two terms as Vice-President to President Reagan, he did not bring
a fixed vision of how to proceed in Afghanistan. His approach
instead was to explore options, all the while giving priority to pro-
tecting the position of Gorbachev, whose continued dominance he
saw as vital to USA–Soviet relations. This was a position to which
he stuck firmly, even when Gorbachev’s swing to the right in the
late part of 1990 and the early part of 1991 (Brown, 1996: 269)
raised the ire of conservatives in the Congress and his own
Republican Party. Afghanistan was no longer a key East–West
issue, and Bush largely left the crafting of policy to Secretary of
State James A. Baker III, although Ambassador Oakley in
Islamabad, reportedly known locally as ‘The Viceroy’ (Rashid,
2000: 172), also played an increasingly active role, which antici-
pated a delegation of policy responsibility to the US Embassy in
Pakistan of a kind which was to prove quite dangerous in the years
ahead. But it is important to emphasise that the Bush
Administration did not set out to ‘abandon’ the Mujahideen.
Certain glitches in the early days of the Bush Administration left
the Mujahideen under-resourced at a time when steady resource
flows (as envisaged by the USA’s declaration at the time the
Geneva Accords were signed) would have been of significant value
(Saikal and Maley, 1991: 121–2), but these did not reflect any
malevolent intent to cripple the resistance.
That said, certain important factors came into play in shaping pol-
icy, and ensured that uncritical support would no longer be on offer.
One was disillusionment with Pakistan’s handling of the Afghanistan
issue. During the 1980s, Congress had been willing to vote in favour
of very large disbursements to aid the resistance, for the greater
good of blocking Soviet geopolitical ambitions. With those ambi-
tions shrinking, more attention began to focus on the explicit anti-
Americanism of some of the groups to which Pakistan had
channelled funds (Goldman, 1992: 183–5). This was brought sharply
into focus during the 1991 Gulf War, when Hekmatyar adopted a
pro-Iraqi position. Another was a growing sense that Najibullah
could be eased out of office by cooperative US-Soviet action, specif-
ically of a kind which would result in a cutoff of supplies to his
The Interregnum of Najibullah, 1989–1992 179