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The guerrillas suffer from other severe disadvantages. There is little or no coordination between different, sometimes rival groups. Their mobility is hampered by the ten-inch snow that covers the mountain passes. In some of the craggy heights of Kunar province, for example, the insurgents are said to be near starvation because food can be carried to them only on foot.
The insurgents' main advantage is a moral and spiritual one. The vast majority of Aghanistan's 14 million to 18 million people are devout Muslims. The Soviet invaders are widely resented, even despised, as godless interlopers, and consequently so is their principal Afghan standin, Karmal. The President probably has the support of no more than 10% of the population. "The people question his legitimacy and view him as an atheist who has sold himself completely to the Soviet Union," said a senior Western diplomat in Kabul. "Karmal's No. 1 problem is to get some political support from the people, by whatever means."
The "national unity" government that Karmal unveiled last week was obviously designed to extend his narrow base. For the first time since Noor Mohammed Taraki's Marxist coup in 1978, the 20-member Cabinet includes three politicians from outside the card-carrying ranks of the ruling Communist People's Democratic Party, as well as five senior military officers. Four of the officers were also named to the seven-member Praesidium, the main executive body. The government grandly announced the disbanding of the dread KAM secret police, which it said Hafizullah Amin had used for "his own criminal ends." The gesture was not likely to fool many Afghans, however, because the same announcement made it clear that the new intelligence service would be modeled on the Soviet KGB.
In an effort to ingratiate himself with the Muslim majority, Karmal also tried to give his government an Islamic coloration. Official broadcasts over the government-controlled radio were preceded by the traditional invocation to "God, the compassionate, the merciful." The ruling party called for religious ceremonies to mark a national day of mourning for victims of the Amin regime.
Lip service to Islam became a main theme in Karmal's diplomatic overtures toward Iran. He fired off a telegram to "Gracious Brother, Most Reverend Imam," the Ayatullah Khomeini. Karmal's message almost reverently appealed for an Afghan-Iranian revolutionary entente based on "Islamic brotherhood" and a shared hostility toward "American world imperialism—the No. 1 irreconcilable enemy of all the people of the world." Karmal promised that his government "will never allow anybody to use our soil as a base against Islamic revolution in Iran"—adding that "we expect our Iranian brethren to resume a reciprocal stance."
The Iranian leadership was clearly not impressed. At week's end Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh instead complained about persistent reports that Soviet troops were massing behind the Iranian border. If that proved to be true, he said, Iran would "protest fiercely."