General Staff, Lieutenant-General Shahnawaz Tanai, had been
appointed Defence Minister, even though he was a Khalqi. Tanai
had been involved as a young officer in the April 1978 coup, but
came to prominence as a commander of the 37th Commando
Brigade during operations in the Panjsher Valley. After the com-
pletion of the Soviet troop withdrawal, the relationship between
Najibullah and Tanai deteriorated rapidly. In December 1989,
Najibullah arrested 100 Khalqi officers who were charged with
plotting to overthrow the regime. Finally, in March 1990, Tanai
attempted a coup against Najibullah. The regime alleged it was
prompted by fear that the Khalqidefendants might implicate him
(Bradsher, 1999: 342). Others hypothesised that Soviet circles may
have been involved (Hyman, 1990: Arnold, 1990). But in any case,
it failed rather badly. Of the resistance party leaders in Pakistan,
only Hekmatyar was prepared to throw his weight behind Tanai;
the coup plan had called for Tanai’s forces to open a route for
Hezb-e Islamiloyalists to enter Kabul (Rubin, 1995a: 253). The
coup reflected disorganisation on the part of the Khalq, and trig-
gered a new purge. Zeray, Gulabzoi, Dastagir Panjsheri, and
Asadullah Sarwari were all expelled from the party.
One other development caused trouble for Najibullah. On 20
June 1991, Babrak Karmal returned from Moscow, where he had
been in enforced exile for over four years. During his years of
exile, Karmal had been treated frostily by the Gorbachev leader-
ship: the Soviets even refused to pay for a Karmal family wedding,
on the grounds that Karmal had no friends to invite. Karmal made
no secret of his resentment at the way in which he had been treat-
ed, and described the April 1978 coup as the ‘greatest crime
against the people of Afghanistan’ (Snegirev, 1991). Rubin has
suggested that his return may have been at the instigation of
Kremlin hardliners looking to reassert a tough line in Afghanistan
(Rubin, 1995a: 152); Najibullah apparently blamed Karmal’s return
on a KGB-CIA conspiracy (Halliday, 1999: 688). But it was by no
means only hardline communists in Moscow who were hostile to
Najibullah. Increasingly, Russian commentators were critical of the
continuing burden of supporting the regime. Just a week after
The Interregnum of Najibullah, 1989–1992 173