his creatures’ – he was promptly arrested (Rubin, 1995a: 166;
Giustozzi, 2000: 159).
Despite all these problems, might there not be some basis for
claiming that ‘national reconciliation’ was at least in part success-
ful? After all, Najibullah survived the withdrawal of Soviet forces
and remained in office until April 1992. However, as we shall
shortly see, the strategies which Najibullah deployed in order to
retain his hold on power had little to do with genuine ‘reconcili-
ation’ – that is, with the generation of legitimacy – but rather with
the purchasing of loyalty from important social groups, using
externally supplied resources to do so. Here, Gorbachev’s view of
the situation in Afghanistan most likely diverged from that of
Najibullah (and his conservative KGB backers such as Vladimir
Kriuchkov). Halliday and Tanin have argued that the policy of
national reconciliation ‘turned out to be less extensive than
Moscow hoped: Najib used military and economic means to win
over tribes to his support, but this was very much in the manner of
manipulation from the centre, rather than the political broadening
envisaged by Moscow’ (Halliday and Tanin, 1998: 1374). Yet it is
hard not also to conclude that realistically, these manipulatory
devices were the only tools he had available. The notion that with
his gruesome background he could reconstitute himself as a plural-
ist was sheer fantasy. Rather, his KhAD background ‘inherently
disqualified him as the architect of national reconciliation’
(Tsagolov and Harrison, 1991: 53). Gorbachev wanted him to save
the PDPA regime. Najibullah probably realised he would be lucky
if he could even save himself.
The Najibullah-Gorbachev Period 1986–1989 125