of Kabul, said there was no need for coalition leaders to come
to the capital, and warned he would shoot their plane down if
they tried’ (Bradsher, 1999: 381–2). Mojadiddi then issued a
communiqué naming Massoud as ‘Defence Minister’ of the
‘Islamic Interim Government of Afghanistan’, and requested that
he ‘urgently begin to work’ (Maley and Saikal, 1992: 30). With an
explicit pledge of support from Azimi (BBC Summary of World
BroadcastsFE/1365/C1/2, 27 April 1992), Massoud did just that,
securing the city and ejecting the Hezb-e Islamiforces. On 26
April, full agreement was reached and announced between the
Sunni leaders – except Hekmatyar – and on 28 April, Sebghatullah
Mojadiddi arrived by car in Kabul, as head of a new regime.
Giandomenico Picco, who in March-April 1992 was Assistant
Secretary-General for Political Affairs, argues that it was a ‘devas-
tating error of judgment’ on the part of the Secretary-General to
pressure Najibullah to announce his intention to relinquish power,
since it had the potential to create ‘a vacuum that could be filled
only by a more devastating civil war’. He reports that Sevan stated
that the ‘men in Peshawar will help fill the vacuum with Pakistani
help’ (Picco, 1999: 37). To believe in such circumstances that the
ISI would not seek to promote Hekmatyar at the expense of other
party leaders and internal commanders was to indulge in large-
scale fantasising. Boutros-Ghali’s memoirs are entirely silent on
the details of this episode, which he even puts in the wrong year
(Boutros-Ghali, 1999: 301), but Picco was clearly haunted by what
happened. ‘To this day’, he writes, ‘I believe we were responsible
for much of what ensued in that tragic place’ (Picco, 1999: 39). Yet
one can plausibly argue that the demand that Najibullah leave
came not prematurely, but much too late. By 18 March 1992, his
regime was manifestly coming apart at the seams: his announce-
ment aggravated and accelerated the process, but did not cause it.
The time for such an announcement was at the time of the Pankin-
Baker statement, before the regime had lost its external income
source, and before Najibullah’s attempts at the manipulation of eth-
nic segmentation had triggered the gross fragmentation of the
military that came after the January 1992 northern crisis. Sevan’s
192 The Afghanistan Wars