Shahnawaz Tanai

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 (ISI). 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. However, most neutral sources doubt this claim, partly because Western sources have tended to play up the ISI's role in the Pashtun discontent, and partly because of Tanai's unpopularity with Pakistan's army and intelligence—as opposed to the Pakistan Peoples Party in power when he fled to Pakistan.

In 2005 he 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 in the 2004 elections, but his movement was enrolled as the 29th political party for the 2004 elections, and it was expected that his influence would bringing back Afghan communists from Pakistan and elsewhere where they fled to play a political role.

Lieutenant General Shahnawaz Tanai (Russian: Шахнаваз Танай, Pashto/Urdu: شهنواز تڼی), is a former Soviet Afghan politician and a former general officer who served as the Chief of General Staff of the Afghan National Army until his defection to neighboring Pakistan following the failed coup d'etat in 1990.

On 6 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. Tanai had secret sporadic contacts with the hardline Islamist Hekmatyar. 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.

Besides commanding the Afghan National Army, his command assignments included the command of the artillery and director of the military intelligence as well as serving as minister of defense under President Mohammad Najibullah. He was a hardline member of the Khalq faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and leader of at least the majority of the Khalqist 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. A pillar of the communist regime, Tanai later attempted a coup against his former friend and President Mohammad Najibullah, before seeking refuge in a hostile Pakistan and working with fundamentalists such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

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 bloodshed that followed during the Saur Revolution. His first appointment was of Commander of the Kabul garrison.

Tanai was born in the village, named Dargai (not to be confused with a town in Pakistan), located in the Khost in Afghanistan to a poor ethnic Pashtun in 1950. He was educated in the Soviet Union where he first studied the infantry tactics and later excelling in leadership. He married in 1978.