4 September 2005
The Tanai affair
By A. R. Siddiqi
AFTER a stay of over a decade and a half in Pakistan, General Shahnawaz Tanai, defence minister in the regime of President Najibullah, is reportedly back in Kabul. Whether during his long stay in Pakistan he had ever gone to his country or travelled abroad is not known.
Tanai reportedly drove from Islamabad early last month to Kabul. His dramatic return to Kabul may throw yet another spanner in the works of the none-too-easy Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship.
The Afghan press, led by Watandar, an Afghan Persian (Dari) daily, has directly accused the ISI of a hand in the Tanai affair. The paper came out with an editorial captioned: “Mr Tanai’s arrival in Afghanistan is a new game of Pakistan.”
A dyed-in-the-blue communist and a pillar of the Najibullah regime, Tanai was a dubious character attempting an abortive coup against his own friend and president, Najibullah, and seeking refuge in a hostile Pakistan - above all - joining hands with a fundamentalist like Engineer Gulbadin Hekmatyar.
The monthly Defence Journal, Karachi (Vol. XVI, Nos. 4&5, 1990), had editorially noted at the time that three Afghan planes and a helicopter carrying the defecting general and his entourage landed at Parachinar, headquarters of the Kurram agency, 12km from the Pakistan border. First to land was an Antonov 12 transport carrying 12 escapees at 1.30pm followed by an MI-17 chopper with the VIP himself, his family and close collaborators at 2.30 pm. The defection or the flight plan thus took little more than two hours to complete - a brilliant logistical feat in its own right. Having left his family in Pakistan’s safe haven, Gen Tanai, together with some of his senior colleagues, drove back (the air transports flying them into Pakistan having been already quarantined) to Afghanistan to be technically there mainly with an eye on foreign publicity, without running any unnecessary risk to his personal security.
The reaction in Pakistan to Tanai’s coup de theatre was electric - at once expressive of joy and surprise. The way the foreign office reacted might have been closer to unconcealed personal enthusiasm over a much-wanted but largely unexpected event than to a measured and calculated diplomatic response. The foreign office readily lent its ear and voice to the first reports about Najib having been either already killed or holed up in the Soviet embassy in Kabul. The success of the coup was taken for granted until Najib appeared on TV at 10 pm the same night to prove that he was physically there and in effective control of the state apparatus and that the coup had failed.
Whether the Tanai coup was a serious attempt at state seizure or just an ingeniously-contrived escape plan, remains an open question. The first Kabul broadcast about the coup at midday (March 6, 1990) was followed, some four hours later, by another announcing its failure and the dismissal of the coup leader. It was all over within four hours.
Two Afghan top politicians-turned diplomats, Assadullah Sarwary and Mohammad Gulabzoi, respectively their country’s envoys to Aden and Moscow, were said to have been intimately connected with the coup. Assadullah Sarwary, an old comrade of Tanai, was the chief of the Afghan intelligence under Nur Mohammad Taraki. He was a Khalqi hardliner of the PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) known as the assassin of the rival Parcham faction. Gulabzoi was minister of interior before being exiled on a diplomatic assignment to Moscow.
Tanai himself was recognized as a hawk and a sworn enemy of the Mujahideen. In Najib’s own words Tanai was the ‘so-called’ hardliner who would advocate a ‘tit-for-tat’ policy against Pakistan. He would even urge targeting Scud missiles at Islamabad. He sought a ‘military solution’ as opposed to the party’s policy of ‘national reconciliation’.
Among the Pakistan-based Mujahideen groups, the only person to have openly supported and confessed to close links with the coup was Hekmatyar, leader of the mainstream Hizb-i-Islami. He owned and supported the coup as a joint operation master-minded by Tanai with his prior knowledge.
He declared: “If the coup is successful, the Tanai forces and Mujahideen around Kabul should form a joint council and then hold elections after six months. Otherwise the jihad against Najib will go on. I was aware of the coup beforehand and had relations with them. Even the interim Afghan government (AIG) knew about it but declined to take part.”
Hekmatyar spoke too soon in the hope and the belief that the coup had succeeded. In a display of enthusiasm uncharacteristic of the man known for his stark pragmatism, he forgot that by supporting a pillar of Najib’s secular and Sovietized regime, he was actually and, quite inevitably, compromising his own ideological credentials.
All the other heads of the Mujahideen groups (Tanzimat) roundly condemned Hekmatyar for supporting Tanai, a communist, even one attempting to topple Najibullah’s secular regime.
Professor Burhanuddin saw no ‘visible’ differences between Najib and Tanai. “Whatever Hekmatyar does is his own business in which the Mujahideen have no contribution.”
Professor Sibghatullah Mujaddedi (Jabhe Milli Islami Afghanistan) while answering a question about his attitude towards a Tanai-Hekmatyar coalition government said: “We will continue our jihad against them.”
Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf urged intensifying the struggle to topple the regime and exploit the differences between the Khalqis and the Parchamis.
Surprisingly enough, there has been no official version as yet forthcoming from Islamabad about the protracted stay in Pakistan of General Tanai, his entourage and family and his reported return to Kabul and his present whereabouts.
The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.