individual recruitment (Dorronsoro and Lobato, 1989: 100). A
number of militia leaders were to achieve considerable notoriety,
such as Rasul Pahlavan in the vicinity of Andkhoi, and the ram-
bunctious Esmatullah ‘Muslim’ in Kandahar. Esmatullah in particu-
lar proved hard to handle: he noisily disrupted a ‘Loya Jirgah’
staged by Najibullah in Kabul in November 1987, and Najibullah
the next day made his views of him quite clear: ‘Unfortunately he
is sick. He goes to extremes in using narcotics and alcohol, and it
is these which caused his illness’ (BBC Summary of World
BroadcastsFE/0021/C/5, 9 December 1987). He finally died in a
Soviet hospital in 1991 (Rubin, 1995a: 159). The militias were
used to guard the peripheries of urban centres, as well as key roads
(Dorronsoro, 2000: 204). The advantage of a militia system is that
it can provide a ‘halfway house’ for those who wish to shift their
allegiance, but not completely lose their autonomy. This is also the
disadvantage of such a system: loyalty tends to be contingent
rather than absolute. Giustozzi has argued that high salaries
‘played a fundamental role in the rise of the regional and border
militia’ (Giustozzi, 2000: 209). As militias came to play a larger
role in the regime’s coercive capacity, maintaining the capacity to
pay them on time became ever more important to the regime’s sur-
vival. This was to come to a head in 1992.
Eastern and southern Afghanistan
Military activities in eastern and southern Afghanistan remained
intense, although the focus of activities was no longer ‘driving off’
the population, as attempted from 1983, but rather ensuring that
towns remained under the control of the Kabul regime. A number
of operations attested to this. In August 1986, Soviet and regime
troops undertook several major sweeps into Logar, and on 20 May
1987, they launched an operation with the apparent aim of reliev-
ing a besieged garrison in Jaji in Paktia. This they managed to do,
but concerted resistance put paid to any idea of securing a firm
foothold in the area, and on 13 June, they withdrew (Isby, 1989:
42; cf. Urban, 1990: 216–18). This inability to hold on to prizes
110 The Afghanistan Wars