victory to the resistance, but instead gnawed away at the regime’s
claims to legitimacy. The second examines the evolution during
this period of the new leaderships in both the USSR and
Afghanistan, and of their strategies for political consolidation. The
third discusses the formal policy of ‘national reconciliation’ which
was promoted by the USSR as a way of dealing with ‘regional
conflicts’, and shows why it was unable in Afghanistan to deliver
the kinds of outcomes for which the Soviet leadership had hoped.
As an overview, it is important to note that 1986 was a year of par-
ticular ferocity in the war, with the Soviet force under General
Mikhail Zaitsev embarking on a number of major new operations.
This lends some credence to the view that before contemplating a
withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was necessary for Gorbachev to
give the Soviet military the chance to secure a desirable political
outcome by military means. Its failure to do so arguably excluded
it as a serious opponent of withdrawal, and silenced those mem-
bers of the Soviet leadership who might otherwise have been
inclined to argue that the USSR had not really tried to win the war.
PATTERNS OF WAR
Militias
In a development that was ultimately to pave the way for his own
downfall, Najibullah accorded an enhanced role to militias. In con-
trast to organised forces under hierarchically structured command
and related formally to the state, militias were armed groups that
served the state, but at a distance and in such a way as preserved
the autonomy on which key militia leaders tended to insist. In their
pioneering study of militias, Dorronsoro and Lobato identified a
number of distinct types, of which the most important were the
Geruh az Defa-i Inqilab (‘Groups for the Defence of the
Revolution’), Ghund-e Qawmi (‘Tribal Regiments’) which were
under KhAD control, and the Milishia-i Sahardi(‘Border Militia’).
Some were based on qawmsolidarity, while others were based on
The Najibullah-Gorbachev Period 1986–1989 109