interests, and few of these found much in the UN plan that offered
them anything at all. Instead, they began to build bridges to differ-
ent resistance groups, and the result was the emergence of new
power formations which appeared to key resistance leaders to offer
better prospects of delivering their objectives than a still only
vaguely specified UN plan.
Ethnicity ostensibly determined the destination of defectors, but
ideology may have been equally important, since the two poles of
attraction, Massoud and Hekmatyar, not only came from different
ethnic backgrounds, but also had different political orientations,
with Massoud being a moderate Islamist while Hekmatyar, in
Olivier Roy’s phrase, was an ‘Islamo-Leninist’ (Roy, 1994: 113;
see also Edwards, 1993). KhalqiPushtuns for the most part gravi-
tated towards Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami. This was hardly surpris-
ing, since Hekmatyar’s embrace of Tanai in March 1990 had
shown that he was willing to form tactical alliances with anyone
who could be of use to him. The most important such defectors
were the KhalqiInterior Minister Raz Muhammad Paktin, and the
Defence Minister Aslam Watanjar. On the other hand, Tajik
Parchamistended to shift towards Massoud. The most important of
these were Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil, who had been working
for Massoud for quite some time, and Farid Mazdak, a youthful
party leader who had also established ties with Massoud. Nearly as
important were three generals whose defection disrupted any uni-
fied command system within the Afghan Army: Deputy Defence
Minister Muhammad Nabi Azimi; Army Chief of Staff Muhammad
Asif Delawar; and Kabul garrison chief Baba Jan. On 21 March,
just three days after Najibullah announced his intention to quit,
Azimi had quietly made contact with Dostam.
The collapse of the UN plan
In early 1992, Pakistan appeared to be moving to support the
Secretary-General’s plan. The Foreign Ministry had initially wel-
comed it (BBC Summary of World BroadcastsFE/1080/C2/2, 24
May 1991); on 4 January 1992, Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff,
The Interregnum of Najibullah, 1989–1992 189