Afghanistan: Backing Away From a Client

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The report from Kabul broadcast on last week's Soviet television program International Panorama startled some viewers. Remarked veteran correspondent Mikhail Leshchinsky: "It may be said that the People's Democratic Party is not actually the ruling party in Afghanistan." Official leak or not, that represented another public step away from the Soviet-backed regime of Afghan President Najibullah. For months the ruling P.D.P. has been riven by a bitter internecine war over the correctness of Moscow and Najibullah's policy of "national reconciliation."

Leshchinsky's commentary seemed to reflect deepening Soviet pessimism about Najibullah's survival amid the outcome of the nine-year struggle against mujahedin insurgents. In Kabul the Kremlin appeared to be laying the groundwork for a negotiated change of government. Two weeks ago Sayed Mohammed Gulabzoi, the once powerful Interior Minister, was suddenly posted to Moscow as ambassador, a kind of exile. His apparent problem: opposition to compromise with the mujahedin. Last week another sympathizer of the hard-line Khalqi faction, Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Ghaffer Lakanwal, defected to the U.S. while in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly.