Badakhshan was a significant commander, but Wahhabi forces,
manipulated by both the Kabul regime and Hekmatyar’s Hezb,
caused him considerable trouble at different times (Delpho, 1989:
49).
The Hazarajat
As noted earlier, from 1982 the Hazarajat experienced significant
internal conflict, which saw the Shura-i Ettefaqin effect displaced
by Islamist forces inspired by Iran. A consequence of this was that
the Soviet Union and the regime made little effort to exercise
direct control through military force: the Hazarajat was of no
strategic significance. The token Soviet garrison in Bamiyan was
evacuated in summer 1987 (Bradsher, 1999: 211) after coming
under attack. But the most important development in the Hazarajat
was not military but political: the crystallisation of a sense of
Hazara political identity which would subsequently see a Hazara
leadership bid for a slice of national power. How this played out,
in a tragic way which obliged Hazaras to draw on all their stocks
of resilience, we shall see in later chapters.
POLITICAL CHANGE IN MOSCOW AND KABUL
Elite turnover in the USSR
As noted in the preceding chapter, by the early 1980s, a significant
turnover in the Soviet leadership was underway. The decrepit elite
of the Brezhnev era was dying off in increasing numbers.
Gorbachev by exercising the patronage powers of the General
Secretary had considerable say in the appointment of their replace-
ments, and was able to craft a personal power base in the Central
Committee more swiftly than many of his predecessors had been
able to do. Brezhnev had been forced to accommodate his gener-
ational associates amongst the vydvizhentsy; by contrast, at the
1986 Party Congress, there was a 45 per cent turnover in Central
Committee members, compared with a 22 per cent turnover at the
114 The Afghanistan Wars