Afghan Commanders To Set Up New Government In Northern Provinces Russia Backing Military Leaders Ousted By Muslim Faction

The last two military commanders holding out against the new rigorously Muslim government in Afghanistan forged a formal military alliance on Thursday. They vowed to set up a non-fundamentalist government in the nine northern provinces under their control.

Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ahmad Shah Massoud, military commander in the government that fell when the Islamic movement called the Taliban captured Kabul two weeks ago, signed a document creating the new alliance. They met for the first time in three years, at an old Soviet guesthouse in the Hindu Kush mountains.

The pact was also signed by Abdul Karim Khalily, a leader of the Shiite Muslim minority in Afghanistan, whose forces control a 10th province.

The government proclaimed by the Taliban in Kabul, the capital, controls all the other 19 provinces, except part of Parwan province north of Kabul that is held by the Massoud forces.

But events on Thursday in the area immediately north of Kabul, where Taliban forces came under attack for the second time in three days, with dozens of Taliban casualties, underscored the uncertainties surrounding the Taliban’s ability to consolidate power in Kabul.

One of those waiting outside the guesthouse during the meeting was the Russian consul general in Mazar-i-Sharif, Oleg Nevelyaev, whose presence signaled the strong diplomatic support that Dostum and Massoud have received from Russia.

Moscow has reacted with hostility to the prospect of Taliban rule close to Russia’s southern borders.

It has been joined in its support for the Taliban’s opponents by India and Iran, whose Shiite Muslim leaders distrust the Sunni Muslim leadership of the Taliban.

In Washington, the state department’s spokesman, Nicholas Burns, called on all sides in Afghanistan to stop fighting and seek a political solution. “The United States will not support any one faction or group of factions against another,” he said. “We’re neutral.”

On the question of Russia’s support, he said, “We don’t think any of Afghanistan’s neighbors should intervene in this conflict to promote a continuation of the civil war.”

Russian backing for the new alignment appeared to be reflected in some of the new equipment displayed at the meeting by Dostum troops.

In addition to what appeared to be brand-new trucks carrying antiaircraft guns to protect the meeting from possible Taliban air attacks, many of the Dostum fighters wore what appeared to be brand-new uniforms and boots of the kind worn by Soviet troops when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The alliance proclaimed at the meeting at Khinjan, a market town 100 miles north of Kabul on the northern side of the Hindu Kush, opened a new chapter in the 18 years of war in Afghanistan.

The alignment appeared to mean that the Taliban, instead of facing two enemy forces that have been divided, will now face a common front, controlling an area of tens of thousands of square miles, and united by their hostility toward the rigorous form of Islam that the Taliban have imposed in areas under their control.