[ A department spokesman said there would be no direct public response to the interview. ]

After 13 years of war, waged by Islamic rebels against various leftist governments and the Soviet forces, Afghanistan is a country in tatters. The years of conflict have driven six million refugees into Pakistan and Iran, prompted the country's educated classes to migrate to Europe and America and fractured the country along its already fragile ethnic fissures.

With the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in February 1989, virtually all Western nations abandoned their embassies here and ostracized Mr. Najibullah's regime. And then, with the final disintegration of the Soviet Union in December, Afghanistan's last source of economic assistance disappeared. Mr. Najibullah found himself alone in the world, and all but ignored.

In recent months the United Nations peace plan has begun to show signs of life. Pakistan, the principal benefactor of the Afghan guerrillas and the main conduit of Western arms to them, cut off its assistance in late January and said it was supporting the United Nations plan. In doing so, Islamabad abandoned its insistence on installing a fundamentalist government in Kabul, seeking instead a government that could serve as a stable bridge to fruitful economic and political ties with the new Central Asian republics formed from the old Soviet Union. Many leaders in those republics are wary of Islamic fundamentalism.

Some of the fundamentalist guerrillas have condemned the peace efforts, declaring that only the imposition of an Islamic government will bring peace to the country. But others among the splintered guerrilla movement have agreed to participate in the peace efforts.

Mr. Najibullah spoke fervently today of his hopes for a dialogue with the United States, which at one time was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to the fundamentalist guerrillas largely in the interest of countering Soviet dominance over the country. Repeatedly during the 40-minute interview, the President echoed a concern underlying the swing through Central Asia last month by Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d -- that Islamic fundamentalism poses a significant threat to stability in the region.

"You may think that the Central Asian Republics are significant for the United States of America," he said. "That's right. But I must say that the strategic and political significance of Afghanistan is much more than these republics. If Afghanistan is lost and is turned into a center of fundamentalism, you will lose the Central Asian republics."

Mr. Najibullah, a burly man with a brush mustache, spoke in a wood-paneled conference room dominated by a huge map of the country and lighted by a chandelier made up of five glass globes. Dressed in a subdued blue suit and dark blue tie, the president, normally quite reserved in his discussions with journalists, gesticulated frequently, especially during his discussion of his hopes for a renewal of contacts with the United States. 'What Is the Obstacle?'