in Afghanistan. The candour of this information also grew over
time. The following items are merely samples from a wider body
of material, but they do give some flavour of what began to
appear. In July 1986, an article about life in Kabul spoke of the
problem of ‘securing peace and tranquillity in the city’ (Shurygin,
1986: 6). In August 1987, Pravda reported that there were no
fewer than 1.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan (Okulov, 1987:
6), and on 24 February 1988, a photograph of Afghan refugees in
Pakistan appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta. In November 1988,
Mikhail Leshchinskii, interviewed on Soviet television, observed
that the ruling Afghan party had ‘no support in the people’, and
was ‘being torn by contradictions between factions and wings’
(BBC Summary of World BroadcastsSU/0309/A3/1, 15 November
1988). A number of Soviet journalists, especially Artyom Borovik,
were to play significant roles in exposing the realities of
Afghanistan to Soviet audiences. Borovik, a son of the longtime
head of the Soviet Peace Committee, went on to become a crusad-
ing investigative reporter in post-Communist Russia, and was
eventually killed in a suspicious plane crash. Borovik’s analysis of
Afghanistan was set out in some detail in a book published in
English (Borovik, 1990), but he won earlier fame with his field
reporting, and in particular a sensational interview with Major-
General Kim Tsagolov, Head of the Department of Marxism-
Leninism at the M. V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow
(Borovik, 1988), about which I shall have more to say shortly.
THE POLICY OF ‘NATIONAL RECONCILIATION’
The origins of ‘national reconciliation’
Najibullah’s specific policies were implemented under the over-
arching rubric of ‘national reconciliation’. While Najibullah
sought to give it Islamic roots (Rubin, 1995a: 165), the terminol-
ogy was of Soviet origin – used in Pravdaon 3 January 1986
(Bradsher, 1999: 146) – and was marketed as a way of resolving
120 The Afghanistan Wars