United States formally closed its Embassy. It was not to reopen
until December 2001, and the empty buildings in the Embassy
compound through the 1990s stood as a cameo of the Afghan
people’s involuntary transition from Cold War heroes to post-Cold
War ‘failed state’ pariahs.
The end of the withdrawal was a bloody affair. Bradsher reports
that the 40th Army ‘unleashed one final campaign of terror in an
effort to prevent attacks on its last troops on the road, with
Gorbachev’s personal authorization’ (Bradsher, 1999: 309).
Unfortunately, this slaughter – a microcosm of the Soviets’ activities
for over nine years in Afghanistan – received far less attention than
the photogenic spectacle of General Gromov crossing a bridge at
Termez leading from Afghanistan to the USSR, and finally bringing
Moscow’s ground combat in Afghanistan to a conclusion.
Thus, the end of the Soviet involvement saw different illegitim-
ate or enfeebled claimants to power pitted against each other, in a
country whose ‘state’ had limited capacity to function autonomous-
ly without external backing. The illegitimate regime of Najibullah
was challenged at the political level by the impotent Interim
Islamic Government and its self-interested external promoters. The
significantlegitimatepower of local and regional commanders was
not integrated into effective organisational structures at the nation-
al level, around which ordinary Afghans could rally. With no
processes in place to reconcile these antagonisms or relegitimate
political power, the outcome could only be determined by political
manipulation and battlefield combat. This set the scene for the sec-
ond and third waves of the Afghanistan conflict.
152 The Afghanistan Wars