Ripe Apple in the Hindu Kush

Feudal and remote, Afghanistan has long defended its independence by playing off ambitious foreign powers against one another. Now it is more deviously threatened as the Soviet Union attempts to become the dominant political force by offering increased trade and aid to its weak southern neighbor. The opportunity arose after April's bloody coup replaced the nepotistic regime of President Mohammed Daoud with the shakily neutralist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. If Soviet influence succeeds in vaulting the towering Hindu Kush mountains, Afghanistan would provide the Russians with windows south to troubled Iran and Pakistan, and beyond. TIME New Delhi Bureau Chief Lawrence Malkin, who covered the coup, returned to Kabul and cabled this report last week:

As so often happens with revolutions, purge has followed purge in Afghanistan. Half a dozen pro-Moscow leftist leaders were shifted abroad as ambassadors and later fired. Then the government turned on Brigadier Abdul Qadir, the Soviet-trained air force officer who helped bring it to power but was suspected of renewed ambitions. He is now in the detention barracks at Puli Charki tank base. The barracks are speedily being enlarged to house perhaps 1,000 centrist intellectuals, political extremists and dissident officers arrested by a worried government.

The internal power struggles have dangerously narrowed the government's political base, which is concentrated in a tiny urban and military elite. Support has been further eroded by dismissals of critically scarce but politically suspect management talent in favor of inexperienced loyalists. The former chief of the state airline, for example, now works as a telex operator; the new deputy health minister graduated from Kabul Medical School only last year. Never efficient, the frightened bureaucracy has now been slowed to a camel's pace.

The government is under pressure to deliver on its reformist pledges and has been forced to turn to Soviet advisers to fill the manpower gap. There are now about 3,000 Russians in Afghanistan. One-third of them are military officers; their numbers have tripled since the coup. Meanwhile, the regime is desperately seeking to broaden its base by courting mass support among the 18 million people in one of the world's poorest and most ungovernable tribal societies.

Photographs of Author-President Noor Mohammed Tarakki, 61, smile benignly from every conceivable public place, but the purges seem to have delivered the levers of power to Foreign Minister Hafizullah Amin. A former schoolteacher, Amin has so far managed to keep a sure foot on an ideological tightrope. When he is abroad in Havana or at the United Nations, his harangues often sound like those of a Communist, but at home he does not always act like one. He has eagerly signed aid deals with the U.S., Japan and the World Bank, which is setting up fruit-export agencies on profit-making lines. In an interview, Amin insisted that the Russians would never manipulate his country or its economy, and disclosed that he had told both U.S. and Soviet ambassadors that "we want to retain our free judgment." But a shopping list of expensive prestige projects is being compiled at the planning ministry with Soviet advice, and Amin admitted that he has canvassed all non-Communist ambassadors for "cash commitments" --which some see as blank checks from Washington. He seeks more aid along with "sincerity, honesty and friendship of the people of the U.S., whom we highly respect." The Foreign Minister is a courteous man with the round, deliberately ingenuous face of the traditional Afghan rug dealer. But the consensus among Kabul's diplomatic community is that he is naively depending on the guile he used in the past to outmaneuver his opponents in the Afghan political bazaar.

The Soviet Union is already Afghanistan's largest customer and holds 62% of its $1.75 billion foreign debt. Russian aid deals come readymade on terms that would make even a Yankee trader blush. Repayment is usually in commodities, and price and quantity are renegotiated annually. Orange growers on a Soviet-aided project are whipsawed when the fruit reaches the border, where Soviet inspectors often rate it substandard and lower the price. Afghan natural gas is piped over the border. The Russians have craftily installed the meters on their side and pay for the gas at about one-third the world price by bartering low-grade gasoline. New proposals are being discussed to exploit huge Afghan copper and fluorite deposits on terms that one international expert likens to those for Cuban sugar; such deals could tie Afghanistan irrevocably to the Soviet Union.

Even one Communist-educated intellectual allied to the regime pleads that his country is "not an apple" ready to fall to the Russians, and privately appeals to the U.S. to act like "a great power." But U.S. room for maneuver is as limited as the Afghans'. Conservative Muslim tribesmen in provinces bordering Pakistan have rebelled against government reforms; some air force squadrons, which strafed them last month, have been grounded by the arrest of pilots loyal to Qadir.

Policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals are in as excruciating a dilemma as Amin. Do they offer aid to prop up a shaky regime --which then might drop in the Russians' lap? Or let the government collapse--and risk a widening guerrilla war in an unstable region? Moscow, which has waited patiently since the time of the czars to consolidate its hold, faces no such agonizing choice.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.