sary’ class (named after the Christian guards whose role it was to
protect the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire) who would be
detached from normal cultural influences and moulded to per-
form the functions required in a Soviet-type system of rule.
‘During 1984–86’, Rubin writes, ‘this program created consider-
able resentment and fear in Kabul; many refugees said they had
fled Kabul for fear that their children might be sent to the USSR’
(Rubin, 1995a: 141–2).
Such strategies are for the long-run only, and in the long run, the
Afghan communist regime – to paraphrase Maynard Keynes –
turned out to be dead. The sad legacy of this particular strategy is
to be found in the large numbers of still-young Afghans scattered
through the former Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc,
often spurned by their erstwhile hosts but with nowhere left to go.
They are readily visible to any Afghanistan specialist who travels
in those parts of the world.
Soviet-KhAD relations and the roles of Soviet advisers
One point that is abundantly clear is that Soviet advisers played
central roles in all of KhAD’s diverse activities. They helped train
its agents in the management of information, which is a key
resource in the hands of a secret police force, as the opening of
Stasi archives in the former East Germany made clear. Soviet
advisers were so numerous that they had their own offices in the
Darulaman district of Kabul (Rubin, 1995a: 133). However, the
complexities of loyalties in Afghanistan meant that the relations
between KGB advisers and KhAD agents were not straightforward.
While a key aim of KhAD was to penetrate the resistance, some
KhAD agents provided information to the resistance as well, and
the knowledge that this could happen affected interpersonal trust
between KGB staff and their Afghan counterparts. The scale on
which this occurred should not be exaggerated, but in such cir-
cumstances, a little distrust goes a long way. KhAD was a profi-
cient organisation, and was widely feared as a result, but it was not
omnipotent.
102 The Afghanistan Wars