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The Endgame in Afghanistan
| Article
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19989 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,230 Words |
| Author
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James Phillips
James Phillips is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation
in Washington, D.C. |
The April 15 collapse of Afghanistan's communist dictatorship imposed by Soviet tanks in December 1979 caught many Western observers by surprise. After all, President Najibullah (who, like many Afghans, has only one name) already had survived for more than three years following the February 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops. This withdrawal, required under the terms of the UN-sponsored Geneva accords of 1988, widely was assumed at the time to spell the end of Najibullah's communist regime. But the wily Afghan dictator, propped up by $400 million in Soviet military aid per month, managed to keep a firm grip on power until early 1992.
In the spring of 1992 Najibullah apparently overplayed his hand by trying to purge military and militia commanders who had developed independent power bases in northern Afghanistan. These commanders, many of whom had developed secret understandings with the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors), promptly defected to the resistance. As his regime rapidly imploded, Najibullah sought to flee the capital of Kabul on April 15, was blocked by militia forces loyal to the mujahideen, and took refuge in a UN compound in Kabul. Subsequently, he is believed to have secretly escaped to exile in India.
The collapse of Najibullah's communist dictatorship ignited a power struggle within the broad anticommunist resistance coalition that overthrew the regime. The Afghan resistance, which fought and won a 14-year war against the Soviet Union and its puppet Afghan communists, splintered into warring factions. This is not surprising, given the fact that the resistance was a decentralized, ad hoc alliance of eight major Sunni resistance groups based in Pakistan and seven smaller Shiite groups based in Iran.
Persistent infighting among rival Afghan resistance groups threatens to jeopardize the foreign support that the new Afghan government needs to rebuild Afghanistan. The growing perception that Afghanistan could slip into chaos and become another Lebanon, replete with anti-Western fundamentalist fanatics, already has undermined support for the Afghan cause in the West. The U.S. government, which has provide more than $2 billion in military and humanitarian aid to the Afghans since the 1979 Soviet invasion, is particularly sensitive about the Lebanon analogy, due to the bitter aftertaste of the American intervention in Lebanon from 1982 to 1984.
It would be a critical mistake if the United States, which provided crucial military, economic, and diplomatic support for the resistance, turned its back on its former Afghan
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