Props for Moscow's Puppet

Karmal tries for political legitimacy as the rebels fight on. More than five Soviet armored divisions were deployed around his country to help suppress the Muslim rebels. Fortified by what might be called Russian courage, Moscow's puppet President Babrak Karmal tried to improve his image last week, both inside and outside Afghanistan. In an attempt to broaden his shaky political base at home, he announced the formation of a "national unity" Cabinet, giving unprecedented prominence to non-Communist and military leaders. And in an effort to mend regional ties he made flamboyant overtures of friendship to Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Karmal's political ventures were transparent bids for some popular acceptance to complement the Soviets' military support. According to most accounts, Moscow's occupation force effectively controlled all of Afghanistan's major cities and highways, but still faced considerable resistance in rural areas; perhaps 80% of the barren countryside remained in rebel hands. After a four-day lull, attacks by Muslim insurgents flared again in the northeast provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar. Civil unrest, according to U.S. intelligence reports, erupted repeatedly inside Kandahar, an ancient trading center on the edge of the Desert of Death. Soviet forces also found themselves in confrontation with mutinous units of the crumbling Afghan army; on at least one occasion, at the southern town of

Ghazni, they were forced to disarm an entire Afghan rifle battalion.

Rebel bands continued to mount raids against the Soviets' lines of communication. One ambush in the northern Salang Pass, for example, successfully blocked a Soviet convoy of more than 200 vehicles at a 7,000-ft. altitude for almost 24 hours. Yet for all their hit-and-run bravado, it was clear that the rebels were on the defensive, and sooner or later the Soviets would have the insurgency under control. "A besieged government on the verge of collapse has been saved," an Asian military attache grudgingly allowed. "Shoring up a doomed regime obviously was the Soviets' first priority."

Subdued by the first blizzard of winter, Kabul was regaining a semblance of normality. Soviet convoys no longer growled through the narrow streets at dawn. Curio shops on Chicken Street reopened for business. The capital's telephones were functioning once more, and cross-country buses were running again. But the city was not the same. Soviet officers and political cadres were virtually in charge of the Defense and Interior ministries. Most large police stations now had live-in Soviet advisers. Just outside the city limits more than 16,000 Soviet soldiers continued to dig in.

Among Soviet garrison troops, morale appeared to be high. "We have everything here we could possibly need," a swarthy, French-speaking 2nd lieutenant from Uzbekistan cheerily assured TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, outside his billet. His men were all delighted to be in Afghanistan, he said, mostly because of the perks. "This is a poor country so the only thing we purchase locally is fruit," he said with a smile. "We've brought everything else from the Soviet Union--in our cook tents it's just like eating at home." Best of all, he said, was the special combat pay: 180 rubles on top of his regular 200-ruble monthly salary. "Do you know what 380 rubles is worth? Back home I can live on that for ten months."

Last week a sixth full division of "motorized rifles," as the Soviet army denotes its armored infantry columns, rolled south across the border at Torghondi. It reinforced five other divisions already rooted around every major city in sprawling tent camps that are ringed by 130-mm artillery emplacements. The troops were arrayed around the country in a kind of wheel formation. At its center was an elite airborne division with a main base just outside Kabul, and two mobile units, one stationed due east at Jalalabad and one due west at Shindand. One of the four armored divisions, equipped with heavy T-72 tanks and BMP and BMD armored personnel carriers, was also dug in near Kabul; the three others were fanned out at Kandahar in the south, Herat in the northwest and Kunduz in the northeast. American intelligence experts were puzzled by one facet of the Soviet deployment: each division had a full complement of chemical-biological-radiological warfare decontamination units. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the decontamination units were regularly assigned to the divisions and, in the methodical Soviet way, had to go with the troops even if there was little or no chance they would see action.

Soviet air superiority in the fighting was complete. The airfields at Kabul, Bagram and Shindand bristled with MiG-21s as well as ultrasophisticated MiG-23s; high altitude MiG-25 reconnaissance planes were also spotted overflying combat zones, though they were believed to be based at fields in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet airfields and some base headquarters were guarded by surface-to-air missiles --an obvious precaution in case of foreign attack, but hardly a necessary defense against the insurgents.

Outgunned and outnumbered, the motley, disjointed forces of mujahidin --the "holy warriors" as they call themselves--were relying mostly on light machine guns captured from Soviet caches, and automatic rifles or other light arms provided by their Chinese backers. Some carried old Enfield rifles from border villages that have long specialized in hand-crafted weapons. Last week, as they had pledged to U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown during his recent visit to Peking, the Chinese stepped up deliveries of arms supplies across the Karakoram Pass into Pakistan; even so, the rebels received nothing heavier than mortars or light artillery pieces.

The guerrillas suffer from other severe disadvantages. There is little or no coordination between different, sometimes rival groups. Their mobility is hampered by the ten-inch snow that covers the mountain passes. In some of the craggy heights of Kunar province, for example, the insurgents are said to be near starvation because food can be carried to them only on foot.

The insurgents' main advantage is a moral and spiritual one. The vast majority of Aghanistan's 14 million to 18 million people are devout Muslims. The Soviet invaders are widely resented, even despised, as godless interlopers, and consequently so is their principal Afghan standin, Karmal. The President probably has the support of no more than 10% of the population. "The people question his legitimacy and view him as an atheist who has sold himself completely to the Soviet Union," said a senior Western diplomat in Kabul. "Karmal's No. 1 problem is to get some political support from the people, by whatever means."

The "national unity" government that Karmal unveiled last week was obviously designed to extend his narrow base. For the first time since Noor Mohammed Taraki's Marxist coup in 1978, the 20-member Cabinet includes three politicians from outside the card-carrying ranks of the ruling Communist People's Democratic Party, as well as five senior military officers. Four of the officers were also named to the seven-member Praesidium, the main executive body. The government grandly announced the disbanding of the dread KAM secret police, which it said Hafizullah Amin had used for "his own criminal ends." The gesture was not likely to fool many Afghans, however, because the same announcement made it clear that the new intelligence service would be modeled on the Soviet KGB.

In an effort to ingratiate himself with the Muslim majority, Karmal also tried to give his government an Islamic coloration. Official broadcasts over the government-controlled radio were preceded by the traditional invocation to "God, the compassionate, the merciful." The ruling party called for religious ceremonies to mark a national day of mourning for victims of the Amin regime.

Lip service to Islam became a main theme in Karmal's diplomatic overtures toward Iran. He fired off a telegram to "Gracious Brother, Most Reverend Imam," the Ayatullah Khomeini. Karmal's message almost reverently appealed for an Afghan-Iranian revolutionary entente based on "Islamic brotherhood" and a shared hostility toward "American world imperialism--the No. 1 irreconcilable enemy of all the people of the world." Karmal promised that his government "will never allow anybody to use our soil as a base against Islamic revolution in Iran"--adding that "we expect our Iranian brethren to resume a reciprocal stance."

The Iranian leadership was clearly not impressed. At week's end Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh instead complained about persistent reports that Soviet troops were massing behind the Iranian border. If that proved to be true, he said, Iran would "protest fiercely."

Ghotbzadeh was not the only one to wonder. Nearly a month after the invasion, Western intelligence officials were still perplexed about the Soviets' strategic intentions. One school speculated pessimistically that the number of Soviet troops and the size and sophistication of their weapons were far in excess of what was needed to quell an internal insurgency. Afghanistan, according to these suspicions, could be only a steppingstone on the way to further military aggression, either west into Iran or possibly south into Baluchistan. Straddling both Iran and Pakistan, this area is inhabited by fiercely independent Baluch tribesmen who have long sought autonomy from both countries. The other school maintained that the Soviet move was basically a defensive, self-contained operation aimed at rescuing a crumbling client regime. The military overkill, one Western European envoy argued, simply represented "typical Russian thoroughness--using more force than necessary in order to make sure." In any case, no one disagreed with the argument that the introduction of brute Soviet power into the region had raised a fearsome set of further options--most of them Moscow's.

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