different evaluation. In 1989, I concluded a mournful assessment of
the Geneva Accords with the warning that ‘for many Afghans, they
offered only the peace of the grave’ (Maley, 1989b: 25). The years
of bloodshed which were to follow highlighted their limitations.
First, the Afghan resistance groups were neither parties to the
Accords, nor involved in any serious way in the negotiation process.
There is no doubt that the difficulties in trying to involve elements
of such a collection of combatants would have been considerable,
not least because of the manipulative inclinations of their Pakistani
hosts; but their absence left a hole in the process: a mark of a truly
great mediator’s dexterity is an ability to find ways of linking all
necessaryparties to a settlement, while excluding all unnecessary
parties. Second, the Accords left a crucial issue in the Afghanistan
conflict, namely the character of the country’s rulers, unaddressed.
The Secretary-General on 14 April 1988 stated that the Accords ‘lay
the basis for the exercise by all Afghans of their right to self-
determination, a principle enshrined in the Charter’ (United Nations,
1988: 1). This was precisely what they did notdo. The hiatus here
was not simply an aesthetic weakness, for such gaps mean that fun-
damental issues in disputecan remain unresolved (Randle, 1973:
487). To be fair to Cordovez, at the time at which he was working,
a lesson that became clearer during the 1990s – that political recon-
struction in disrupted states is a complex and laborious process,
involving the rebuilding of trust, change in elite relations, relations
with non-state actors, and efforts to bring about the institutionalisa-
tion of politics (Maley, 1995b; Maley, 2002a) – was not so widely
appreciated. Yet while this may excuse a mediator any moral blame,
it does not make defective agreements any more meritorious.
THE COURSE OF THE WITHDRAWAL
UNGOMAP and UNOCA
The period of the withdrawal witnessed the first deployment
in Afghanistan of what might broadly have been called a
142 The Afghanistan Wars