Afgantsy

Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan] in a manner which does not damage Soviet security.’²⁴ This letter too received no response.

Now, in 1987, Moscow stepped up the tempo. In September Shevardnadze told US Secretary of State George Shultz (1920–) that ‘we will leave Afghanistan. It may be in five months or a year.’²⁵ Shultz was struck with this news, but believed that it would fall foul of the right-wingers in Reagan’s cabinet. He kept it to himself for weeks, for fear he would be accused of going soft on Moscow.²⁶

Three months later Gorbachev told Reagan that he agreed that Afghanistan should be neutral, independent, and pluralistic. Afghanistan was not a socialist state. How it developed was a matter for the Afghans themselves. The Soviet Union needed a friendly Afghanistan, but was not seeking bases there. Both the Americans and the Russians should back the process of National Reconciliation. The Americans should cease their support for the mujahedin. Once there was an agreed date for the withdrawal of Soviet forces, they would no longer participate in military operations. But the two men did not settle on any matter of substance. Reagan even suggested— bizarrely—that the Kabul government should disband its army.²⁷ Gorbachev left Washington with the impression that the Americans were happy to leave the Russians to flounder and even to hamper the departure of their troops.

The Russians and the Americans later disagreed on what had passed at this meeting, each believing that the other had failed to take the opportunity to make a positive move. The Russians believed that Reagan had indicated that he was willing to cut off supplies to the mujahedin. Shevardnadze so informed Najibullah—and, rather incautiously, the Afghan press—in January 1988. Shultz issued a furious denial. The Soviet Foreign Ministry asked Jack Matlock, by then ambassador in Moscow, for a clarification. After consulting Washington, he replied that the Americans would refrain from supplying the mujahedin if the Soviets cut off military supplies to the Kabul government. This was not of course a deal that the Russians could easily accept, and in the event both sides continued to supply their proteges. The Russians retained an obscure feeling that they had been somehow double- crossed.

Matlock believed in later years that agreement on an orderly withdrawal, including a provision for the Americans to cease aid to the mujahedin without the Soviets having to cut off support for Kabul, could have been reached in 1986 or 1987 if Gorbachev had been willing to engage Reagan earlier. Whether the domestic politics of either side would have permitted that is a very open question.²⁸

On 1 April 1988 the Politburo met to consider the outcome of the Geneva negotiations. The Americans were now ready to sign, provided that there was no mention of military aid to the mujahedin. Chernyaev thought that the issue was now moot: the mujahedin would get their aid whatever the final agreement said, and the Russians were preparing to withdraw their troops whether or not the agreement was signed. Gorbachev asked for views. Everyone agreed that the Soviet Union should sign. Gorbachev gave the news to Najibullah in Tashkent ten days later; he took it with apparent equanimity.²⁹

The agreements were finally signed in Geneva on 14 April 1988 under the aegis of the United Nations. A bilateral agreement between the Kabul government and Pakistan provided for non-interference and non- intervention. The Russians and the Americans signed a declaration on international guarantees. And there were provisions for the Soviet troops to withdraw in two stages by 15 February 1989. The mujahedin were not a party and refused to accept the terms. This opened the way to the fall of the Najibullah regime and the subsequent murderous civil war: the nightmare that Gorbachev had feared when he confided to Chernyaev in September 1987 that the Soviet withdrawal might be followed by a bloodbath ‘for which we would not be forgiven, either by the Third World, or by the shabby Western liberals who have spent the last ten years lambasting us for occupying the place’.³⁰

Shevardnadze signed in Geneva with a heavy heart. ‘One would have thought I would have been happy: no more coffins were coming home. We’ll close the account: both of the deaths and of the drain on our resources, which had reached 60 billion roubles… It was hard for me to realise that I was the Foreign Minister who had signed what was certainly not an agreement about a victory. There aren’t many examples of that in Russian or Soviet history. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the people we had trained up, pushed into a revolution, and were now abandoning to face a mortal foe alone.’³¹ Such sentiments were to affect the policy advice he gave over the next two years.

‘We will leave the country in a deplorable situation,’ he told the Politburo on his return, ‘ruined cities and villages, a paralysed economy. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Our withdrawal will be regarded as a major political and military defeat. Within the Party and among the people the attitude to our departure is ambiguous. We must at least announce that the introduction of our troops was a gross error, that even then the experts and the public were against that adventure… We may not be able to distance ourselves easily from the past by arguing that we do not bear responsibility for our predecessors.’ He suggested that ten to fifteen thousand Soviet troops should be left behind to support the regime, a proposal clearly at odds with the agreement he had just signed. Kryuchkov supported him. Gorbachev reacted strongly to what he called ‘Shevardnadze’s hawkish scream’. It did not matter, he said, whether Najibullah survived or not. The legal basis for the Soviet withdrawal meant that it could not be compared with the way the Americans had bolted from Vietnam. Everything possible had been done to limit the negative consequences of the war.³²

Disagreements about how far the Russians should assist Najibullah—if necessary by using military force— continued to bedevil Soviet policymaking until well after the withdrawal was completed. Shevardnadze and Kryuchkov continued their hawkish stance, opposed for the most part by the military.

The First Phase of the Withdrawal: Summer 1988

The Defence Minister, General Yazov, had already issued plans for the withdrawal. The total Soviet force now numbered about a hundred thousand. Half would leave by 15 August 1988, the remainder by 15 February 1989. The routes would be the same as those for the original invasion, but in reverse: in the west from Kandahar via Shindand and Herat to Kushka; in the east over the Salang Pass to Khairaton and across the Friendship Bridge to Termez.

The first move was to bring outlying garrisons into their parent regiments. The garrisons on the eastern border with Pakistan—Jalalabad, Gardez, and Ghazni—were withdrawn completely. So were the southward-facing garrisons in Kandahar and Lashkar Gar. The Russians also pulled out of their positions in the north-east in Kunduz and Faisabad. By the end of the first phase, the Soviet forces were concentrated between Shindand and Kushka in the west, and between Kabul and the great supply base of Khairaton in the east.

The garrison from Jalalabad was the first to leave. A tribunal was hastily erected on the parade ground for the benefit of the senior Soviet officers and Afghan local politicians. A group of uncommunicative UN military observers was there to ensure that the Geneva Agreements were properly carried out. Behind the tribunal was a buffet loaded with ham, sausage, cheese—things the garrison never normally saw. At dawn the armoured vehicles were drawn up on the square, their crews beside them. Their faces were grim, unsmiling, exhausted, as they listened to the endless speeches. Their officers congratulated them on having fulfilled their ‘international duty’. Crowds of Afghans gathered to wave them goodbye. They threw bouquets of flowers at the departing troops. Among the flowers were other small gifts: stones and pieces of camel dung.³³ Then the orchestra played the traditional march, ‘The Slav Girl’s Farewell’, and the column started on the hundred mile journey to Kabul, through the passes where the British Army of the Indus had been wiped out in January 1842. The battle helicopters clattered overhead to protect it from attack, turning aside to investigate when little puffs of gun smoke from the mountainsides revealed the presence of snipers.

‘All along the way,’ wrote David Gai, a Soviet journalist who accompanied the column, ‘was what remained of the roadside kishlaks. Not one was undamaged: the walls were overturned, the houses were smashed, the trees were twisted. The fields were bare and uncultivated, the irrigation systems had been turned into marsh. And who had gained from the way everything had been reduced to useless collapse? How much effort would have to be put into restoring life to that dead space? The futility of those 3,200 (or however many it was) days of war made one’s eyes burn with shame… The only good thing was that the boys were going home.’³⁴