Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
The last Soviet soldier crossed the bridge out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989 and the government they left behind lasted three more years. Gorbachev had decided on withdrawal within a year of taking office and needed three more to arrange one that did not look like a defeat. The Geneva accords of April 1988 were signed by Afghanistan and Pakistan with the superpowers as guarantors, and provided for a Soviet withdrawal in nine months and for non-interference — which neither guarantor observed, both continuing to supply their clients. The withdrawal itself was conducted with great care, in two phases, with the commander General Gromov walking across the Friendship Bridge at Termez last and on foot for the cameras. Some 620,000 Soviet personnel had served in the country and 15,000 had died. Western and Pakistani expectations were that Najibullah's government would fall within months. It did not. It held Kabul and the cities for three years, because the mujahideen were seven quarrelling parties with no capacity to take a defended city, and because Soviet supplies continued. What killed it was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, which ended the fuel and the money; the army disintegrated in the spring of 1992 and Kabul fell to militias that immediately began shelling each other. Najibullah took refuge in a United Nations compound and was hanged from a traffic post by the Taliban in 1996. The war also broke the Soviet army's confidence in its own leadership. The returning soldiers had a name, the Afghantsy, an experience the state would not discuss and a country that had not been told there was a war, and the glasnost press began publishing the casualty figures in 1989.
- Year: 1988 CE
- Category: Military
