Afghan Girl

I WILL NEVER KNOW THIS WOMAN'S NAME. Among Afghan villagers it is the custom for women not to tell their names to strangers. On this cold November night she is busily preparing food for the six mujahidin, Afghan freedom fighters, who have escorted me across the Pakistani border to Afghanistan's embattled Paktia Province and into this small village in the Jaji region.

But in the darkness and snows of December, sometime around the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she will give birth to her tenth child. If the child comes in the safety of the night, it will be born here, in this earthen house warmed by an iron stove. If her baby comes in the day, she is likely to be in the damp bomb shelter hewn into the ground under the fields outside the village, her birth pangs accompanied, perhaps, by the roar of jets and bombs.

She pauses to pour me a glass of steaming black tea. "When the planes come, I can't run very fast to the bomb shelter any more," she says. "I am too big and heavy. What can I do?" She speaks in a lilting accent, the rhythms of her native Pashtu carrying over into the Dari, or Afghan Persian, that she learned in Kabul before the war.

Few families remain in this region, where frequent bombings have destroyed both villages and crops as the Russians attempt to close this important route to the interior. Most of those who remain share food and shelter with the mujahidin ("holy warriors") who pass through, many from across the frontier in Pakistan.

When an April 1978 coup brought a Marxist regime to power in Kabul, armed resistance began within months. The conflict was both nationalistic and religious, but devout Muslims regarded it as a jihad, or holy war. By December 1979 the central government was in danger of collapse, and in a three-day operation beginning on Christmas Eve, thousands of Soviet troops invaded the country, claiming to have been invited under the terms of a 1978 friendship treaty. While the invasion was still in press, President Hafizullah Amin was executed and replaced by Babrak Karmal, a political rival Moscow summoned back from Czechoslovakia, where he had been sent as Afghan ambassador.

Soviet troops, estimated at about 80,000 in 1980, now number more than 100,000. They have mounted frequent offensives to stamp out resistance, at great cost in lives to Afghan civilians. The economy has also been damaged. The 1984 harvest in eastern Afghanistan was less than half that of 1978, and prices of many staple foods have tripled.

BUT THE MOST VISIBLE effect of the war has been the flight of the Afghan people, a multilingual population of mixed tribes and ethnic groups, from their homeland. One-quarter of Afghanistan's prewar population of about 15 million has been forced into exile in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. At least another million are "internal refugees," driven from their homes by bombing and other military action. An unknown number have been killed or wounded.

After more than five years the war remains in a violent stalemate. The mujahidin claim to control as much as 80 percent of the countryside, while Soviet troops and an army of Afghan conscripts defend parts of major cities, a few main roads, and fortified posts in some rural areas.

Abdul Wahed (not his real name), husband of the pregnant woman in this Jaji village, comes in out of the cold and darkness, letting in a gust of icy wind. The light of his lantern reveals the graceful geometric designs his children have daubed on the walls with the red earth of the mountains.