Book: AFGHANISTAN A MILITARY HISTORY FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN
The Panjshir Valley became the Mekong Delta of the Soviet- Afghan War, assuming a psychological significance beyond the already consider- able importance of its geography. The mouth of the Panjshir opens onto easily passable ground a day’s march above Bagram air base and about forty-five miles from Kabul. Ninety miles long, the valley cuts a north- eastern swath through the Hindu Kush, narrowing as it goes so that it can only be attacked in great force from the south. For centuries it had been a primary travel artery connecting the northern and southern halves of Afghanistan, only recently being superseded by the Salang highway. The valley’s proximity to the highway made it an excellent place from which to attack the main Soviet supply route, as well as Bagram and the capital, and its many side valleys provided defensive options, escape, or resupply routes for its mujahideen defenders.
It was the Soviets’ misfortune that resistance in the valley was led by Massoud, the most skillful and innovative of the mujahideen com- manders. During the course of the war he became known as “The Lion of Pan]shir.” Massoud, twenty-seven years old at the time of the Soviet invasion, was a Tajik educated at the Istiqlal High School and the Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1973. He also studied engineering at Kabul Polytechnic, but gave it up for revolution, joining Rabbani’s Islamic Society during the turbulent 1970s. As early as 1975 he had led an attack in the Panjshir on Daoud’s govern- ment forces. During the Soviet war he was notable for using modern military tactics, dividing his men between aggressive strike forces, troops committed to stationary defense, and mobile reserves. He was also one of the few mujahideen leaders to emphasize unit discipline, train his men in specialized weapons, and even attempt to maintain a civil administration in areas under his control.
The French-speaking Massoud was also a media magnet, drawing worldwide attention to the mujahideen cause. Though his predominantly Tajik forces were not favored by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which preferred the fundamentalist Pashtun parties (particularly Hekmatyar’s), Massoud was able to receive a steady flow of weapons due to the strategic importance of the Panjshir. The valley pointed like a dagger from the north to the heart of Soviet-held territory and lay just a slice away from their jugular through Salang. Massoud’s mis- fortune was that his home ground thus comprised the one piece of real estate outside the major cities that the Soviets felt compelled to con- trol. As Massoud survived battle after battle, the press coverage that attended his exploits may also have provided a certain inspiration for the Soviets to eliminate their tenacious opponent, thereby proving to the world their mastery of Afghanistan.
During the first three years of the war, six major offensives were launched into the Panjshir, leaving Massoud bloodied but unbowed, continuing to strike back wherever he could. Controversially, however, the Soviets and Massoud negotiated a ceasefire in January 1983. The Soviets badly needed peace on the road to Kabul, Massoud out of their hair, and Andropov had little stomach for the fight in Afghan- istan anyway. Key to the deal was Massoud withholding any attacks on the Salang highway. What Massoud received in return was a desperately needed respite from the fighting. He had taken the brunt of Soviet offensive efforts, and though he had not been beaten, the civil-
ian population in the valley upon whom he depended—and vice versa—had suffered tremendously. Villages and crops had been destroyed and half the population of the Panjshir had fled. He needed time to reorganize, resupply, and rebuild the valley.
The ceasefire caused considerable consternation among the vari- ous mujahideen factions. Some derisively called Massoud the “King of the Panjshir,” believing that he had sold-out to the Soviets in order to preserve his own Tajik fiefdom. They criticized him because his truce had freed Soviet troops to attack elsewhere. Indeed, during 1983 the Soviet 108th Motorized Rifle Division joined operations with the Afghan Central Corps against the Shomali and other resistance bases near Kabul. But Massoud had no intention of giving up the fight. He spent the year retraining his men, building up supplies, and reorganiz- ing the valley. In March 1984, he rejected an offer to extend the truce and on April 1 he renewed his attacks on the Salang highway.
By then, Chernenko had taken power in Moscow and the new Soviet leader took a very different approach to winning the war. Shortly after Massoud’s rejection of the peace offer, the Soviets began preparing for their largest effort yet against the Panjshir.
The ceasefire had allowed Massoud to amass a fighting force up to 5,000-men strong, armed with some two hundred heavy antiair- craft machine guns, several captured tanks, 122mm howitzers, and plentiful quantities of small arms and mines. His rejection of the offer to extend the truce made him guess an attack was imminent, a fact confirmed by his intelligence sources and two attempts on his life in late March. In one of the assassination attempts, the killer chosen by the Soviets turned out to be a double agent who turned over twenty- three members of his conspiracy to the resistance.
The Soviets prepared by stationing three squadrons of Tu-16 Badger bombers just across the border in Soviet territory. The swept- wing Badger, somewhat larger than a U.S. B-17, had two jet engines and could carry nearly ten tons of ordnance. The 108th Motorized Rifle Division under Major-General Saradov was reassembled at the mouth of the valley. Battalions from the 66th Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 191st Independent Motorized Rifle Regiment were brought from Jalalabad and Ghazni, and the 180th Motorized Rifle Regiment was pulled up from Khair Khana. Five thousand Afghan troops were also called in for the offensive while airborne troops and helicopters moved into Bagram.
Massoud struck first with a preemptive attack designed to disrupt Soviet preparations. On April 16, the mujahideen wrecked three bridges on the Salang highway, causing three days of repair work and impairing Soviet mobility. The next day they ambushed and destroyed a fuel convoy, causing shortages in Kabul. On the third day of fight- ing, Massoud attacked a Soviet-Afghangarrison near the mouth of the valley at Anawa. On April 21, the mujahideen made an unsuccessful raid against the Bagram air base, which by then was packed with troops. On that same day the Soviets kicked off their offensive.
The operation began with Soviet Tu-16s carpet bombing the val- ley floor. These high-altitude attacks arrived without warning save for the last-minute whistle of the bombs, catching a number ofPanjshiris in the open. Massoud ordered civilians out of the valley and mined the path of the Soviet ground forces. The mines slowed the enemy advance, but the Soviets had placed minesweeping armored vehicles at the head of their columns. By April 24 they had reached Rokka about a third of the way up the valley and by the end of the week a rolling artillery barrage had brought them to Khenj about halfway through.
During this first phase of the offensive, Soviet troops did not pur- sue the mujahideen into the subsidiary valleys that branched off from the Panjshir. The Soviets seemed to be repeating the pattern of the pre- vious offensives by propelling a juggernaut through the valley floor while preparing to stab at the mujahideen in the heights with airborne troops and commandos. As Massoud fought back against the armored columns as best he could, his mobile striking forces dodged the main blow by moving into side valleys and into the mountains to wait for opportunities for raids or ambush. But the Soviets had learned from their previous mistakes and now surprised Massoud with new tactics.
In the first week of May, a mass of rotors whirred to life on Bagram airfield as thousands of elite Soviet troops embarked for des- ignated blocking positions in the offshoots of the Panjshir. Entire bat- talions of airborne forces were landed deep within the side valleys and a large force was deposited beyond Khenj near the head of the Panjshir. An additional force flew in from Jalalabad to block the Alishang Valley that pointed from the Panjshir to the southeast. While these Soviet battalions plugged up mujahideen escape routes, main force units began splitting off from the Panjshir to hammer the enemy onto the multiple anvils. Tagging behind the airborne assaults were
Hind gunships, hovering above the savage firefights on the ground to pounce on Afghan resistance fighters who had been flushed out.
The mujahideen were caught unaware and forced ever higher into the mountains to escape the combined-arms assaults. Units shrunk from casualties or scattered into unassailable positions where even the toughest Soviet Spetsnaz or airborne troops couldn’t follow. The Soviets had meanwhile saturated the floor of the Pan]shir Valley with bombs and artillery fire, clearing it of mujahideen. It appeared as if they finally had Massoud where they wanted him. Kabul radio announced, “We bring you good news, that the criminal band of Ahmed Shah no longer exists.” Babrak Karmal even visited the valley to show how solidly it had fallen under Communist control. Several high profile prisoners were taken, including Abdul Waned, who had frequently appeared in the world press as a spokesman for the cause of the resistance. The Soviets were so confident that Pan]shir 7 had succeeded that for the first time they left behind garrisons in the val- ley to protect their gains. Their only problem was that the mujahideen still did not quit.
Later that summer, Girardet interviewed Massoud. “As we sipped tea in his mountain stronghold,” the journalist wrote, “he paid little attention to the sullen roar of artillery and mortar shells exploding on the rocky escarpments. He only looked up when a Mig-27 ground attack fighter streaked in low to bomb a guerrilla position.” Massoud stated that the Soviets had failed in their military objectives. Their helicopter commandos had gotten more skillful but the mujahideen had learned how to deal with them among the high altitudes of the Hindu Kush. His main concern, expressed to Girardet, was: “Unfortunately, we are in danger of losing our people. This is where the Soviets may succeed. Failing to crush us by force, as they have said they would with each offensive, they have turned their wrath on defenseless people, killing old men, women and children, destroying houses and burning crops. They are doing everything possible to drive our people away.”
In September, the Soviets found their garrisons under assault and launched still another offensive into the Panjshir. They also mounted an airborne attack into Paktya province and a massive assault into the Kunar Valley near the Pakistani border. Mujahideen in the paths of the onslaughts were hard-pressed to survive. In the west, Ismail Khan’s front around Herat was in serious trouble. Much of the population
had fled to Iran, and the remaining mujahideen were forced to hunker down, short of food, against Soviet airstrikes and surprise assaults by combined-arms formations. Except for major offensives, the Soviets had abandoned the lumbering armored columns with which they had begun the war for fast mobile forces. Their counter-insurgency tactics improved steadily as they learned to combine bombing with ground attack and helicopter commandos dropped in the enemy’s rear to block mujahideen escape routes.
The Soviets also upgraded their weaponry. The BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle was replaced by the BMP-2, which had greater side armor and a 30mm cannon that could fire faster at greater elevations than the previous 73mm. Their tank guns were also given greater ele- vation in order to hit surrounding heights. Their armored personnel carrier, the BTR-60, had been upgraded in armament, and subsequent models eliminated vulnerable spots which had quickly become known to the mujahideen. Soviet infantry now carried AK-74 assault rifles, which fired a 5.45mm bullet with greater stability, velocity, and killing power than the AK-47. (These rifles were not shared with the DRA army so became highly prized as trophies by the mujahideen.)
At the end of 1984, a leading mujahideen commander in the north, Zabiullah, was killed when his jeep ran over a land mine. Members of Rabbani’s party, to which he belonged, immediately sus- pected that Hekmatyar’s men had placed the mine. Of the Sunni par- ties in Peshawar, Hekmatyar’s fundamentalists appeared xenophobic even in the context of their fellow Afghans. In the Hazarajat, mean- while, the Shi’ite factions backed by Iran were openly fighting each other rather than the Soviets. Alex Alexiev, in a Rand Corporation study prepared for the U.S. Senate, wrote: “Many of the political par- ties seem to be expending most of their energy bickering and fighting each other and are riven with corruption and nepotism. In the opinion of many mujahideen field commanders the political factions at present represent more of an obstacle to effective resistance than an asset.”
After five full years of war, the Soviet Union had no reason to fear a Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong had struck simultaneously at thirty-six provincial capitals, nor an Easter Offensive, in which the North Vietnamese had fielded state-of-the-art conventional arms. Instead, the Afghan resistance had proven disjointed in its various hideouts and unable to match Soviet firepower. It was now on the defensive. The Soviets’s major remaining problems were a noticeable
drop in morale among their troops, most clearly represented by wide- spread drug use, and the interminable length of the conflict, which was beginning to wear out the patience of both the army and the pub- lic. But surely these problems were shared by the Afghan resistance. Analyzing the situation at the end of 1984, Alexiev wrote: “The Afghan mujahideen, armed with little more than their courage in the early stages of the war, seemed doomed to defeat like many others that had dared to take up arms against the Soviets before them. But courage and determination proved to be a potent weapon in this case, and the resistance persisted and grew.”
The following year proved crucial to the conflict, with two events outside Afghanistan weighing heavily. In March 1985, Mikhail Gor- bachev assumed power in the Soviet Union, its fourth leader in less than four years. A young man by Politburo standards, he intended to initiate a vast program of social reform, but in the meantime was loath to antag- onize the Soviet army, an essential prop to his support. For the next year the army was given free rein in Afghanistan to fight as it wished.
The following month, Ronald Reagan, newly empowered by a landslide reelection, signed a national security directive that declared America’s intent to support the Afghan resistance “by all available means.” This move was forced by the U.S. Congress, as the Reagan administration remained more obsessed with Nicaragua and El Salvador. The key factor was that the American public, which had resigned itself to constant defensive wars against Communist-backed movements, had realized that in Afghanistan the Soviets themselves had become beleaguered by forces resisting Communist rule. The Afghan situation was all the more surprising because during the A rab- Israeli wars the Islamic states had depended on Soviet support. As news from Afghanistan gradually came to light through the U.S. press, the formerly unknown “soldiers of God” became widely admired for their direct battles against the Soviet Union on behalf of their faith and country. It was as though the West had discovered its first genuine ally in the Cold War. U.S. aid to the mujahideen topped half a billion dol- lars in 1985, more than in all the prior years put together.
Beginning in January 1985, the Soviets launched a series of aggres- sive attacks to root out mujahideen safe areas. By now the Afghan army was capable of accompanying, or leading, many of the offen- sives. When the passes cleared in spring, the Soviets attacked the Maidan Valley south of Kabul, unveiling a new weapon, the Frog-7,
that delivered warheads that dispersed cluster bombs. In May, a joint Soviet-Afghan attack churned up the Kunar Valley north of Jalalabad to reach Barikot, where an Afghan garrison had been isolated by mujahideen. The force resupplied the town and then stormed its way back down the valley.
In the Pan]shir, the Soviets had left behind a fortress at Pechgur the previous year, held by a full battalion of Afghan troops. In mid-June, Massoud swooped down and captured the fort. After his sappers had cleared a way through the minefield after dark, mujahideen stormed the walls and broke inside. A delegation of high-ranking officers were visiting Pechgur at the time. An Afghan general and colonel were killed in the fighting, five other colonels taken captive. Of his five hun- dred prisoners, Massoud marched 130, mostly officers, up the valley. The affair triggered Panjshir 9, another Soviet offensive into the val- ley, this time not just to catch Massoud but to retrieve the prisoners. A large helicopter-borne force landed behind the mujahideen, threat- ening to trap them in a cul de sac. This force soon found the prison- ers, all of them dead. The mujahideen said they had been killed by Soviet bombing, but the claim seemed dubious.
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