Abdul Rahim of the Jamiat-e Islami, and Ghairat Baheer of the
Hezb-e Islamiof Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The meeting dealt mainly
with the issue of prisoners and soldiers missing in action, but
Engineer Rahim was reported to have stated that he and Baheer
had ‘sought to reassure the Soviet team that a future mujahideen-
dominated government would be non-aligned and seek good rela-
tions with Moscow’ (Reuters, 28 November 1988). A further
meeting took place at a higher level, in Taif in Saudi Arabia on
3–4 December. Vorontsov attended from the Soviet side, and from
the resistance, Burhanuddin Rabbani of the Jamiat-e Islamiand
Sebghatullah Mojadiddi of the Jabha-i Milli-i Nejat-e Afghanistan
took part, although not with any credible claim to be representing
the entire resistance. However, it ended without any concrete out-
come, and nor did anything of use emerge from a third round of
talks with Vorontsov which was held in Islamabad from 6–9
January 1989. Ultimately, the gap dividing the parties was too
great. Vorontsov’s brief was to secure a coalition government, but
this was exactly what the Mujahideen parties could not accept:
covert contact with regime members was one thing, but overt
acceptance of the legitimacy of the PDPA as a political force was
something entirely different (Saikal and Maley, 1991: 113–14).
The focus of the Mujahideen’s backers was instead how to take
over Afghanistan after the expected collapse of Najibullah’s
regime. Yet in the measures that were taken to address this issue
lay some of the seeds of the disarray which was ultimately to
eventuate. In the mid-1980s, there had been concerted attempts to
foster a semblance of unity amongst the Sunni, Pakistan-based par-
ties, culminating in the 16 May 1985 establishment of the ‘Islamic
Alliance of the Mujahideen of Afghanistan’. The alliance existed
mainly on paper, but it did serve to produce a resistance
‘spokesman’, with the leaders of the seven participating parties
serving three-month rotating terms. In 1988, an effort had been
made to put together an ‘Interim Government’, with members
being announced on 19 June. The head was one Engineer Ahmad
Shah, a member of Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e Islami Afghanistan, who
was married to an American convert to Islam, but widely regarded
The Road to Soviet Withdrawal 149