Keesing's Record of World Events (formerly Keesing's Contemporary Archives), Volume 27, October, 1981 , Soviet, Afghan, Chinese, Soviet Union, Page 31143 © 1931-2006 Keesing's Worldwide, LLC - All Rights Reserved. Military Developments

The Moslem mujaheddin rebels continued throughout mid-1981 with their resistance campaigns against the Afghan Army and against the Soviet forces within Afghanistan. Western news reports, which were largely dependent on diplomatic sources or on eye-witness accounts from the growing number of refugees reaching Pakistan and India, suggested that resistance was particularly strong in the areas away from , the national capital, and that Soviet and Afghan forces exercised no effective control in large areas of the country.

The heaviest fighting centred during this period on the southern city of Kandahar (which was held by the rebels), on the areas close to the border with Pakistan (where a number of the most important resistance groups were based, many of them across the border in Pakistan itself), and on to the north of Kabul, particularly the Panjshir river valley [see map on page 30231], where a major government offensive was launched during late August. There was in addition increasing violence in Kabul itself, involving not merely clashes between the rebels and government forces, but also inter-factional feuding within the PDPA.

Faced by large guerrilla forces, the Afghan Army was reported to have dwindled from an original strength of some 100,000 to about 30,00040,000 men, partly because of battle losses, but more particularly because of the growing desertion rate; it was, for example, reported on July 16 that an entire Afghan Army regiment had deserted en masse during an engagement at (just north of Kabul).

The high rate of desertion led the authorities to adopt new measures to strengthen the armed forces. It was announced on July 11 that the conscription age was to be lowered so as to include pupils undergoing their final two years of secondary education [for earlier conscription measures see page 30880], and during mid-August a number of youths in Kabul were reported to have been shot during searches for conscription evaders. On Sept. 8 the Government announced the call-up of all ex-soldiers under 35 years of age who had completed their military service before October 1978 since, as Gen. Baba Jan, the Afghan Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, said in a statement on Kabul radio, the time had come for Afghanistan "to arm itself for the complete annihilation of the counter-revolutionaries and traitors". It was nevertheless announced on July 31 that the military academy in Kabul, whose normal capacity was 4,000 recruits, was to be closed, following demonstrations in the city during which a number of arrests were made, while further demonstrations led the Government in late September to allow numerous exemptions from the call-up order issued on Sept. 8.

The total Soviet troop presence in Afghanistan was reported in late August to be between 88,000 and 100,000 men, and to comprise five infantry divisions, one tank division, 400 helicopters (including the helicopter gunships which were particularly effective in mountain engagements), and a large number of aircraft; the weakening of the Afghan Government forces meant in turn that these Soviet forces were increasingly heavily drawn into military activities against the guerrillas. It was further reported that the Soviet Union had meanwhile changed the ethnic composition of its troops in Afghanistan, replacing the original Moslem soldiers from the bordering Soviet republics (who had themselves often defected or otherwise shown reluctance to fight the guerrillas) with a force drawn more extensively from the European part of the Soviet Union.

The Assembly of the Western European Union (comprising Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK) was told on June 18, in a report prepared by its committee on European security and on developments in the Gulf area, that the Soviet forces had set up a new command involving 44 divisions in order to prepare for a long occupation. Meanwhile the Soviet Union 'continued to develop its transport links with Afghanistan, and it had by mid-July half completed a new boxgirder bridge across the river Amu Darya (Oxus—see also 29198 A; page 30880), which marked the country's southern border with Afghanistan.

The Soviet and Afghan troops began a new offensive in early April 1981, as the snows thawed from the mountain valleys away from Kabul, and it was reported on April 12 that fighting was in progress in 23 of the 29 provinces, particularly in Kandahar and in the western city of Herat, and that Soviet and Afghan troops had carried out reprisal raids on Charikar (40 miles north of Kabul) and Khulm (150 miles north-west of Kabul), as well as on villages close to Kabul itself (some of which were reported to have been razed to the ground).

Pravda reported on April 14, in an unusual departure from normal editorial practice, that food convoys were experiencing difficulty in reaching villages near the Pakistan border because of mines and occasional ambushes by the rebels.

During early May it was reported that Soviet and Afghan units had surrounded the southern city of Kandahar population 230,000), and that they had laid siege to it using tanks and heavy artillery which was airlifted into the area; refugee sources reported on Sept. 23, however, that the rebels had gained almost complete control of the city, that they had ransacked the fortified local government buildings, and that the government forces now held only the Chownee garrison in one part of the city.

Heavy fighting was also said to be taking place during this period in Kabul itself, where a full- scale military alert was proclaimed on April 22, following the killing of Mr Sharafuddin Sharaf, the head of the Forces for the Defence of the Revolution. It had earlier been reported on April 18 that Brig. Ghulam Sakhi, the deputy head of the secret police (KHAD), had also been shot dead close to the Soviet embassy in Kabul. Responsibility for such killings remained unclear, however, because of the internal feuds between the various mujaheddin groups, but also because of the increasingly violent differences between the Parcham and Khalq factions of the PDPA, in the course of which a large number of political murders were committed during early May.

It was reported on May 25 by refugees arriving in New Delhi that the Soviet embassy in Kabul had been hit during a rocket attack launched by the mujaheddin on May 24, although there were no details of casualties. Further reports of attacks on the embassy were made by refugees arriving in Pakistan on Sept. 20. A major military engagement was reported during late May at the rebel-held town of Ghazni (some 80 miles south-west of Kabul), where the Soviet forces attacked the town with tanks and with aircraft, losing about 20 tanks and other vehicles (it being claimed that the Afghan Army units stationed in the area had at this time almost completely defected).

According to sources in New Delhi on June 17, the mujaheddin had on June 9 attacked and set fire to a fuel and ammunition depot at a Soviet air base about 40 miles north of Kabul, and the explosions had forced the Soviet aircraft to leave the base. It was subsequently reported on June 29 that the rebels had captured an Afghan Army post at Nan (some 20 miles from the Pakistan border), killing its commander and 44 other soldiers.

Radio Kabul announced on June 19, as the fighting in Kabul intensified, that the Government would grant an amnesty to all "misguided" rebels who voluntarily surrendered, and that it would assist them in starting a "normal life"; the same offer, it said, applied to all exiles and refugees. On July 19 it was announced that 152 people had been released from detention in Herat, where they had been held for anti-state activities.

The mujaheddin on June 17 captured, for the first time since the opening of hostilities in late 1979, the pilot of a Soviet aircraft, who was subsequently smuggled across the border and who was on July 7 handed over to the Pakistan authorities for questioning.

Guerrilla activity intensified again in early July 1981, when the rebels captured Gulbahar (in Parwan province, north of Kabul, and at the entrance to the strategic Panjshir river valley—see below). It was, however, also reported during mid-July that over 100 rebels had died in the province during bitter fighting between the rival mujaheddin groups.

An important battle took place on July 13–15 in Paghman, about 12 miles north-west of Kabul, during which 300 cadets from the military academy in Kabul were brought into action; they were, however, surrounded by the mujaheddin, whereupon 200 defected to the rebels and 70 of those remaining were killed. About 100 rebels were reported killed in this action, and the Soviet and Afghan troops eventually withdrew after what the Kabul New Times, in a rare account of the fighting, termed a major operation against "bandits who were destroying life and property" (an expression first used by President Karmal in an interview with the Jndian Express published on April 21, and since then a common official description of the rebels), although the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on Aug. 5 that the Soviet troops had suffered heavily and had at one point mistakenly attacked their own positions. Further hard fighting was reported during mid-July during an Afghan/Soviet campaign at Torabora, 32 miles south of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.

Afghan and Soviet troops began during late July a renewed campaign to secure the upland areas close to the Pakistan border, and were said on July 31 to have retaken positions in Nuristan, although with heavy losses. It was further announced on Aug. 10 that the Soviet Army had occupied the Wakhan salient in north-eastern Afghanistan [for which see below], and they were later reported to have driven most of the residents into Pakistan. A report issued in mid-August by the US State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research claimed, as Chinese reports had also done, that the Soviet troops were losing ground overall, but added that their losses were not sufficiently heavy to prompt them to seek a negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan in the near future. The US report drew attention, however, to the increasingly unreliable character of the Afghan Army. The Soviet military newspaper Red Star reported in mid-August that the mujaheddin were making "furious" raids on villages, although it stressed that the Afghan Army could rely on the continued assistance of the Soviet Union.

It was claimed on Aug. 16 by a senior Afghan Government official, who had fled to Pakistan, that most of the 29 provincial governors, meeting in Kabul during June, had complained that they could not effectively resist the rebels with the means placed at their disposal by the central authorities; it was, however, announced the following day by Kabul radio that the PDPA had decided to create a "Defence Council for the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan" whose function would be the establishment of security centres in all parts of the country.

A further Afghan-Soviet military offensive began during late August in the (which carried many of the communications systems used for transporting Soviet arms and other equipment to Kabul—see also page 30881 and resulted in fighting which was described by the refugees arriving in Pakistan as the hardest since the Soviet intervention of December 1979. There were no clear indications of casualties (although defections by Afghan soldiers were again understood to have been heavy), but Western diplomatic sources reported on Sept. 9 that the Afghan and Soviet forces had recaptured Gulbahar and were consolidating their presence further up the valley.

The rival factions among the mujaheddin, particularly those based in Pakistan, made repeated attempts during this period to resolve their differences and to form alliances designed to replace the "Islamic Alliance for the Liberation of Afghanistan" (which had been formed during 1980— see page 30242—but which had quickly been incapacitated by such disagreements—see page 30882).

It was reported by Afghan refugees in India that Hizb-i-Islami (led by Mr Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) and SAMA (a local resistance group based near Kabul) had in May begun to co-operate in guerrilla activities. Three other groups—the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, or Afghan Islamic and Nationalist Revolutionary Council (led by Sayed Ahmed Gailani), the Movement for the Islamic Revolution (led by Maulavi Mohammadi—see 29878 A), and the Afghan National Liberation Front (led by the Imam Seghbatullah Mujjaddedi)—united on June 1 to form the Islamic Unity of the Mujaheddin of Afghanistan, an organization which was thought to favour the provision of direct military assistance by Western countries. Afghan emigre sources reported on July 7 that Hizb-i-Islami and five other Pakistan-based groups had reached a new agreement on the merging of weapons, funds and manpower, and The Guardian published on Aug. 24 a report to the effect that five such groups had in fact merged. [For further details of rebel groups, see pages 29642; 29878; 30242; 30882.]

Despite these agreements, however, tensions and occasional outbreaks of inter-factional feuding continued, particularly in the more remote areas of Afghanistan. It was reported on Aug. 31 that Radio Free Afghanistan, a clandestine radio service run by Afghan resistance organizations and based in Pakistan, had begun transmissions inside Afghanistan, using a lightweight portable transmitter. The first broadcasts were addressed to the Soviet troops, and contained statements by such exiled Soviet dissidents as Mr Vladimir Bukovsky and Maj. - Gen. Piotr Grigorenko [For whom see pages 28253 and 29112 respectively], claiming that the Soviet armed forces had no place in Afghanistan. The radio system had been paid for by a group of French intellectuals who sympathized with the rebels' cause, but who denied that their action constituted any interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs.

The Afghan armed forces were reported during this period to have carried out a number of attacks on suspected rebel bases inside Pakistan itself; on June 10, for example, three Afghan MiG-17 fighters fired on a bus in the Pakistani border region to the north of Quetta, and on Sept. 7 Pakistan reported that two more fighters had attacked a border post at Domondi, about three miles inside Pakistan and 60 miles north of Quetta. President Zia issued on Sept. 8 a statement protesting at the Afghan incursions, but said that Pakistan would seek diplomatic rather than military means of responding to the attacks.

Following the statement made on March 10 by President Reagan, to the effect that the USA would consider supplying arms to the Afghan rebels [see page 30880], the American ABC television network broadcast on June 19 a programme in which it alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was already involved in a covert international operation for the provision of such supplies. The programme claimed that (i) Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent the United States, were providing funds for the weapons; (ii) that the guns, which were either Soviet weapons or replicas, originated from Egypt; (iii) that Pakistan was tacitly allowing their transit through its borders and into Afghanistan; and (iv) that China was pursuing aims "parallel" to those of the USA. The US State Department declined on June 19 to comment on the accuracy of the reports, but on July 24 Le Monde claimed to have confirmation from US Defence Department sources of the CIA's role in such a scheme.

President Sadat of Egypt, speaking in a television interview broadcast by the United States NBC network on Sept. 22, claimed to have been approached by the USA immediately after the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan with a view to such a scheme, and added that the USA had since then been transporting arms of Egyptian origin into the hands of the mujaheddin. A US State Department spokesman declined to comment on the report, claiming only that the bulk of the rebels' weapons had been obtained from "indigenous sources" (i.e. captured in battle or brought by defectors from the Afghan Army).

As the fighting in Afghanistan continued, there was a considerable increase in the number of refugees leaving the country for Pakistan and for Iran, although some travelled instead to India.

The Pakistan Government reported on Sept. 14, 1981, that altogether 2,298,767 Afghans had registered as refugees by Aug. 30, more than half having crossed the border since the Soviet intervention in December 1979. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had, in an earlier estimate on June 22, put the figure at 2,083,688, and had estimated in April that a further 1,500,000 people had fled to Iran. (The official Afghan census of June 23, 1979, had given the size of the settled population on that date as 13,051,358, plus an estimated 2,500,000 nomads.)

The accuracy of statistics relating to the refugees was increasingly called into doubt, however, not merely by President Karmal (who on June 24 claimed that many of the "refugees" in Pakistan were in fact nomads), but also by certain United Nations officials and by the staffs of international relief organizations, who pointed to instances in which tribal leaders, entering Pakistan with refugee groups, had made multiple registrations in order to increase their share of the available aid.

Controversy arose during this period over the control of the Wakhan salient, a mountainous, sparsely populated but strategically important tongue of Afghan territory which ran north-east from the main part of Afghanistan to the Chinese border, passing between the Soviet Union in the north and Pakistan in the south.

During June and July Soviet troops began a massive occupation of the salient, meeting little or no resistance from the rebels, and by mid-August it was reported that they had expelled the 2,000-3,000 Afghan residents (most of whom left for Pakistan), that they had closed the border with Pakistan and manned it with Soviet officers, and that they had set up extensive strategic and military bases in the region. The New China News Agency further claimed on Aug. 24 that the Soviet troops had installed ballistic missiles in the area, and that they had also occupied lshkashim, the pass controlling all access to the Wakhan salient from the west (i.e. from the remainder of Afghanistan).

Earlier, the Soviet Union had provoked strong Chinese reactions by signing with Afghanistan on June 16 a border agreement relating to the Wakhan salient.

Although no exact details of the agreement were published by Afghanistan or by the Soviet Union, a report issued on June 17 by Kabul radio said that it regulated the local boundary between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union and demarcated the state borders "from the western shore of Lake Zorkul up to Pik Povalo-Shveykovskogo", and a later broadcast said that the treaty legally affirmed the existing boundary between the two countries.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued on July 22 a statement complaining essentially that the Soviet Union had no right to conclude with a third country (i.e. Afghanistan) a border treaty involving this line, since the land immediately to the north of the border was not the rightful territory of the Soviet Union, but had in fact for some 90 years been in dispute between China and Russia (subsequently the Soviet Union). The treaty was, it said, therefore "illegal and invalid", although it stressed also that China had no outstanding territorial disputes with Afghanistan itself, having signed on Nov. 22, 1963, a border agreement regulating its 43-mile border with Afghanistan along the extreme eastern edge of the Wakhan salient [see 19761 E].

China's case against the Soviet Union rested on an 1884 protocol concerning the Chinese- Russian border in the region of Kashgar" (or, as the New China News Agency termed it on Aug. 31, the "Sino-Russian Kashgar boundary treaty"). The agreement, which had been reached after a prolonged period of Russian incursions into and encroachments on the traditional Chinese territories of central Asia, had specified that from the Uz-Bel mountain pass "the Russian boundary turns to the south-west and the Chinese boundary runs due south"; Russia had, according to the Chinese, nevertheless in 1892 illegally occupied some 20,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory, using armed force, and had subsequently attempted to legitimize this invasion by describing an 1894 Chinese-Soviet exchange of notes on the issue as constituting a border agreement (an account rejected by China since, it said, in the 1894 exchange of notes the two sides had agreed to differ over the sovereignty of the territory in question but had decided to maintain the positions which they then held, pending a permanent settlement).

Tass responded on Aug. 11 by asserting that the newly-signed border treaty between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union was a bilateral affair involving no third countries, and accused China of "inventing", by "falsifying history", a dispute over a matter which had been finally settled by the 1894 exchange of notes. "The [1894] line is still in existence," said the report, "and there is no other line." It went on to claim that the border in this region was shown on Chinese maps exactly as on Soviet maps, a claim which was rejected on Aug. 31 by the New China News Agency as a "deliberate misrepresentation" since, it was claimed, "the maps of China published now based on the ones published before the liberation", and that "the boundary line in the Pamirs [was now] delineated as an undemarcated frontier, indicating that the boundary dispute there [was] yet to be settled".

The Wakhan peninsula itself had, according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, fallen during the period 1873-95 under Afghanistan's sovereignty in order to act as a buffer between the spreading Russian empire and the British imperial territory in India; China was reported to have refused to participate in the negotiations, in protest at both British and Russian advances on its former territories.

The Financial Times reported on April 9 that Afghanistan had reached agreement with the Soviet Union on a mutual trade programme for the years 1981-85, during which period the volume of mutual trade between the two countries was to be three times that for the period 1976-80. Under the agreement Afghanistan was to supply the Soviet Union with raw materials, natural gas and food products, and was to receive in return machinery and industrial equipment.

The volume of Soviet-Afghan trade, according to the report, had been rising steadily since 1978, and had in 1980 amounted to 504,700,000 roubles (nominally £317,400,000). [For previous trade agreements signed early in 1980, see page 30364; see also 29459 A.]

President Karmal signed on June 25, during a visit to Czechoslovakia on June 23–26, a 25-year treaty of friendship and co-operation with Czechoslovakia in which the two countries undertook to provide "all-round co-operation, mutual assistance and support" for each other, and to expand and intensify "mutually advantageous economic, scientific and technical co-operation". The agreement was the first to be signed by Afghanistan with an East European country, although several such documents had been signed with the Soviet Union.-(BBC Summary of World Broadcasts - Soviet Embassy Press Department, London - Times - Financial Times - Guardian - Daily Telegraph - New York Times - International Herald Tribune -Le Monde - Neue Zürcher Zeitung - European Commission, Brussels) (Prev. rep. Military and Political Developments to early 1981, 30879 A)

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