AFGHANISTAN: 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.