Chapter 2 continues…

Maley identifies certain factors that accounted for President Najibullah’s, the last communist-era President’s survival until April 1992 and the collapse of his regime at that point.

The principal mechanisms for Najibullah’s regime maintenance were continuing Soviet assistance, militias and segmentary politics, rebadging the party and intra-party rivalries. Even though the Soviets had withdrawn, the Soviet food and arms supplies were a necessity.

Kabul needed food supplies of approximately 700 tonnes a day which the Soviet leadership continued to provide. Moreover delivery of arms and ammunitions into Afghanistan, particularly the armaments like R-17 missiles, air-defense equipment and others’ were sent into Afghanistan. Moreover the resources supplied from the USSR, together with the printing of more Afghan money, gave the regime some scope to buy off influential local commanders like Sayed Mansur Nadiri of the Ismaili Shiite militia and Abdul Rashid Dostum of the ‘Jawzjani’ Uzbek militia, which technically worked as the 53rd Division of the Army.

Also Najibullah tried to make nationalism the new basis for his popularity namely the change of the name of his party in the mid- 1990s to Hizb-e Watan or party of the fatherland. The regime also altered certain policies whereby they decided to go back to more traditional patterns of power and also gave up revolutionary rhetoric. In 1992 the UN-negotiated plans for President Najibullah, to step down and a transitional authority to take over were jeopardized. Mujahideen groups formed an alliance with a commander in the north; they entered Kabul and seized power but with no united or coherent strategy for running a government. Within a matter of months, incompatible goals and an aversion to power-sharing between the different Mujahideen factions led to the collapse of their coalition as a new phase in the conflict began.

The struggle against occupying Soviet forces mutated into an internal power struggle as the different factions within the mujahideen regime fought each other. Those institutions that were untouched during the intervention now rapidly disintegrated and an institutional vacuum became apparent.

To be continued…