Shahnawaz Tanai

Lieutenant General Shahnawaz Tanai is a former communist general. He was chief of Afghanistan's army under the Republic of Afghanistan. His military positions included Commander of Artillery, Chief of the Army Staff, Chief of the KHAD Intelligence Network and then Minister of Defense during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

A pillar of the Communist Regime, Tanai later attempted a coup against his former friend and President Mohammad Najibullah, seeking refuge in a hostile Pakistan and working with fundamentalists such as Engineer Gulbadin Hekmatyar.

He was a member of the Khalq faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and leader of at least the majority of the Khalqi faction since its former leader Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy was exiled as Ambassador to Moscow as part of the political preparation of the Soviet pullout, in September 1988.

Early years
Born in 1950 in the village of Dargai in the southern province of Khost. Tanai followed a classic military career, attending first the military academy and then university, specialising in infantry tactics. He later traveled to the Soviet Union to study leadership.

After the 1978 coup in which President Mohammed Daoud Khan was ousted and killed, Tanai was appointed head of Military Intelligence. He survived through the years of coups and bloodshed that followed during the Saur Revolution. His first appointment was of Commander of the Kabul garrison.

When Mohammad Hasan Sharq was selected by President Najibullah as the new Prime Minister, the position of Minister of Defense remained open for some time, but was finally awarded to General Tanai. Tanai himself was recognized as a hawk and a sworn enemy of the Mujahideen. He even urged targeting SCUD missiles at Islamabad. He sought a military solution, as opposed to the party's policy of national reconciliation.

In March 1990, 127 Khalqi military officers were arrested for an attempted coup. Twenty-seven officers escaped and later showed up at a press conference with Hikmatyar in Peshawar. Former Minister of Tribal Affairs, Bacha Gul Wafadar and Minister of Civil Aviation Hasan Sharq were among the conspirators. From his position as Defence Minister, Tanai pressured President Najibullah to release them.

Coup of March, 1990
In March 1990, when the trial of the Khalqi officers was about to start, Tanai launched a coup with the help of renegade mujahideen commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, against the then President Mohammad Najibullah.

He stated that he didn't disagree with President Najibullah's views, but rather with his policy on the military.


 * Najibullah was transferring all the privileges of the Army to the tribal militias and in particular to his special guard. I was against this because the Afghan Army was losing efficiency.

Hekmatyar ordered his fighters to intensify their attacks against the Kabul regime in support of Tanai. The success of the coup was taken for granted.

The Pakistan government's involvement in this abortive affair was transparently obvious. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's plea to the other six party leaders to aid Tanai and Hekmatyar was rebuked as a disgrace to the jihad. Most of the factions viewed Gral. Tanai as an opportunistic war criminal and hardline communist who had been responsible for the carpet-bombing of portions of the major western city of Herat in March 1979.

The expected uprising by Afghan Army didn't take place: Tanai had no direct control of troops inside Kabul. He ordered air strikes against government buildings (Air Force Commander Abdul Qadir Aqa was an accomplice who also later fled to Pakistan). The plot misfired and failed because of faulty communications.

President Najibulllad appeared on TV at 10 p.m. the same night to prove that he was physically there and in effective control of the state apparatus. The President gathered the support of important Parchami militias, including the elite Special Guard to defuse the plot.

Tanai was apparently also supported by those important Khalqis who remained in the Politburo, Assadullah Sarwary and Mohammad Gulabzoi, respectively their country's envoys to Aden and Moscow, were said to have been intimately connected with the coup and with Gral Tanai.

Sarwary, an old comrade of Tanai, was the chief of the Afghan intelligence under Nur Mohammad Taraki. He was a Khalqi hardliner known as the assassin of the rival Parcham faction. Gulabzoi was minister of interior before being exiled on a diplomatic assignment to Moscow.

Tanai escaped by helicopter to Pakistan where he was greeted and publicly accepted as an ally by Hekmatyar, but when the rebellion was losing strength, Tanai defected to the Taliban.

Eventually, he settled on Pakistan, where he lived in exile until August 4. He married in 1978, and has a daughter and two sons (the family is still in Pakistan).

Post-Taliban
Tanai is currently the leader of the Afghanistan Peace Movement (De Afghanistan De Solay Ghorzang Gond) party. The party is believed to be fielding a significant number of candidates around the country.

He recently returned to Khost province to make a political comeback. He drove from Islamabad to the border town of Torkham, where he crossed over to Afghanistan to be warmly received by his supporters. He was then escorted in a convoy of vehicles to Kabul, where he now resides.

The 55-year-old former general did not stand as a Presidential candidate. Tanai's movement was enrolled as the 29th political party for the 2004 elections, and its expected that his influence would bringing back Afghan communists from Pakistan and elsewhere where they fled to play a political role.

He has also campaigning for a bigger role for Pashtuns, former jihadi leaders and religious parties, and he openly criticizes United States policies that perpetuate the Afghan Northern Alliance domination in Kabul.

There were also allegations that Tanai had been sent by Pakistan to influence Afghanistan's politics in the post-Taliban period. He is also accused of working for Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence.

According to western diplomatic sources, Tanai has acted as an agent for ISI by providing the Taliban a skilled cadre of military officers from the Khalq faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to use his pilots to fly Mig-23, Sukhoi fighters of what was left of the Afghan Air Force, drive Soviet tanks and the use Soviet artillery.