Managing Withdrawal: Afghanistan as the Forgotten Example in Attempting Conflict Resolution and State Reconstruction

Abstract

Perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of new Russian memoir material, some excellent individual monographs, and a large variety of declassified documents, a full operational -political account of the Soviet Union's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan has yet to be written. This article, utilising openly published yet neglected sources, attempts to fill that gap. The final fate of the Najibullah regime, and the contradictory effect of the National Reconciliation Policy in Afghanistan itself, suggests four key lessons for international forces today as disengagement from both Iraq and Afghanistan again becomes a pressing issue, and as questions around re-creating stability within a failed state scenario again occupy the international community.

Anatomy of a surrogate: historical precedents and implications for contemporary counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism

“…Once the Communist government ran out of money the militias deserted to the Mujahidin, thereby helping to precipitate Najibullah's fall in April 1992. 57 Ultimately, of course, the co-option of militias by the counter-insurgent may be a result of circumstance rather than choice. In southern Iraq in 2004, an overstretched British Army was obliged by the security vacuum and its own limited numbers not only to accept the existence of Shia militias, but to actively employ them within the new Iraqi SSF.…”

Coming to terms with neopatrimonialism: Soviet and American nation-building projects in Afghanistan

“…During this process of reorganization, greater numbers of non-Communists were appointed to positions within the government and ulama, Sunni and Shi'ite alike were granted official recognition (Halliday and Tanin 1998, pp. 1368-1369, Marshall 2007.…”