On March 7, 1990, I was in Multan, Pakistan, in southern Punjab province. I can’t remember why; it had something to do with my duties as the Washington Post’s South Asia correspondent. In those primitive days before cell phones and the Internet, the home newsroom, mercifully, had great difficulty reaching a correspondent in the field, so we were often free to report as we chose, but we also had to monitor breaking news. My habit was to tune in by shortwave radio to the BBC for hourly world-news bulletins, supplemented by the occasional “Newshour” of in-depth, worldwide radio reporting. (It’s still a great program, and now easily accessed on an iPhone.)

That March day, the BBC reported that Shahnawaz Tanai, then the Defense Minister of Afghanistan, had launched a coup attempt against his President, Najibullah, and had mustered defecting air-force pilots to bomb Najibullah’s office. It was a big story; Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan only a year before, and the Central Intelligence Agency was still arming and funding mujahideen rebels who sought to overthrow Najibullah. I went to the Multan post office and telexed into Washington a quick news file, then headed for Islamabad, the capital, to report some more. The next day’s story, published on page A29 (such was the fate of Afghanistan stories in those heady days following the fall of the Berlin Wall), read:

The senior general and defense minister who attempted a coup against Afghan President Najibullah reportedly flew to Pakistan with his family today…For U.S. and Soviet policy-makers, who have spent billions of dollars during the last decade maneuvering against one another in Afghanistan, this week’s coup attempt was shaping up as a perilous turn of events…The faction of Afghan rebels benefiting most from the effort—those pledged to radical Islamic fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—espouses an ideology that is often hostile to the United States…

All these years later, Hekmatyar is still at large, probably based out of Pakistan, and he is still fighting the United States, leading a faction of fighters opposed to the government of President Hamid Karzai; Hekmatyar’s men also shoot regularly at American soldiers. And in Kabul, where I was last week, doing some research, the talk of potential coups d’etat is gathering once again as well.

Kabul is a somewhat steadier capital than it was a year ago. Mass casualty attacks on the city are down by about a third over last year, depending on how you count them. American and NATO troops are reducing their role in the war very rapidly, and the pace of their withdrawal from combat—to be replaced primarily by the Afghan National Army—will speed up during the next year. Even European diplomats normally skeptical of American military claims tend to see the security situation nationwide as manageable by Afghan troops, if also disturbingly violent and fragile.

The prevailing assumption within NATO governments, including the reëlected Obama Administration, is that while the military transition might work, the political transition from a Karzai-led government in Kabul to something new looks perilous. Presidential elections have been scheduled for early 2014, and President Karzai has declared that he intends to transfer power peacefully to a successor, following a national election. But holding a credible vote in 2014, managing the Taliban’s resistance to it, and finding candidates who, if elected, could hold together some minimally stable coalition of northern warlords and militias, Pashtun tribes, generals, and urban power brokers looks, well, hard.

The recent history of Afghanistan might suggest that a coup d’etat is more likely than a peaceful post-election handoff. Since 1973, seven out of the past nine Afghan Presidents have taken power in Kabul either by a coup or a military or guerrilla invasion, or both. (There was one relatively peaceful transfer of power during the Soviet occupation, and a second in the very early days of the mujahideen rebel government of the early nineteen-nineties.)

President Najibullah, for example, participated as a young man in the murderous overthrow of Hafizullah Amin by Soviet forces, in 1979. More than a decade later, after surviving Tanai’s attempt against him, he was overthrown and took refuge in a United Nations office in Kabul. Then in 1996, when the Taliban stormed the capital, their cadres beat Najibullah to death and hung his body above a Kabul traffic circle.

The history of coups in Afghanistan suggests that there is no easy way to describe the factionalism, personal ambition, tribal or other motivations that can precipitate a particular event—each has its own fingerprint. A second lesson is that coups in Kabul are hardly ever bolts from the blue. Loose talk, portentous personal conflicts, and direct, intimate conversation of a Shakespearian type usually precede the strike. Killer and killed usually know one another.

That was the case with Tanai and Najibullah. They had come of age as leaders of rival factions within the Afghan communist party during the nineteen-seventies. Later, Tanai was a general; Najibullah was more of a K.G.B. man and a politician. But they saw themselves as factional rivals. For years after Tanai’s attempt, Najibullah regaled visitors with the story of how his general had betrayed him—even after accepting a meal of ashak, a traditional Afghan meat dish, at Najibullah’s home, served by the President’s wife. In Afghanistan, the betrayal of hospitality is a deadly sin; attempted murder belongs more to the venal category.

I had assumed in recent years that Tanai was dead, by one means or another; he had chosen a life of hazards. So I was surprised last week when Afghan friends mentioned that he was alive and well and living under armed protection in Kabul. He had returned from Pakistan, formed a political party, and even listed himself as a candidate for the Presidency in the last election; he didn’t win the office that way, either. I asked Tanai if I could visit; he agreed.

A gunman in the parking lot of his building called up to confirm that he was willing to receive me. I climbed to the top floor of a modern edifice that housed a bank. At the highest stairwell landing, I encountered a cage, secured by a chain lock. Inside the cage was a metal circular stairway to the penthouse. An aide came down and unlocked the contraption and we climbed. Tanai’s small apartment is sunny and he has placed many plants on the windowsills. He keeps a parakeet in a cage; as we spoke, with increasing animation, the bird sang loudly along with us. Tanai remains a vigorous, fit-looking man who has maintained his signature, enormous brush moustache.