fighters of a Korean airliner on 1 September 1983, which led immediately to further worldwide condemnation of the Soviet Union for what President Reagan called a ‘massacre’. His efforts ran out of steam even before he died in January 1984.
His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also seriously ill and barely able to take a grip on policy. He died on 10 March 1985. By now it was obvious to the senior Soviet politicians that the Soviet system was not working as it should. Within hours of Chernenko’s death they elected Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor, because he was young, energetic, imaginative, and—they believed—orthodox.
Gorbachev came to power determined to press ahead for a solution in Afghanistan. As a first step he requested a policy review from the Committee on Afghanistan, which was told to look into ‘the consequences, pluses, and minuses of a withdrawal’. Later he decided that this committee of old men was a brake on progress and abolished it.7
Some Western accounts said that Gorbachev gave the generals a year to finish the job by military means, and that in 1985–6 the pace of the fighting was increased to the highest level of the war. Kryuchkov, always a hostile witness, claimed that Gorbachev first criticised the Ministry of Defence for not prosecuting the war more energetically, but soon swung to the other extreme.8 There were of course some major military operations in 1985, notably the Kunar offensive in May–June. The Special Forces Brigade was introduced in the same year, as the Russians moved away from massive ground operations towards more flexible actions in support of the Afghan army, backed where necessary by long-range bombers from Soviet territory. But Soviet casualties peaked in the period before Gorbachev came to power and began to fall from May 1985 onwards. That is hardly compatible with a ‘Gorbachev surge’.9
Whatever the truth of the story, Gorbachev made up his mind well before the year had expired. In October 1985 he summoned Babrak Karmal to Moscow and raised the prospect of Soviet withdrawal. Karmal was shocked to realise that the Russians needed him less than he needed them. He went white and said, ‘If you withdraw the troops now, next time you will have to send in a million.’10 Gorbachev told him that Afghanistan would have to be able to defend itself by the summer of 1986. The Soviet Union would no longer help with troops, though it would continue to supply military equipment. Karmal should forget about socialism, share power with others, including the mujahedin leaders and others who were now his enemies, and restore the rights of religion and the religious leaders.
Anatoli Chernyaev, the former Party official whom Gorbachev had appointed as his diplomatic adviser earlier in the year, commented in his diary, ‘Ten of our boys are dying every day. The people are disenchanted and ask: How long are our troops going to remain there? And when will the Afghans learn to defend themselves? The main thing is that there is no popular base, and without that no revolution can defend itself. What’s recommended is a sharp U-turn, back to free capitalism, to Afghan and Islamic values, to a real division of power with the opposition and even with the enemy… I advised that a compromise should be sought even with the leaders of the mujahedin, and of course with the emigration. Will Karmal go that far? Above all, is he capable, is he sufficiently in command of the situation, for his present enemies to go to meet him?’11
Gorbachev now made clear to the Politburo that he was determined to grasp the nettle. Deliberately playing on his listeners’ emotions, he read out letters received in the Central Committee from the parents of those who had died.12 Many were signed. Women spoke of the moral as well as the physical damage being done to their sons. Officers, and even one general, said that they were no longer able to explain to their men what the war was about. Soldiers complained that, because of the press restrictions, the newspapers were reporting that all the fighting was being done by the Afghan army, which was the opposite of the truth. ‘In whose name are we in Afghanistan? Do the Afghans themselves want us to do our “international duty” in their country? Is it worth the lives of our boys, who don’t understand what they are fighting for? What are you doing, throwing young recruits against professional killers and gangsters? You people in the Politburo made a mistake, and it is up to you to put it right—the sooner the better, while every day sees more casualties.’ The Politburo agreed with Gorbachev’s conclusion that the object of Soviet policy should now be to build up the Afghan state and leave.13
Gorbachev went public in February 1986, when he told the delegates to the XXVIIth Party Congress in Moscow that the Soviet troops would leave once a political solution had been negotiated which left Afghanistan as a friendly, independent, and non-aligned state, with guarantees against external interference in its affairs.
Although the war was by now increasingly unpopular among the people and the military, it was not of course enough for Gorbachev simply to take the decision to leave. He had also to face up to a difficult problem of domestic politics which has puzzled other nations finding themselves in similar circumstances. How could the Russians withdraw their army safely, with honour, without looking as if they were simply cutting and running, and without appearing to betray their Afghan allies or their own soldiers who had died? The 40th Army had not been defeated on the battlefield; but how was the obvious blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union and its army to be avoided?
Moreover, Gorbachev had to persuade the other parties to the war—the mujahedin, eternally warring among themselves but determined to get rid of the godless Communists in Kabul; the Pakistanis, who wanted to see a friendly Islamist government there; and the Americans, many of whom wished to wipe out the memory of defeat in Vietnam by making the Russians pay the highest possible price in blood and humiliation, at whatever cost in Russian, or indeed Afghan, lives. It is not surprising that the negotiations went on much longer than Gorbachev had envisaged.
The first need was to beef up the Afghan government. The Russians had lost faith in Babrak Karmal: they found him weak, indecisive, and increasingly addicted to drink. In April 1986 they decided that he must go. Gorbachev called on him in a Kremlin hospital where he was being treated for kidney trouble, but failed to get him to leave quietly. Karmal returned to Kabul in a huff and on 1 May Kryuchkov was sent to have another go at him. Their first meeting was interrupted by a noisy street demonstration of support for Karmal. Kryuchkov said coldly that he knew perfectly well how such demonstrations were organised and within five minutes the demonstrators had dispersed. On that visit Kryuchkov got nowhere. But he returned to Kabul a few days later and, after twenty solid hours of persuasion, Karmal finally agreed to resign.14 The reason given publicly was that he was suffering from ill-health, a line which was somewhat dented when the Soviet doctors, who had not been properly briefed, reported that his health was fine.15 He was replaced by the younger and more effective Najibullah, the head of the secret police, the KhAD. Karmal hung on as President, without effective power, until Najibullah was elected to the post in November 1986. He then went to Moscow—ostensibly for medical treatment, but actually into permanent exile—and died there a decade later.
Najibullah was not without his critics. A GRU analysis of April 1986 showed, once again, the divergence of views between parts of the Soviet military, who favoured the Khalq faction and their officers in the army, and the KGB, who favoured the Parcham faction represented by Karmal and Najibullah. Speculating on rumours that Najibullah might succeed Karmal, the GRU analysts said that Afghan politicians regarded him as a strong personality. But they feared the power he had exercised through the KhAD, which he had exploited for his own purposes, and whose brutalities he had done nothing to mitigate. Under his regime, the Pul-i Charkhi prison had filled up with Khalqists. He was notoriously a Pushtun nationalist. He was regularly accused of allowing theft, bribery, and corruption on a scale previously unknown. The GRU were not at all sure of his loyalty to the Soviet Union: he had not studied there and, unlike many other Afghan Communist leaders, he had no military experience. The GRU concluded, ‘He will not be able to unite the party, the army, and the people to bring about peace.’16
These views were not shared by General Varennikov, the most senior soldier in Afghanistan at the time. Najibullah’s candidature was also favoured by Kryuchkov. His Pushtun nationalism undermined his ability to persuade the Tajiks and others of the virtues of his Policy of National Reconciliation—an inability which was to prove fatal in the civil war which followed the Soviet withdrawal. But there were no other obvious candidates. And whatever Najibullah’s weaknesses, most observers, then and since, agreed that he had many of the qualities of an
