Aftermath

Although the Soviet Union completed an (incomplete) military withdrawal by February 1989 and Najibullah's Watan regime effectively collapsed by early 1992, Afghanistan remained a hollow shell of a state with millions of its inhabitants living in precarious states in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere by the early 1990s. What, in sum, was the damage wrought by the events of 1978-1992 in Afghanistan? How had the country and region been transformed?

This section seeks to answer these questions by providing an overview of the state of Afghanistan and its refugee diaspora at the time of the collapse of the Najibullah regime, seeking to underscore the changes in demographics that the 1980s had unleashed.