February 16, 1989

Last Soviet Soldiers Leave Afghanistan

By BILL KELLER, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES MOSCOW -- The last Soviet soldier came home from Afghanistan this morning, the Soviet Union announced, leaving behind a war that had become a domestic burden and an international embarrassment for Moscow. The final Soviet departure came on the day set as a deadline by the Geneva accords last April. It left two heavily armed adversaries, the Kremlin-backed Government of President Najibullah and a fractious but powerful array of Muslim insurgents, backed by the United States and Pakistan, to conclude their civil war on their own. Lieut. Gen. Boris V. Gromov, the commander of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, walked across the steel Friendship Bridge to the border city of Termez, in Uzbekistan, at 11:55 A.M. local time (1:55 A.M., Eastern time), 9 years and 50 days after Soviet troops intervened to support a coup by a Marxist ally. 'Our Stay Ends' "There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me," General Gromov told a Soviet television reporter waiting on the bridge. "Our nine-year stay ends with this." Today's final departure is the end of a steady process of withdrawal since last spring, when Moscow says, there were 100,300 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed. This morning, as the last armored troop carriers rumbled home across the border, a Soviet newspaper carried the first report of atrocities committed in the war by the nation's military forces. Massacre and Cover-Up The weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta described the killing of a carload of Afghan civilians, including women and children, and the order by a commander to cover it up. The article was a foretaste of recriminations expected in the months ahead. The war cost the Soviet Union roughly 15,000 lives and undisclosed billions of rubles. It scarred a generation of young people and undermined the cherished image of an invincible Soviet Army. Moscow's involvement in Afghanistan was often compared to the American experience in the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans died.

The Soviet intervention, which received international condemnation, cast a pall over relations with China, the Muslim world and the West. It led to an American trade embargo and a Western boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Western reporters flown to Termez to witness the finale said the ceremony at the border was one of festive relief at the homecoming. Today, there were no obvious second thoughts expressed about the venture.

"The day that millions of Soviet people have waited for has come," General Gromov said to an army rally in Termez, Reuters reported. "In spite of our sacrifices and losses, we have totally fulfilled our internationalist duty." Token of Official Esteem The official press agency Tass said the Defense Ministry presented all of the returning soldiers with wristwatches. Yet in contrast with the joy at leaving Afghanistan, Soviet press reports told of insurgents massing outside Kabul, the Afghan capital, and other major cities, and of Afghan Army regulars deserting in droves. The reports seemed intended to brace the public for the possibility that defeat would follow retreat.

Vadim Perfilyev, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, described the situation in Kabul today as "relatively calm" but said the guerrillas continued to gather reinforcements around the main cities and along the highway to the Soviet Union. Perfilyev said 160 trucks bearing food and fuel reached Kabul safely on Tuesday to relieve shortages in time for an expected siege. He added that aircraft were still ferrying supplies into airports at Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. A Few Advisers and Guards An estimated 250 Soviet civilians were believed to have stayed on at the Soviet Embassy in Kabul after the troops left. Perfilyev said he did know how many military advisers, "if any," were still in Afghanistan. The official who negotiated the Geneva accords, Diego Cordovez of Ecuador, said at the United Nations today that he believed that fewer than 10 Soviet military advisers would remain in Afghanistan after the withdrawal, principally as embassy guards. Western diplomats and Soviet journalists speculate that the guerrillas will attempt a quick victory, perhaps in the vulnerable eastern city of Jalalabad, to break the Government's morale. This would be accompanied by a slow-death blockade of Kabul. But Soviet officials and some recent Western visitors say they believe that Najibullah's forces may prove sturdier than expected. They control vast arsenals of Soviet-supplied weapons, and are motivated by the fear of rebel reprisals if they lose.

A Government statement on the troop withdrawal said the responsibility for a blood bath in Afghanistan now would largely rest on the guerrillas' suppliers. Onus for Further Conflict "Whether the Afghan situation will develop along the lines of national accord and the creation of a broadly based coalition government," the statement said, "or along the lines of escalating war and tension in and around the country, depends to a large degree on those who have, over all these years, aided and abetted the armed opposition, supplying it with sophisticated weapons." The Soviet Government renewed its appeal to Pakistan and the United States to join in a cutoff of military aid to the warring parties. The United States, which a year ago was pressing such an arrangement on the reluctant Soviets, now argues that it is too late.

The rebels insist that they will not take part in a coalition that retains Najibullah or his Communist political grouping, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. But their own efforts to coalesce have faltered over issues of ideology and power sharing. At home, the Soviet Government now faces a period of reckoning with the roots and consequences of the war. In Pravda, the authoritative Communist Party newspaper, a commentator insisted today that the intervention was carried out with the best intentions -including maintaining the security of the Soviet Union's southern border. But he said that the war was characterized by the mistakes and misjudgments of previous leaders.

"One can question the Brezhnev leadership's assessment of the military threat," the commentary said. "One can say that in the future such vital issues as the use of troops must not be decided in secrecy, without the approval of the country's Parliament." What Has Been Learned? Other commentators, who have been constrained while Soviet soldiers were still fighting on Afghan territory, can now be expected to question more pointedly how the Soviet Union got into Afghanistan, what it did there, why it stayed so long and what lessons it has learned. The account today in Literaturnaya Gazeta, a dark essay on the corrupting power of the war, was a sample of the gloves-off analysis that is likely to find its way into the press. The article, by Gennadi Bocharov, who has written extensively from Afghanistan since 1979, told of Soviet troops firing on a carload of civilians after they refused to stop at a border checkpoint and ignored a warning shot. The troops then opened fire on the vehicle, killing a young woman and wounding three others. An old woman and two children were not hurt. When the soldiers radioed to their commander to ask for further intructions, he replied according to the account, "I don't need captives." The commander, who was identified only as Rudykh, told them to eliminate the evidence. "So they did," Bocharov reported. "The passenger car was smashed by an armored vehicle and buried in the earth." The commander was reportedly sentenced to six years' imprisonment, but freed almost immediately in an amnesty. History of the Struggle The first Soviet troops parachuted into Kabul on Dec. 27, 1979, to assist Babrak Karmal, who had become President in a coup within the Communist leadership. The Soviets have always insisted that they came in response to a plea for help from a legitimately constituted Karmal Government. However, most Western analysts say the Soviets engineered the coup as a pretext to replace the Afghan leader who had lost their trust, Hafizullah Amin. The next day, four motorized rifle divisions crossed the Amu Darya River on pontoon bridges, and Moscow announced that its "limited military contingent" would stay as long as necessary to repel outside aggression. This they did for years; along the way, in 1986, Najibullah, the former chief of the Afghan

secret police, replaced mr. Karmal in a purge. The Soviet-backed Kabul Government has generally kept a firm grip on the cities, but throughout the war has been unable to rout the rebels in the countryside, where the conservative populace was antagonized at the outset by changes in social and land policies that offended Muslim tradition. After 1986, the Soviet Air Force was rendered largely useless by advanced Stinger antiaircraft missiles supplied by the United States to the rebels. Overture From East Bloc Peace talks moderated by the United Nations bore little fruit until early last year, when Gorbachev and Najibullah offered a nine-month withdrawal timetable if Pakistan and the United States agreed to curtail their aid to the guerrillas. The arms embargo never materialized, because President Reagan demanded that Moscow stop supplying Najibullah as part of the bargain, and the Soviets refused. In the end, Moscow's withdrawal was in effect unilateral. The Geneva accords introduced United Nations observers to watch the troops depart, but the agreements' other painstakingly negotiated provisions, promising an end to all outside intervention in Afghanistan, were generally ignored. The Bush Administration has indicated that it plans to continue arming the rebels after the Soviet withdrawal.