General Asif Nawaz Janjua held a symbolically significant meeting
in Rome with Zahir Shah’s son-in-law, General Abdul Wali; and on
27 January, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan announced that his
government had decided ‘to support the UN Secretary-General’s
efforts to convene an assembly of Afghan leaders to decide on an
interim government acceptable to the Afghans and to facilitate the
convening of such an assembly’ (BBC Summary of World
BroadcastsFE/1290/A3/1, 29 January 1992). That this marked a
change of policy was confirmed when the ISI Director-General,
Major-General Asad Durrani, was replaced on 1 March (The
Economist, 7 March 1992). These developments held out the pos-
sibility of concerted pressure by Pakistan on the Peshawar-based
parties to agree to the plan as it took more concrete shape. They
did not, however, guarantee the support of internal commanders;
and nor did they ensure that Hekmatyar would not make a bid for
power with the backing of those ISI elements with whom he was
most closely allied.
The regime finally collapsed on 15–16 April 1992. These were
momentous days in both Islamabad and Kabul. In Islamabad, at a
meeting at Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s residence, the UN plan
began to crumble as participants from both Rabbani’s and
Mojadiddi’s parties expressed a preference for the immediate
establishment of an Islamic government, rather than the UN’s tran-
sitional approach. These blows to the UN plan, it should be noted,
came from both an ‘Islamist’anda ‘moderate’ party in the ranks of
the Sunni resistance, and from a Pushtun-dominated as well as a
Tajik-majority party. Sevan, who had developed a plan to fly to
Kabul with members of the ‘pre-transition council’, and to fly
Najibullah out on the same aircraft, left on his own for Kabul,
which he reached in the early hours of Thursday April 16.
By then, he was in another world. His plane was not cleared for
landing by the Khwaja Rawash airport control tower, and when it
made a first pass, it was hit by gunfire (Picco, 1999: 38). On
Wednesday 15 April the airport had changed hands. Azimi, possi-
bly in cooperation with Babrak Karmal’s brother, had flown
between 600 and 1000 of Dostam’s troops from Mazar-e Sharif to
190 The Afghanistan Wars