what the Soviet leadership described as ‘regional problems’, a
code expression for the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan
and Vietnamese forces in Cambodia (Maley, 1993a). Gorbachev
in an important speech in Vladivostok on 28 July 1986 voiced
‘support’ for ‘the line of the current Afghan leadership towards
national reconciliation’ (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
SU/8324/C/1–17, 30 July 1986), but as we now know from
Chernyaev’s memoirs quoted earlier, as well as from a range of
other sources, Gorbachev had been pressing this line upon
Karmal well before Najibullah became party leader. ‘National
reconciliation’ was radically inconsistent with Marxism, since it
emphasised nations rather than classes as appropriate bases for
solidarity, and cooperation rather than struggle as an appropriate
political strategy. In this sense, it was both an aspect of ‘new
thinking’, and part of the process of ideological dismantling that
the Gorbachev era had inaugurated. It also reflected the failure of
military force to solve the regime’s political problems. Najibullah
stated this quite explicitly in July 1987: ‘I want to emphasise par-
ticularly that during the nine years of the fratricidal war we have
not been able to resolve even one of the issues which caused the
war, not one. Now it has become clear that we cannot resolve
these issues by military means’ (BBC Summary of World
BroadcastsFE/8622/C/1, 17 July 1987).
The content of ‘national reconciliation’
National reconciliation consisted in practice of a mixture of sym-
bolic and substantive measures. The former included steps such as
the renaming of the ‘National Fatherland Front’ as ‘National Front’
on 15 January 1987, and of the ‘Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan’ as the ‘Republic of Afghanistan’ (the name the coun-
try had carried from 1973 to 1978) on 13 July 1987. On 30
November 1987, a ‘Loya Jirgah’ adopted the Constitution of the
Republic of Afghanistan, a document of 149 articles in 13 chapters,
but in no sense did it perform the function of limiting power in any
meaningful sense: rather, it reflected a conception of law simply as
The Najibullah-Gorbachev Period 1986–1989 121