Soviet military operations against Afghan guerrillas fighter in
Kunar uses a communications receiver. The war evolved, the Soviets occupied the cities and main axes of communication, while the
Afghan mujahideen, which the Soviet Army soldiers called 'Dushman' (enemy) divided into small groups and waged a guerrilla war in the mountains. Almost 80 percent of the country was outside government control. Soviet troops were deployed in strategic areas in the northeast, especially along the road from
Termez to Kabul. In the west, a strong Soviet presence was maintained to counter Iranian influence. Incidentally, special Soviet units would have also performed secret attacks on Iranian territory to destroy suspected Mujahideen bases, and their helicopters then got engaged in shootings with Iranian jets. Conversely, some regions such as
Nuristan, in the northeast, and
Hazarajat, in the central mountains of Afghanistan, were virtually untouched by the fighting, and lived in almost complete independence.
Bashgal, in Nuristan, was additionally a Salafi quasi-state known as the
Islamic Revolutionary State of Afghanistan. Parts of
Kunar,
Laghman and
Nangarhar were also incorporated into the short-lived
Islamic Emirate of Kunar after the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Periodically the Soviet Army undertook multi-
divisional offensives into Mujahideen-controlled areas. Between 1980 and 1985, nine
offensives were launched into the strategically important
Panjshir Valley, but government control in the area did not improve. Heavy fighting also occurred in the provinces neighbouring Pakistan, where cities and government outposts were constantly besieged by the Mujahideen. Massive Soviet operations would regularly break these sieges, but the Mujahideen would return as soon as the Soviets left. In the west and south, fighting was more sporadic, except in the cities of
Herat and
Kandahar, which were always partly controlled by the resistance. , 1984 The Soviets did not initially foresee taking on such an active role in fighting the rebels and attempted to play down their role there as giving light assistance to the Afghan army. The arrival of the Soviets had the opposite effect as it incensed instead of pacified the people, causing the Mujahideen to gain in strength and numbers. Originally the Soviets thought that their forces would strengthen the backbone of the Afghan army and provide assistance by securing major cities, lines of communication and transport. The Afghan army forces had a high desertion rate and were loath to fight, especially since the Soviet forces pushed them into infantry roles while they manned the armored vehicles and artillery. The main reason that the Afghan soldiers were so ineffective, though, was poor morale, as many of them were not truly loyal to the communist government but simply wanting a paycheck. Once it became apparent that the Soviets would have to get their hands dirty, they followed three main strategies aimed at quelling the uprising. Intimidation was the first strategy, in which the Soviets would use airborne attacks and armored ground attacks to destroy villages, livestock and crops in troubled areas. The Soviets would bomb villages that were near sites of guerrilla attacks on Soviet convoys or known to support resistance groups. Local peoples were forced to either flee their homes or die as daily Soviet attacks made it impossible to live in these areas. By forcing Afghans to flee their homes, the Soviets hoped to deprive the guerrillas of resources and havens. The second strategy consisted of subversion, which entailed sending spies to join resistance groups, as well as bribing local tribes or guerrilla leaders into ceasing operations. Finally, the Soviets used military forays into contested territories to root out the guerrillas and limit their options. Classic search and destroy operations were implemented using
Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships that would provide cover for ground forces in armored vehicles. Once the villages were occupied by Soviet forces, inhabitants who remained were frequently interrogated and tortured for information or killed. To complement their brute force approach to weeding out the insurgency, the Soviets used
KHAD (Afghan secret police) to gather intelligence, infiltrate the Mujahideen, spread false information, bribe tribal militias into fighting and organize a government militia. While it is impossible to know exactly how successful KHAD was in infiltrating Mujahideen groups, it is thought that they succeeded in penetrating a good many resistance groups based in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. KHAD is thought to have had particular success in igniting internal rivalries and political divisions amongst the resistance groups, rendering some of them completely useless because of infighting. KHAD had some success in securing tribal loyalties but many of these relationships were fickle and temporary. Often KHAD secured neutrality agreements rather than committed political alignment. The
Sarandoy were a centrally commanded government paramilitary group placed under the control of the
Ministry of Interior Affairs, before being placed under the control of the unified Ministry of State Security (
WAD) in 1986. They had mixed success in the war, as the
Arab mujahideen fought the Sarandoy's 7th Operative Regiment, only to fail and sustain massive casualties. The label "Sarandoy" additionally included traffic police, provincial officers and corrections/labor facility officers. Large salaries and proper weapons attracted a good number of recruits to the cause, even if they were not necessarily "pro-communist". The problem was that many of the recruits they attracted were in fact Mujahideen who would join up to procure arms, ammunition and money while also gathering information about forthcoming military operations. In 1985, the size of the LCOSF (Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces) was increased to 108,800 and fighting increased throughout the country, making 1985 the bloodiest year of the war. However, despite suffering heavily, the Mujahideen were able to remain in the field, mostly because they received thousands of new volunteers daily, and continued resisting the Soviets
Reforms of the Karmal administration Babrak Karmal, after the invasion, promised reforms to win support from the population alienated by his ousted predecessors. A temporary constitution, the Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, was adopted in April 1980. On paper, it was a
democratic constitution including "right of free expression" and disallowing "torture, persecution, and punishment, contrary to human dignity". Karmal's government was formed of his fellow Parchamites along with (pro-Taraki) Khalqists, and a number of known non-communists/leftists in various ministries.
Mujahideen insurrection (special operations) group prepares for a mission in Afghanistan, 1988. In the mid-1980s, the Afghan resistance movement, assisted by the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, the People's Republic of China and others, contributed to Moscow's high military costs and strained international relations. The U.S. viewed the conflict in Afghanistan as an integral Cold War struggle, and the CIA provided assistance to anti-Soviet forces through the
Pakistani intelligence services, in a program called
Operation Cyclone. Pakistan's
North-West Frontier Province became a base for the Afghan resistance fighters and the
Deobandi ulama of that province played a significant role in the Afghan 'jihad', with
Darul Uloom Haqqania becoming a prominent organisational and networking base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters. As well as money, Muslim countries provided thousands of volunteer fighters known as "
Afghan Arabs", who wished to wage
jihad against the
atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named
Osama bin Laden, whose
Arab group eventually evolved into
al-Qaeda. Despite their numbers, the contribution has been called a "curious sideshow to the real fighting," with only an estimated 2000 of them fighting "at any one time", compared with about 250,000 Afghan fighters and 125,000 Soviet troops. Their efforts were also sometimes counterproductive, as in the March 1989
battle for Jalalabad, when they showed the enemy the fate awaiting infidels in the form of a truck filled with dismembered bodies of their comrades chopped to pieces after surrendering to radical non-Afghan salafists. Though demoralized by the abandonment of them by the Soviets, the Afghan Communist government forces rallied to break the siege of Jalalabad and to win the first major government victory in years. "This success reversed the government's demoralization from the withdrawal of Soviet forces, renewed its determination to fight on, and allowed it to survive three more years." Afghanistan's resistance movement was born in chaos, spread and triumphed chaotically, and did not find a way to govern differently. Virtually all of its war was waged locally by regional warlords. As warfare became more sophisticated, outside support and regional coordination grew. Even so, the basic units of Mujahideen organization and action continued to reflect the highly segmented nature of Afghan society. in 1982, general headquarters of the Afghan Army
Olivier Roy estimates that after four years of war, there were at least 4,000 bases from which Mujahideen units operated. Most of these were affiliated with the seven expatriate parties headquartered in Pakistan, which served as sources of supply and varying degrees of supervision. Significant commanders typically led 300 or more men, controlled several bases and dominated a district or a sub-division of a province. Hierarchies of organization above the bases were attempted. Their operations varied greatly in scope, the most ambitious being achieved by
Ahmad Shah Massoud of the
Panjshir valley north of
Kabul. He led at least 10,000 trained troopers at the end of the Soviet war and had expanded his political control of
Tajik-dominated areas to Afghanistan's northeastern provinces under the Supervisory Council of the North. But in campaigns of the latter type the traditional explosions of manpower—customarily common immediately after the completion of harvest—proved obsolete when confronted by well dug-in defenders with modern weapons. Lashkar durability was notoriously short; few sieges succeeded. From 1984 in conjunction with the CIA and ISI, MI6 helped organize and execute "scores" of guerrilla-style attacks. These included rocket attacks on villages in
Tajikistan and raids on Soviet airfields, troop supplies and convoys in
Uzbekistan which flowed through these areas, some 25 kilometers in these territories. In August 1985, Afghan mujahideen bombed a Soviet military airbase in
Krasnovodsk,
Turkmenistan. Three soldiers were killed. In January 1987 a bomb exploded on a Moscow-bound train in northwestern Uzbekistan, killing three citizens. The attack was likely meant to target Soviet troops. In April 1987 three separate teams of Afghan rebels were directed by the
ISI to launch coordinated raids on multiple targets across the Soviet border and extending, in the case of an attack on an Uzbek factory, as deep as over into Soviet territory. One of the most notable attacks launched by the Mujahideen inside the Soviet Union was the 1988 attack on the town of
Kushka. The Afghan mujahideen captured the town and held it for several days before being forced to withdraw. Pakistan's ISI requested
limpet mines from Britain in the hope of attacking Soviet transport barges on the South bank of the
Amu Darya River. MI6 facilitated the attacks which included the limpets. In this they were successful in destroying a number of barges as well as damaging the bridge pylons spanning the river near
Termez. CIA director
William Casey secretly visited Pakistan numerous times to meet with the ISI officers managing the mujahideen, and personally observed the guerrillas training on at least one occasion. Coll reports that Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory—into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials. Rather was
embedded with the Mujahideen for a
60 Minutes report. In 1987, CBS produced a full documentary special on the war. ''
Reader's Digest'' took a highly positive view of the Mujahideen, a reversal of their usual view of Islamic fighters. The publication praised their martyrdom and their role in entrapping the Soviets in a Vietnam War-style disaster. Leftist journalist
Alexander Cockburn was unsympathetic, criticizing Afghanistan as "an unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan."
Robert D. Kaplan on the other hand, thought any perception of Mujahideen as "barbaric" was unfair: "Documented accounts of mujahidin savagery were relatively rare and involved enemy troops only. Their cruelty toward civilians was unheard of during the war, while Soviet cruelty toward civilians was common." Lack of interest in the Mujahideen cause, Kaplan believed, was not the lack of intrinsic interest to be found in a war between a small, poor country and a superpower where a million civilians were killed, but the result of the great difficulty and unprofitability of media coverage. Kaplan noted that "none of the American TV networks had a bureau for a war", and television cameramen venturing to follow the Mujahideen "trekked for weeks on little food, only to return ill and half starved". In October 1984, the Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, told
Agence France Presse "that journalists traveling with the mujahidin 'will be killed. And our units in Afghanistan will help the Afghan forces to do it. Unlike Vietnam and Lebanon, Afghanistan had "absolutely no clash between the strange and the familiar", no "rock-video quality" of "zonked-out GIs in headbands" or "rifle-wielding Shiite terrorists wearing Michael Jackson T-shirts" that provided interesting "visual materials" for newscasts. == Soviet exit and change of Afghan leadership, 1985–1989 ==