Tag Archives: Najibullah

Losing Afghanistan (It Can’t Be Won)


The Taliban hanged Najibullah, the last Soviet-backed Afghan president, in the streets of Kabul in 1996

Earlier this year, the Taliban tried to assassinate Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, during a ceremony marking the 16th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime. The irony is that as the Taliban demonstrates that, by the classic calculus of guerrilla warfare, it is unlikely to lose (which means that NATO will) in Afghanistan, Karzai’s situation is uncomfortably similar to that of Najibullah in the late 1980s.
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