Afgantsy

For their part the Russians continued to supply Kabul with massive quantities of food, fuel, ammunition, and military equipment. A Soviet military delegation led by Varennikov visited Afghanistan at the beginning of May 1989 to discuss ways and means.⁵ By 1990 Soviet aid to the Kabul government had reached a value of $3 billion a year. The Afghan army and air force were entirely dependent on these supplies, and fought well against the mujahedin as long as the supplies continued.

A major battle erupted around the city of Jalalabad almost immediately after the 40th Army had left. The fall of this city would, the Pakistanis believed, be followed by the fall of Kabul and enable their protege Hekmatyar to seize power.⁶ The mujahedin began their offensive at the beginning of March 1989, capturing an outlying post by bribing the officer in charge.⁷ They then attempted to take the airport, but were repulsed with heavy losses, compounded by the failure of individual mujahedin commanders to agree on a common plan. Early in the battle the mujahedin executed a number of prisoners, which reinforced the determination of the government soldiers to resist.

Once again Najibullah asked for Soviet air support. Gorbachev called an emergency meeting on 10 March to consider the request. It was rejected.⁸ But further attacks were broken up by the government’s own aircraft and by April the government troops were on the offensive. They bombarded the mujahedin with over four hundred Scud missiles developed from the Germans’ wartime V2 rockets and fired by the Soviet crews who had remained behind. Like the V2, you got no warning of the Scud’s arrival until it had exploded. ‘The mujahedin, who, one would have thought, were already inured to the use in their homeland of every kind of weapon,’ wrote Greshnov, who visited Jalalabad at the time, ‘…were psychologically unable to cope when these rockets were employed against them… Losses among the civilian population could be counted in thousands, and the battle itself acquired such a massive and brutal character that it could be compared in military terms perhaps only with the battle for Stalingrad.’⁹ The soldiers cleared the road from Kabul—the old ‘English’ road, along which the Army of the Indus had retreated in 1842—and relieved the city. By the time the battle was over, in July 1989, the mujahedin had lost more than three thousand killed and wounded. One mujahedin field commander lamented that ‘the battle of Jalalabad lost us the credit won in ten years of fighting’. In the eyes of Brigadier Mohamed Yousaf, the ISI officer responsible for supplying the mujahedin with arms for much of the war, ‘The Jehad has never recovered from Jalalabad.’ He was writing just after the war was over and predicted that the ragged end to the war would ‘not bring peace or stability to Afghanistan or the border areas of Pakistan’.¹⁰ His words turned out to be prophetic.

Kandahar had always been a dangerous city for foreigners, full of sullen Pushtun bazaars, where people assumed that if you spoke their language it was because you were a spy. Greshnov visited it with a party of foreign journalists in the summer of 1989, a year after the Soviet garrison had left in the first phase of the withdrawal.

The city looked very different from his previous visit in 1983. ‘We drove through the green belt and past the first roadside shops. Everywhere the same hostile, cautious looks. A city of enemies, soaked in hatred for the Soviets. What has changed here? Well, almost nothing, if you ignore the fact that Kandahar has been largely destroyed. I had not seen the consequences of the Soviet air raid which took place on 8 December 1986. Now I saw for the first time how Kandahar looked without the Soviet forces.

‘We stopped opposite the place where there used to be a coffee shop under a sign saying “Toyota”. It was a part of the town I knew well. But the coffee shop was no longer there… Everything was recognisable, but everything was now different. Children clung to the BTRs. “Ingrizi? Feransavi? Amrikai?”… I calmly said that I was a shuravi, a Soviet. They didn’t believe me until I let out a stream of good Russian swearwords. They were overwhelmed by a childish delight which had not been driven out of them by the experience of war: perhaps they’re the only people in Kandahar who did not remember us with hatred. Shoving their dirty fingers into their mouths to show they were hungry, they cried in Russian, “Soviet, Soviet, fuck your mother, good, give us baksheesh, give us a cigarette!”¹¹

Kandahar was still under government control, but it was being regularly bombarded by the forces of Hekmatyar. It had endured two massive attacks in the past few months. Eighty per cent of the shopkeepers in the bazaar, the city governor told Greshnov, were mujahedin taking a rest from fighting. They used to come in for two to three days a month. Now they were coming in for fifteen to twenty days at a time. The number of mujahedin in the region had grown four- or fivefold since the departure of the Soviet forces. They were honest fellows, said the governor. They had no interest in destroying the city; they merely wanted to liberate it. The governor himself was in discreet touch with their leaders.

What were things coming to, wondered Greshnov, when the official governor of a major city started talking about ‘honest mujahedin’?¹²

The Fall of Kabul

In 1989 and 1990 Najibullah’s government had some success in strengthening the armed forces at its disposal. The KhAD had financed the creation of militia forces drawn from the former mujahedin: 100,000 former insurgents are said to have joined the government militias. The 17th Division in Herat—whose mutiny in March 1979 had helped launch the resistance to the Communists—now consisted of 3,400 regular troops and 14,000 militiamen. According to one calculation, the total numbers of security forces available to the government from all sources in 1988 was almost 300,000.¹³

The respite was shortlived. The rebels had not yet learned how to conduct conventional warfare and throughout 1989 the government forces were mostly successful at beating off their attacks.¹⁴ But by the end of the summer of 1990, Afghan government forces were everywhere on the defensive. Masud by now commanded a force of twenty thousand men with tanks and artillery. By the first half of 1991, the government controlled only 10 per cent of Afghanistan, the city of Khost had finally fallen to the rebels, the morale of the army had collapsed, and desertion was rife. Shevardnadze and Kryuchkov had continued to oppose moves to cut off supplies to Najibullah. But Shevardnadze had resigned from the Soviet government in December 1990 and Kryuchkov was arrested after the abortive coup in August 1991. Najibullah no longer had a senior advocate in the Soviet government. The Soviet Union itself was on the verge of economic and political collapse. An Afghan official visiting Moscow at the time remarked, ‘We saw all these empty stores in Moscow and long queues for a loaf of bread and we thought: what can the Russians give us?’¹⁵

Yeltsin, the coming power in Russian politics, had no interest in spending Russian money to ameliorate the consequences of a Soviet disaster. His officials began to talk openly of getting rid of Najibullah in favour of an Islamic government. That autumn Najibullah wrote bitterly to Shevardnadze, ‘I didn’t want to be president, you talked me into it, insisted on it, and promised support. Now you are throwing me and the Republic of Afghanistan to its fate.’¹⁶ In December 1991 the representatives of the KGB finally abandoned Kabul and their long ambition to control Afghan affairs.¹⁷ Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and his people had begun to deal directly with mujahedin leaders as part of their overall aim of wresting control of foreign policy from Gorbachev’s government.¹⁸ In January 1992 Yeltsin’s new Russian government cut off military supplies and fuel to Najibullah.

The rot spread very fast. Najibullah’s air force, his most effective weapon against the mujahedin, was grounded for lack of fuel. The rebels continued to receive supplies from Pakistan. They began to capture major cities and terrorist acts started to multiply in Kabul itself. In January 1992, on the fifth anniversary of the launching of his Policy of National Reconciliation, Najibullah publicly blamed the Soviet Union for the disasters that had overtaken Afghanistan and called the day of the Soviet withdrawal ‘the Day of National Salvation’. But his government was now beyond any salvation.

The Russians hung on in Kabul for as long as they could. By now the embassy had been turned into a fortress. It was surrounded by a double concrete wall with steel gates. Before they left in February 1989, Soviet military engineers had spent the whole year building an immense air-raid shelter just by the administrative block. The shelter had its own supply of water and electricity, an air-filter system, a substantial stock of food, and everything else that was necessary for the whole staff of the embassy to hold out there for some time. A large refrigerator was designated as a morgue. A separate secure apartment was set aside for Najibullah in case he should seek political asylum.¹⁹ There was an atmosphere of hectic but suppressed tension inside the