The State Department spokesman, Nicholas Burns, said Washington would be sending diplomats there ''within a few days'' for formal contacts with the Taliban. Last week, after the Taliban formed a provisional government and began constructing their new state along strict Muslim fundamentalist lines - complete with the closing of girls' schools and beatings for improperly dressed women, as well as at least one public display of a man punished with amputation - nobody at Foggy Bottom needed a map to find Kabul. The concern has been as marked in Washington as anywhere.Īfter Soviet troops withdrew in humiliation in 1989, and still more so after Moscow and Washington agreed in 1991 to halt arms supplies to the Najibullah Government and the American-backed Muslim guerrillas respectively, Afghanistan all but vanished from the American official consciousness. But he might have taken some grudging satisfaction from the diplomatic flurry that has been stirred by the seizure of power in Kabul by the Taliban militia, a Muslim fundamentalist force that has done more to stir international interest in Afghanistan than anything since the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Najibullah, who in life served the K.G.B.'s efforts to eliminate opposition to Marxism, died a death as miserable as any his secret police meted out. ''Only if we understand our history can we take steps to break the cycle.'' ''They can see how our history has repeated itself,'' he said. Najibullah told United Nations officials that he wanted Afghans to read the Hopkirk text because of what they would learn from it of the 19th-century struggle between imperial Britain and imperial Russia for influence in Afghanistan. IN the months before Afghanistan's new rulers marched him from a United Nations compound in Kabul and summarily beat, shot and hanged him, Afghanistan's last Communist President, Najibullah, spent much of his time preparing a translation into Pashto, his native language, of a 1990 book about Afghanistan, ''The Great Game,'' by the English writer Peter Hopkirk.

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