Najibullah, who in life served the K.G.B.'s efforts to eliminate opposition to Marxism, died a death as miserable as any his secret police meted out. ''Only if we understand our history can we take steps to break the cycle.'' ''They can see how our history has repeated itself,'' he said. Najibullah told United Nations officials that he wanted Afghans to read the Hopkirk text because of what they would learn from it of the 19th-century struggle between imperial Britain and imperial Russia for influence in Afghanistan. IN the months before Afghanistan's new rulers marched him from a United Nations compound in Kabul and summarily beat, shot and hanged him, Afghanistan's last Communist President, Najibullah, spent much of his time preparing a translation into Pashto, his native language, of a 1990 book about Afghanistan, ''The Great Game,'' by the English writer Peter Hopkirk.
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