Karmal’s return to Kabul, a blistering critique of Najibullah
appeared in the Soviet press. The author reported that it was Soviet
economic and military aid that was keeping Najibullah in office;
that 85 per cent of Afghan territory lay outside the regime’s con-
trol; that Najibullah’s offers of a coalition government would entail
his party’s retaining control of the most important ministries; and
that continuing Soviet support for the regime was prompted by the
fear that a free Afghan government would demand war reparations
(Vasil’ev, 1991).
One analyst, Richard Weitz, has suggested that the USSR’s strat-
egy in Afghanistan ‘proved remarkably successful’, and was under-
mined only by the ‘unplanned’ collapse of authority after the
August 1991 coup (Weitz, 1992: 25). Had Weitz known how swift-
ly Najibullah’s regime would follow Gorbachev’s into oblivion, he
might not have offered so positive an assessment. The Moscow
coup was not an ‘Act of God’, but rather the culmination of
processes of institutional decay and elite fragmentation (Gill, 1994)
which at some point would surely have seen an ongoing commit-
ment to Najibullah discarded as an anachronism. The Soviet strat-
egy bought Najibullah time, but very little else. Furthermore, his
survival was to a considerable degree the result of misjudgments
by some of his opponents.
FRACTURING WITHIN THE AFGHAN RESISTANCE
The completion of the Soviet troop withdrawal forced the Afghan
resistance forces to reconsider the nature of their struggle.
Traditional warfare, based on a politicised value system, had
proved well fitted to denying the USSR the political objectives
which it had invaded Afghanistan to pursue. But to some, it was
necessary in the post-Soviet period to move to a more convention-
al form of combat, in which organised forces such as Hekmatyar’s
Lashkar-e Isar(‘Army of Sacrifice’) could flex their muscles. This
proved to be a grave error, which had much to do with the failure
of the Mujahideen properly to capitalise on the Soviet retreat. But
174 The Afghanistan Wars