members’ of the parties: the Prime Ministership to Hekmatyar’s
Hezb, the Defence Ministry to the Jamiat-e Islami, and the Foreign
Affairs Ministry to Gailani’s party. After six months a Council of
Supreme Popular Settlement (known by the Islamic legal term
Shura-i Ahl-e Hal va Aqd) would be convoked to form an interim
government which would organise elections to be held after 18
months.
This agreement faced a number of fundamental challenges.
Hekmatyar, who resented Massoud’s appointment as Defence
Minister, resorted to the strategy of ‘spoiling’. Hekmatyar was a
classic example of what Stephen J. Stedman has called ‘total spoil-
ers’: individuals ‘who see the world in all-or-nothing terms and
often suffer from pathological tendencies that prevent the pragma-
tism necessary for compromise settlements of conflict’ (Stedman,
1997: 10–11). The logic of spoiling is quite straightforward: as an
Australian politician once put it, if you can’t run a meeting, wreck
it. Hekmatyar refused the offer of the Prime Ministership for his
party, and instead denounced the new administration as ‘commun-
ist’. It was indeed the case that Dostam and various generals from
the Najibullah era had emerged as prominent figures, but the wider
allegation was preposterous, not only because most members of the
old communist elite had fled (Arnold, 1994: 67–8), but also
because Hekmatyar at the very time he made these charges was
continuing to work with Khalqiswhose human rights records were
as bad as his own. Once Rabbani took over as President – after a
certain amount of manoeuvring by Mojadiddi, who had hoped to
prolong his term (Rubin, 1995a: 273) – Hekmatyar upped the
stakes, (even though one of his functionaries, Abdul Saboor Farid,
briefly occupied the premiership). In August, the Hezb-e Islami
launched a rocket attack on Kabul in which over 1000 civilians
were killed. It was at this point that Rabbani dubbed him a ‘dan-
gerous terrorist who should be expelled from Afghanistan’ (BBC
Summary of World BroadcastsFE/1461/B/1, 17 August 1992). In
December 1993, a Shura-i Ahl-e Hal va Aqdmet in Kabul and
endorsed Rabbani’s remaining in office for a further 18 months,
until 28 June 1994. Rabbani’s opponents, many of whom boy-
198 The Afghanistan Wars