appointed as district officials among fierce Pathan tribesmen in the eastern mountains. They arrived telling the tribesmen that the forests now belonged to the people, the party and the government. The puzzled Pathans, whose income from selling firewood is exceeded only by that from opium smuggling, asked their Muslim mullahs what this was all about. The mullahs declared the government and party to be infidels, and some of the young ideologues were slaughtered. In came planes and armored cars, and the tribesmen fought back. Some crossed the border to the Pathan area of Pakistan, vowing badal--literally, paying back in kind--for family members killed.

Southward near Kandahar, young teachers arrived in one district to preach Marxism. Again some were killed, and again the army went in, this time driving villagers into the frigid mountains. Neighboring Baluchi tribesmen, like the Pathans, have fled across the Pakistani border and are allied with separatist movements there. Some Western analysts have suggested that the Soviets may now want to take advantage of these movements to spearhead trouble in Pakistan and also in Iran, where some Baluchis have settled. For the moment, however, the Taraki regime's ineptitude in dealing with the tribesmen seems to have checked any such plan.

Inflation is beginning to hurt the Khalq government. Prices of grain, firewood, charcoal and other staples are rising, and the government has warned that hoarding will be dealt with by "revolutionary justice." Political insecurity is mirrored in unexplained arrests, as well as infrequent transfers and demotions of military men, officials and even Cabinet ministers. The regime's main political fear is the Parcham (Banner) faction, whose loyalty to Moscow exceeded the Khalq's before the two groups joined in the April revolution. During the summer, Taraki exiled six Parcham leaders by appointing them ambassadors abroad, then firing them. Their whereabouts remains a mystery, but some diplomats believe they are being kept in cold storage in Eastern Europe so that Moscow can send in another team if the Taraki regime fails.

Hence the Khalq government's professions of loyalty to Moscow. So far, however, the Russians have paid sparingly for this fealty. Since the coup, the Soviets have signed with the Taraki regime 29 aid agreements worth a total of $104 million. By contrast, pledges from the West have amounted to $121 million, half from the World Bank. But the flow of Western aid is starting to taper off. Afghan officials have bombarded foreign missions and international agencies in Kabul with requests to underwrite grandiose development plans that will probably have to be scaled down soon. The top priority now is land reform, and the government's policy is fairly pragmatic; a newly issued decree favors the distribution of plots to private owners (maximum: 15 irrigated acres per family) instead of Russian-style collective farms. If this plan is to work, the regime will need much cash to make crop loans to farmers next spring. The Russians are ready to supply long-term credits, but only for a price: the right to exploit Afghanistan's copper, fluorite, oil, rare earth minerals and, some reports say, uranium. Moscow seems to realize that it does not need another costly Cuba, and that it can secure a part of its southern border at a handy profit.

Indeed, a Cuban diplomat flying from Kabul one day last week, after helping to establish his country's new embassy there, was asked if Havana planned any special relationship with Kabul. No, he shrugged, still seething at Kabul's inefficient airport officialdom. For Cuba, he said, the Afghans are "muy lejos''--very far away.

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