AFGHANISTAN: A War Without End

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Three years after the Soviet invasion, the guerrillas fight on

The anniversary was marked in a peculiar but strangely appropriate way. The 35,000 Soviet soldiers stationed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, were put on the highest alert. Armored cars, their sirens wailing, raced through the streets as truck convoys dropped Soviet soldiers off at the main intersections. Roadblocks were set up every hundred yards or so, and citizens were stopped, searched and asked for their identification cards. Meanwhile, squads of soldiers went house to house, looking for high school graduates to fill the ranks of the unpopular and demoralized Afghan army. When the soldiers found a potential recruit, they would take him away at gunpoint. Says an Afghan exile living in New Delhi: "It is not what you would call winning the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan."

The Soviets, however, were not anxious to cause any trouble on the third anniversary of that cold day in late December 1979 when Soviet paratroopers landed at Kabul airport and began a prolonged, costly and so far unsuccessful campaign to control Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal, 53, the Kremlin's hand-picked leader, remains in power, but the Soviet Union's 105,000 troops have failed in rooting out the mujahedin, the ragtag but stubborn guerrillas who control most of the countryside. Neither side has gained or lost much ground over the past three years, and all signs point to a continuing stalemate. Although diplomats began to speculate last November that new Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov would try to find a face-saving compromise that would allow the Soviet Union to withdraw from its Afghan quagmire, there has been no evidence of that so far. Says a senior British diplomat: "No one is winning, and short of a decision by Andropov to extricate himself from the country, of which we see no meaningful sign at present, it could drag on for years."

The anniversary prompted a worldwide chorus of statements and demonstrations calling for an end to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. "The United States does not intend to forget these brave people and their struggle," President Ronald Reagan said last week. The Socialist government of French President Francois Mitterrand did not mention the Soviet Union by name, but it "denounced all foreign intervention in Afghanistan's internal affairs." West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was blunter, pledging support for "the Afghan people in their demand for freedom." In Tehran several hundred protesters marched outside the Soviet embassy, and in New Delhi hundreds of Afghan exiles demonstrated in front of the Soviet embassy, raising clenched fists and shouting, "Down with the KGB." Perhaps the harshest criticism came from China, where the official party newspaper, People's Daily, termed the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan "a grave threat to China's security" and called upon other nations to give "moral and material assistance" to the guerrillas.