6
The Road to Soviet
Withdrawal
In a radio broadcast on 8 February 1988, General Secretary
Gorbachev announced the intention of the Soviet Union to begin
the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan by 15 May
- In his Vladivostok speech of 28 July 1986, he had signalled
an intention to withdraw six regiments by the end of the year, but
the announcement had met with widespread scepticism (Saikal and
Maley, 1991: 91). The February 1988 commitment was of a total-
ly different character: the proposal was for a complete rather than
partial withdrawal, and was ultimately to lead to the signing in
April 1988 of the so-called ‘Geneva Accords’ which provided a
formal cover for the USSR’s retreat. Gorbachev’s announcement
had not been widely anticipated: apart from the analyst Anthony
Arnold, who had long argued that the USSR would be obliged to
withdraw (Arnold, 1988), few observers had held out much hope
that the Soviets would ever be prepared to accept that the gains of
a Marxist-Leninist ‘revolution’ could be reversed. In this sense, the
withdrawal from Afghanistan was a seismic development in world
affairs, and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe represented the
extension and expansion of a principle which had already been
conceded in the remote reaches of Southwest Asia.
This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I exam-
ine the making of the Soviet decision to withdraw, identifying the
more important factors underlying the decision, and the key
moments at which decisions were made. The second deals with the