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Leadership of Mohammad Najibullah

Policy failures and the stalemate that ensued after the Soviet intervention led the Soviet leadership to become highly critical of Karmal's leadership. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was able to depose Karmal and replace him with Mohammad Najibullah. Karmal's leadership was seen as a failure by the Soviet Union because of the rise of violence and crime during his administration. Najibullah, another Parchamite, attempted to end the insurgency through a policy of accommodation and power sharing known as the National Reconciliation. He reversed several of his predecessor's unpopular reforms, abolished the one-party system, reinstated Islam as the state religion (though still maintaining a fairly secular legal and political setup), replaced the Revolutionary Council with a republican presidency and bicameral parliament, removed communist symbols deemed "provocative" to the opposition from the country's national emblem, dropped the "Democratic" prefix from the country's name, offered amnesty to mujahideen fighters and called for a six-month ceasefire in which fighting would stop in exchange for political negotiations intended to create a coalition government between the PDPA and various rebel groups in an attempt to end the country's crisis.

The talks did not succeed in reconciling the government and the mujahideen, though it was noted that they increased the government's popularity among urban areas, stabilized the armed forces and led to a round of defections from disillusioned mujahideen fighters to government militias. Despite this, the only insurgent group to fully reconcile with the government was the Shia -dominated Afghan Hizbullah. A mujahideen boycott of the 1988 elections, which were the first-ever Afghan elections to allow competing political parties, foiled Najibullah's attempt to reconstruct the nation's parliament, who in turn ordered 50 seats be left vacant to offer to the mujahideen if they decided to reconcile at a later date. Moreover, though Najibullah presented himself personally as a pious Muslim and restored the legal status of Islam, his government was unable to acquire the same Islamic credentials that the mujahideen forces wielded, which in turn meant that many of his reforms were not nearly as successful at convincing the devout, conservative rural and tribal population as Najibullah had hoped. Most importantly, Najibullah oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was to be done according to the Geneva Accords, which entailed a full removal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in exchange for the end of American and Pakistan support to the mujahideen.