The prospects for an alternative government are so dim that many Afghans see hope only in their exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, an 87-year-old who has been campaigning for his lost throne since a cousin ousted him in 1973.

From his home in Rome, the ex-king and his Canadian-educated grandson have been trying to build international support for their return to power. But with the nation facing massive military assaults, and with tens of thousands of people fleeing for the border, the former king's ambitions may be put off.

For those who hope a new government can replace the Taliban, however, the idea of a non-executive monarchy has become an appealing option.

The domestic opposition to the Taliban, the North Alliance, has said it would back the king. The U.S. and British governments have also suggested they would support the idea, as do many in the Afghan diaspora -- if only because they can agree on no one else.

But the Taliban, and its allies in Pakistan, have long resisted the king's return, pointing to a despotic rule that helped drive the country into Communist hands and a horrible civil war in the 1970s.

"My concerns and anxieties for the future of Afghanistan have increased in these precarious moments," the former king said yesterday in a statement from Rome.

He called for Afghans to resist the Taliban's calls for jihad (holy war), should the United States attack their country.

"The Afghanistan people are hoping their nightmare will end. They're hoping another nightmare is not about to begin," said the king's grandson, Mustapha Zahir, who studied medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., in the 1990s.

Zahir Shah was last seen in public in January, when he appeared at a conference of Afghan exiles who are pursuing the idea of a grand assembly of traditional leaders, known as a loya jurga, to salvage a nation deeply divided by ethnicity and sect.

The former king rose to the throne in 1933, at the age of 19, when his father Nadir Khan was assassinated by a Kabul student. He reigned for 40 years, and in the 1960s promulgated a liberal constitution that put Afghanistan, for the first time, on the road to democracy.

The reforms also gave room for the rise of left-wing parties allied with Moscow.

In 1973, while King Zahir Shah was touring Europe, his cousin Sardar Mohammed Daoud, launched a coup and instituted a Republic, with himself as president and prime minister. Mr. Daoud, who was long seen as antagonistic to Pakistan and the United States, was overthrown and killed in a 1978 coup by the main Marxist opposition movement.

The country has been at war ever since.

When the Soviet army retreated from Afghanistan in 1988, after eight years of trying to prop up a Communist government, the victorious mujahedeen factions quickly turned on each other. Moscow's hope of reinstating the king as its own forces withdrew was rejected by the opposition forces.

Many Afghans still see the former king as a moderating force, and a unifying link for the country's Pashtu, Tajik, Uzbek and Shia Hazara communities.