a different generation than Taraki, Amin or Karmal, and had cut
his teeth politically as a student activist at Kabul University, from
which he graduated with an MD degree in 1975. Despatched to
Tehran in 1978 as Ambassador, he disappeared from his post as the
purge of Parchamis accelerated, and resurfaced only with the
Soviet invasion. As is widely known, Najibullah was ultimately to
be murdered in grisly circumstances in September 1996 when the
Taliban seized Kabul. This, together with revulsion at the damage
to Kabul following his removal in April 1992, and the sense that at
least he was a modernist, might incline the casual observer to
regard him with some sympathy. It is thus all the more important
to emphasise that his tenure as Head of KhAD was marked by bar-
barities of a high order, and that Najibullah played no small role in
the spawning of the climate of lawlessness to which he was ultim-
ately to fall victim.
As Head of KhAD, he impressed a range of important Soviet
interlocutors, and this accounted for his subsequent rise to overall
leadership. He enjoyed the particular patronage of Vladimir
Kriuchkov, who headed the KGB from 1988 to 1991. However, he
was an utterly ruthless man. This is borne out not only by the
range of KhAD brutalities over which he was prepared to preside,
but also by testimony of those who knew him. One of the most
interesting of these was his brother Siddiqullah Rahi, who defected
to the resistance and subsequently published his memoirs: these
depicted Najibullah as a violent man who even in his student days
delighted in striking fear into his family, and whose private life
departed sharply from Afghan moral codes (Akram, 1996: 210). A
man of great bulk, Najibullah was known colloquially as Najib-
Gaw(‘Najib the Bull’), and followed Machiavelli’s advice that it is
better for a prince to be feared than loved.
KhAD and urban repression
In rural areas, confronting the resistance was substantially the
responsibility of the armed forces, although prisoners were likely
to be handed over to KhAD for interrogation. But in urban areas,
The Karmal Period, 1979–1986 99