Afghanistan Revolts

Its present shattered, its future badly compromised, this nation on the hinge of Central and South Asia has been plundered of a goodly share of its past as well by the continuing civil war. "We Afghan people are very proud of our history. But now we are cut off from it," reflected Amir S. Hassanyar, chancellor of Kabul University, sadly mulling over the cultural cost of 17 years of fighting.

Their most frequent companions are hunger and cold, and like Oliver Twist, they daydream of being able to eat their fill. Home--if you can call it that--is a drafty building without electricity, heat or running water on a dusty plain littered with abandoned Soviet military equipment. For as long as they can remember, the 850 residents of northwestern Kabul's Daurul Itom orphanage, ages 6 months to 21 years, have known nothing but war.

In this storied frontier town, a clutch of musicians works to keep the soul of a nation alive. About 300 Afghan musical performers live and work in exile here, banished from their country by an extremist Islamic government that has made playing and listening to music a criminal offense. Many of the dancers, singers, musicians and composers fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, during a war against the Soviet Union.

His name was Syed Bahauddin Majrooh, but everyone called him "the professor." He had a doctorate from a university in France and was once dean of the literature faculty at Kabul University in his native Afghanistan. Under former Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah, he had been a provincial governor and a diplomat.

Each day, news of starvation comes down from the villages, carried on foot across mountain passes still deep in springtime snow. Two children dead from hunger in Naito. Twenty-five people in the villages around Jawqul Lal. Six in Shenia, where the villagers are eating grass. The high, rugged region of central Afghanistan known as the Hazarajat, home to 1.5 million people with a distinct culture dating to the days of Genghis Khan, is teetering on the edge of famine.

In a move to put an end to speculation about Soviet intentions, the Soviet military commander in Afghanistan said Sunday that he expects all of the Kremlin's troops to be withdrawn from that country by mid-February. "It is a delicate question which worries everybody in the world and, of course, it worries us," Lt. Gen. Boris V. Gromov said. "But the plan and the scheme of the withdrawal have been drawn up."

As U.S. warplanes roamed above the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, flying low and striking at targets as they came into view, the Taliban rushed troops to a key northern city Wednesday, halting the advance of the opposition Northern Alliance, anti-Taliban officials said. The setback for the lightly armed Northern Alliance troops in Mazar-i-Sharif--strategically important because it would provide the opposition with a key supply route and the U.S.

Crouched in the bushes on the side of a road in southern Mogadishu, Dr. Broderick Franklin prepared to face death. * Months before, Franklin had left the comfort of his home in Washington, D.C., and headed for Somalia, where he treated the victims of war and famine, sometimes seeing up to 60 patients a day at Mogadishu's Digfer Hospital.

Afghan rebels launched two rocket attacks on Kabul, the capital, hitting a key Soviet helicopter installation, the area around the city's airport and other targets, the Soviet news agency Tass reported. Diplomats said the report was probably aimed at underscoring rebel plans to continue their attacks, which is what led to Moscow's decision earlier this month to suspend its troop withdrawal.

The mayor of Kabul condemned the nine-year Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as unnecessary in what diplomats called the first such direct criticism by an official of the Soviet-backed government. Abdul Karim Misaq told reporters in Kabul that "it is an Afghan tradition to fight against foreign intruders" and it was "natural that . . . the Afghan people resisted" Soviet troops. Misaq was jailed for two years after the 1979 Soviet invasion, and spent most of the 1980s as a short-story writer.

Targets of an alleged Afghan assassination conspiracy included foreigners, the country's exiled king and interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, authorities said Thursday, accusing those arrested of "undermining, threatening, sabotaging and harming this government." Interior Minister Younis Qanooni said that about 300 opponents of Karzai's government had been arrested or detained in recent days and that 160 remained in custody.

Sun-bronzed Najmuddin, 23, hefted his trusty Kalashnikov into the crook of his arm and smiled grimly beneath his pancake woolen hat. "We are going to Gardez," he said. "I think it will be the last fighting."

About 200 fighters for one of northern Afghanistan's key warlords laid down their weapons Monday in a ceremony their leader said may be the first step toward broader disarmament. "We have turned a new page," Ata Mohammed told his soldiers marshaled at the 120-year-old Baghjahanuma fort, about 50 miles southeast of the main northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. "Now is not the time for fighting, now is the time to lay down our guns." U.N.

Mediators shuttled between Uzbek and Tajik commanders Monday trying to hammer out a truce after a factional clash killed eight people and wounded 30 in this northern Afghan town. The fighting poked a hole in the paper-thin sense of peace here and raised tensions between the region's most powerful warlords, the same ones who had fought together as members of the Northern Alliance.

Afghan and U.N. mediators, joined by U.S. officials, extracted a conditional cease-fire agreement Sunday from two rival tribal warlords in this eastern Afghan town that was rocked by two days of fighting last week. With factional fighting threatening the national government's efforts to assert control throughout the country, the delegation hopes to avert more tribal clashes in Gardez, a town of about 40,000 that is the capital of Paktia, a strategic border province. U.S.

His pensive, bearded visage adorns virtually every wall and windshield in this capital, where the wars he waged against Soviet and Taliban oppressors seem finally to have ended in victory for his people as well as a martyr's death for himself. Ahmed Shah Masoud, the ethnic Tajik warrior who kept Afghan hopes for freedom from foreign domination alive through bloody battles for two decades, has been reborn as a national icon in the six weeks since his Northern Alliance cohorts took power in Kabul.

Vasudin, 25, a Taliban fighter, was the proud possessor of his dream car, a Datsun Hilux pickup truck, for not much more than one glorious hour. He took possession of the truck as a trophy of war. Asked when, he looked at his gold watch. "About an hour ago," he grinned Saturday.

An advance by Northern Alliance forces surrounding the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan came to a halt Friday after new claims that Afghans fighting for the Taliban had agreed to surrender. Although the two sides have been discussing a surrender in Kunduz for days, there were contradictory reports on whether several thousand foreign fighters, mainly from Pakistan and Arab countries, also would give up.

Northern Alliance forces on Monday threatened to attack thousands of surrounded Taliban fighters in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz if they don't surrender, and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned that freeing the hard-line fighters would endanger America. Rumsfeld said he would do everything he could to prevent a negotiated deal in the stalemate because a large share of the Taliban force is made up of zealous non-Afghan fighters from the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

They'd spent days haunting Peshawar's musty government offices, forgotten chambers stacked to the ceiling with sodden, twine-bound piles of paper. They'd stared at the makeshift filing system and waited in endless lines. More than once, they'd agreed frostily to come back tomorrow. But on Saturday afternoon, the car trunks slammed and the old buses shuddered to a start and the journey to Afghanistan from the Pakistani city began at last.