The Afghanistan Wars - William Maley

of the most controversial developments of the war, namely the negotiation of a ceasefire between Massoud and the regime, which l ...

Shia, which shaped the character of political and military organisa- tion. Within the Hazarajat, there were a number of competit ...

exposed to the threat of Soviet invasion should their internal pol- itics spin out of control from the Soviet point of view: suc ...

(Bolshevik) in March 1921 – that at which the famous theoretician Bukharin observed that ‘the revolution is hanging by a thread’ ...

Garrison, Major-General Khalilullah, and had to be hospitalised. In July 1984, he reportedly shot and wounded his Khalqicolleagu ...

Relations between different bureaucratic agencies In the Soviet model, the Communist Party played an overarching role, and while ...

Ministry of Information and Culture, contained no mention at all of socialism or communism. However, Article 4 of the Fundamenta ...

Dealing with tribes was a major challenge for the regime, espe- cially after August 1980 when its Minister for Tribal Affairs, F ...

a department within the Prime Minister’s Office, it was headed until 21 November 1985 by Dr Najibullah. He was succeeded by his ...

a different generation than Taraki, Amin or Karmal, and had cut his teeth politically as a student activist at Kabul University, ...

KhAD had a frontline role to play in confronting opposition. Here, the regime lived in fear not so much of violent overthrow by ...

was that at Pul-e Charkhi, but equally frightening were those at the Prime Ministry (Sedarat), KhAD-e Shashdarak, KhAD-e Panj, K ...

sary’ class (named after the Christian guards whose role it was to protect the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire) who would be ...

THE USSR AND CHANGE IN THE KABUL REGIME At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet Union appeared to be a permanent fixture on th ...

satisfaction. By the last three years of Brezhnev’s rule (1979–82), it is likely that the USSR was already experiencing a declin ...

much higher than originally anticipated’ (Halliday, 1999: 680). In the years which followed, Western pressure on the USSR, if an ...

Grachev, was ‘a genetic error of the system’ (Brown, 1996: 88). Karmal was entirely orthodox, and incapable of responding to cir ...

family was already living. Karmal was dazed. He obsequiously begged Gorbachev to change his mind, promising to perform his dutie ...

5 The Najibullah-Gorbachev Period 1986–1989 The fall of Babrak Karmal led to a period of what Goodson calls ‘Resistance gains an ...

victory to the resistance, but instead gnawed away at the regime’s claims to legitimacy. The second examines the evolution durin ...