No evidence of talks to halt Afghan war

By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press

An anti-aircraft gun is parked at the rear. Heavy machine guns look out from hand-carved stone balconies on all sides of the three-story palace.

About 100 heavily armed government troops roam the vast corridors of the 90-year-old building, perched three miles outside the capital, Kabul, on a hill shaded by the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush. Darulaman is the last government outpost against Taliban rebels, dug in just hundreds of yards away.

In one of the hundreds of high-ceilinged rooms, soldiers crouch in front of a wood fire cooking the day's meal of rice and vegetables. Behind the steaming pots, the ornately carved stone wall is black with gunfire and soot.

Crude charcoal drawings of tanks, helicopter gunships and soldiers blasting away at each other cover palace walls.

On one wall in a dark corner outside what might have been a royal ballroom, the face of a bearded man looks into the almond-shaped eyes of his beloved.

The epitaph is simple: ``In memory of Mohammed Abdul. He died here.''

Death in war has become a common phenomenon in Afghanistan. For 13 years, Islamic rebels fought a Soviet-installed regime in Kabul, banding their militias together in a final onslaught that drove the communists from the capital in 1992.

But peace was not to be. For the four years that followed the Islamic victory, nearly a dozen factions have taken up arms against each other in brutal power grabs.

All told, more than one million people were killed in the Soviet period, and the United Nations estimates that 25,000 have been killed in Kabul since.

Recently, the rivalry has boiled down to two major sides: the government of President Burhannudin Rabbani and the Taliban, a group dominated by former religious students who want to install an even stricter Islamic regime than the one Rabbani has enforced.

On Tuesday, Rabbani swore to launch a full-scale assault to silence the rockets Taliban rebels have been raining on the capital every day. Tanks and heavy weapons have moved closer to the front lines and reinforcements have begun arriving in the city, Rabbani said.

``We are ready to force the Taliban out of rocket range,'' he said. ``That might make them ready to negotiate a peace agreement with us.''

On Wednesday, a Defense Ministry spokesman said the government was still in a defensive position.

``When we decide to go into an offensive position will depend on the Taliban,'' said the spokesman, who goes by one name, Amrullah.

The rebels could forestall the assault by agreeing to a negotiated settlement, he said.

There is no evidence, however, that either side is ready to talk. It looks like another big battle is brewing along the front line, where a collection of war-ruined homes and mine-infested fields separates the opposing sides.

``Every day they hit the palace, sometimes one rocket, sometimes `bang, bang, bang,' several rockets,'' Abdul Rehman, the commander of a band of palace guards, said of the rebels.

As if to prove him right, the whistle of an incoming rocket sounded. Within seconds a rocket hit nearby, missing the palace, but serving as a stark reminder of the enemy nearby.

An eerie quiet has descended over the front line in recent days, punctured by the occasional rebel rocket and retaliatory government gunfire or bombs.

But the silence at the front line, say government soldiers, is only temporary.