By Dr Muhammad Shahid

Thirty years after Afghan president Dr. Najibullah’s violent overthrow, Kabul’s enduring failure to build a legitimate, rules-based state continues to project instability across its borders.

Thirty years ago tonight, on September 27, 1996, the trajectory of modern Afghan history was violently altered. As Taliban forces surged into Kabul, breaching the diplomatic sanctuary of the United Nations compound where he had sheltered for four years, former President Dr. Mohammad Najibullah was seized, tortured, and hanged alongside his brother from a traffic post near the presidential palace.

The image of his body left hanging under the streetlights became the grim, theatrical introduction of the Taliban’s first regime to the capital. Three decades later, as the country endures another cycle of international isolation, sweeping governance restrictions, and economic collapse under the same movement, September 27 remains far more than a dark historical footnote. It stands as a structural warning about Afghanistan’s recurring inability to break free from cycles of violence, extrajudicial vengeance, and state collapse.

A complex legacy, reconsidered

In life, Najibullah — a former physician, head of the KHAD intelligence service, and the last leader of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) — was a deeply polarizing figure. To the mujahideen factions who fought his Soviet-backed government, he embodied an authoritarian regime propped up by foreign occupation.

Yet with the passage of time and the fading of civil-war-era partisanship, assessments of his tenure have grown more nuanced. Facing the withdrawal of Soviet support in the late 1980s, Najibullah attempted to rebrand his government through a policy of “National Reconciliation” — shedding strict Marxist doctrine, embracing Afghan nationalism, and pursuing a negotiated power-sharing peace. His warnings that the collapse of a centralized state would plunge Afghanistan into unchecked factionalism and radical extremism proved, in hindsight, prophetic.

When Kabul fell to mujahideen forces in 1992, Najibullah chose to remain in the country, living out his final years under the nominal protection of the UN mission — a decision that reflected either a stubborn belief in his own continued relevance to Afghan political life, or simply the absence of any safer alternative.

The unbroken thread of impunity

The manner of Najibullah’s killing set a precedent that would come to define much of the conflict that followed: the total erosion of due process, the violation of diplomatic protections, and the deliberate use of public terror to consolidate political control.

The parallels between that autumn in 1996 and Afghanistan’s present reality are difficult to ignore. Three decades apart, the underlying structural failures of the Afghan state remain strikingly consistent:

• The fragility of diplomatic norms — the 1996 breach of the UN compound foreshadowed a pattern of disregard for international protections and institutional safeguards that continues to characterize governance in Afghanistan today.
• The cycle of vengeance — Najibullah’s execution signaled that political transitions in Afghanistan would be settled by force rather than through any social contract or legal framework, a pattern that continues to shadow Afghan governance.
• The missing consensus — the question that consumed Najibullah’s final years, how to build an inclusive national state structure capable of withstanding both external interference and internal polarization, remains as unresolved today as it was in 1996.

History as a warning

As Afghan families mark another year under restrictive governance, economic hardship, and constrained public life, the memory of September 27 stands as a reminder of what follows when dialogue and institutional integrity are replaced entirely by force.

Najibullah’s execution was meant by those who carried it out to close a chapter and terrorize a population into submission. Instead, thirty years on, it endures as an open wound and a warning from the past: a testament to the price Afghanistan continues to pay whenever the rule of law is sacrificed to raw power.

About writer: Dr Shahid is a current affairs/defence analyst and can be approached at: shahid152001@yahoo.com