BATTLE FOR AFGHANISTAN
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf was born in 1937 and was commissioned as an infantry officer into the Frontier Defence Force Regiment of the Pakistan Army in 1961. Subsequently his career took him through the usual sequence of command and staff appointments, including active service against India. He also attended the Command and Staff College at Quetta and the National Defence College at Rawalpindi.
While commanding an infantry brigade he was selected by the Director of the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) to head its Afghan Bureau, a post he held from 1983 to 1987, until he resigned as a matter of principle and left the Army. During these four years he was responsible for training, and operational planning of the Mujahideen inside Afghanistan and later inside the Soviet Union.
Since retiring he has kept in close touch with events and Mujahideen leaders in Afghanistan. He now lives in Karachi with his family. He has written a short book on General Akhtar, his superior at ISI, who was killed in an aircraft crash in 1988, along with President Zia.
Major Mark Adkin was commissioned into The Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment in 1956 and served with it and The Royal Anglian Regiment in Germany, Malaya, Mauritius and Aden. On leaving the British Army he joined the Overseas Civil Service and was posted to the Solomon Islands. Transferred to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, he was one of the last British District Officers anywhere in the world.
His final overseas post was as a contract officer for five years with the Barbados Defence Force, and it was as the Caribbean operations staff officer that he participated in the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. He now lives in Bedford and has written books on military subjects, including Urgent Fury, The Last Eleven?, Goose Green and The Charge, all published by Pen and Sword Books.
THE BATTLE FOR AFGHANISTAN
THE SOVIETS VERSUS THE MUJAHIDEEN DURING THE 1980s
Mohammad Yousaf
&
Mark Adkin
First published in 1992 by Casemate,
Reprinted in 2001
Published in paperback in 2007 & reprinted in 2009
Reissued in this digital format in 2017 by
Pen and Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley, South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
ISBNs; 9781526707123, 9781526707116, 9781526707130
Copyright Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin 1992, 2001, 2007, 2009, 2017
The right of Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin to be identified as Authors of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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To General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan,
Pakistan Army,
Director-General Inter-Services Intelligence, 1980-1987
MILITARY SYMBOLS USED ON MAPS
MAPS
Afghanistan
Pakistans Frontier Region
Soviet-Afghan Deployment, 1983-84
The Soviets Final Operation of 1983
Soviet Air Forces Operating in Afghanistan, December, 1983
Soviet and Mujahideen Supply Routes and Bases
The Panjsher 7 Offensive, Aprii-May, 1984
The Arms Pipeline
Arms Routes into Afghanistan
Rocket Attack on Bagram Airbase
The Kunar Valley Offensive Spring 1985
Key Points in Kabul
Kabul Under Pressure
The Mujahideen Assault on Khost Fails 1985
The Soviets Second Eastern Offensive of 1985
Mujahideen Defences of Zhawar
The Battle for Zhawar
Stinger Deployment Phases 1986/87
The Underbelly of the Soviet Union
The CIA Map of Sherkhan
Wali Begs Incursion into the Soviet Union
Genera! Akhtars Strategy to Finish the War
The Battle for Jalalabad
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The information for this book came almost entirely from personal experience and observations during my time at ISI, and more recently when I returned to Peshawar. I know the Mujahideen, some of their Commanders and all their Leaders well. We worked and planned together for four years and I have discussed the situation today with many of them. This book, therefore, has not been written with extensive use of works of reference, or from the stories of journalists. I disagree with much that has been written about the war in Afghanistan. Sometimes the facts are wrong, more often the interpretation is wrong. This does not mean that all books on the war are valueless, far from it, but merely that I found very few to be reliable aids when compiling my manuscript. Those that were included Mark Urbans War in Afghanistan , Macmillan Press, 1988; David C. Isbys War in a Distant Country , Arms and Armour Press, 1986; and Robert D. Kaplans Soldiers of God , Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990. Of these I found the first-mentioned to be particularly authentic and accurate.
PUBLISHERS NOTE
AFGHANISTAN THE BEAR TRAP
Twenty years ago, as today, the military balance could not have been more uneven. Intent on conquering Afghanistan, the Soviet Union poured in vast resources of men, modern equipment, air power and sophisticated command and control facilities. Their enemy, the Afghan Mujahideen, were outgunned and outnumbered and yet it was they who were to prevail thanks to their superior local knowledge, resilience and limited external support, on this occasion from the CIA, secretly channelled through the Pakistani Government.
The lessons in Afghanistan The Bear Trap have never been more relevant than they are today in what has been so recently declared by the US President as The War Against World Terrorism.
For a clear understanding of what the pitfalls are of a major military intervention into one of the Worlds most primitive and hostile environments, reading Afghanistan The Bear Trap can arguably not be bettered. Written by their puppet-master, Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, then Director of the Afghan Bureau of Pakistans ISI over the crucial years 1983-1987, no-one was closer to the heart of the Mujahideens operations.
