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Defense Professional
Join Date: 12-10-04
Location: Seattle, WA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xerxes
...could you please give a date on this claim .... ^^^
the part that "Soviets went to Pakistan and said 'back-off or else'" and the part that "Pakistan wisely pulled the plug on those operations."
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From "The Bear Trap" by Mohammed Yousaf.
Quote:
In this instance we highlighted the facilities in Nizhniy Pyandzh (the blank area just north of the bridge), emphasizing that so long as the rocket launcher was located within the 7-kilometre circle he would be certain to be in range of the targets in the Soviet Union. The Commander was given complete discretion as to which target he engaged, from which firing position, and when he carried out his attacks. For example, we might ask that he did so once a week for two months, but nothing more specific. Within six weeks of our briefing the Commander at Peshawar, rockets started to rain down on Nizhniy Pyandzh.
These cross-border strikes were at their peak during 1986. Scores of attacks were made across the Amu from Jozjan to Badakshan Provinces. Sometimes Soviet citizens joined in these operations, or came back into Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen. As I have mentioned above, in at least one instance some Soviet soldiers deserted to us. That we were hitting a sore spot was confirmed by the ferocity of the Soviets’ reaction. Virtually every incursion provoked massive aerial bombing and gunship attacks on all villages south of the river in the vicinity of our strike. These were punitive missions, with no other purpose than razing houses, killing people and forcing the survivors to flee, thus creating a belt of ‘scorched earth’ along the Amu, from which it would hopefully prove impossible for the Mujahideen to operate. Their aim was sufficiently to demoralize the population to halt our incursions.
In so far as destroying villages, killing women and children and driving survivors into Pakistani refugee camps were concerned, the Soviets succeeded. But if stopping our attacks or weakening the Mujahideen resolve were their objectives, they failed. We continued to bait the bear until April, 1987, when Soviet diplomatic reaction rather than military, sufficiently frightened Pakistani politicians into ordering us to stop. Perhaps our April attacks were just that much over-ambitious and represented too deep a cut in the Soviet anatomy.
During late 1986 we made tentative plans to continue operations inside the Soviet Union the following spring. With this in mind Commanders were trained, briefed and supplied with the necessary weapons and ammunition before winter set in. In April we hoped to start the offensive with three slightly more ambitious attacks. The first involved a heavy rocket attack on an airfield called Shurob East, some 25 kilometres NW of Termez, near the Soviet village of Gilyambor. It was not a major airfield, but it was in use, and lay only 3 kilometres north of the river, so the firing positions could be in Afghanistan. In early April this bombardment was successfully completed, with the airstrip being engaged several times over a period of ten days.
The second attack involved a party of twenty men armed with RPGs and anti-tank mines, tasked with ambushing the frontier road east of Termez, between that town and the Tajikistan border. They were to lay the mines between two security posts, wait for some vehicles to hit the mines, then open fire and withdraw. In the event three soft-skinned Soviet vehicles drove along the road at night, one hit a mine and the two others were destroyed by RPG rounds. Several Soviet soldiers were reported killed or injured, the nearby post opened up with mortar and machine-gun fire, and the Mujahideen pulled back over the Amu. This was followed by the third, and most ambitious, mission which penetrated some 20 kilometres north of the Amu, and struck an industrial target close to the airfield at Voroshilovabad (see Map 21). This was Wali Beg’s operation.
<snip details>
Wali’s attack had caused considerable damage and inflicted a number of Soviet casualties, although I was never able to establish exactly how many. The smoke rockets had started a fire which had consumed several buildings, but it was the suddenness, the ferocity and the distance (about 20 kilometres) inside the Soviet Union that was so galling to the enemy. It was the third successful attack within three weeks, and the Soviet Ambassador had been instructed by Moscow to use whatever language necessary to get future attacks halted immediately.
Our Foreign Minister, Sahibzada Yaqoob, was left in no doubt that if any further operation was conducted in the Soviet Union the consequences for the security and integrity of Pakistan would be dire. It was a threat of outright attack by the Soviet military. That they used this threat was itself confirmation that our raids were hurting. They were concerned, not so much with the actual damage caused, but by the effect they were having on the local Muslim population. If the attacks were to continue unchecked it might not be long before they had a general uprising on their hands. There was panic in our Foreign Office. The Prime Minister was informed that Pakistan might be on the brink of war, so he at once ordered General Gul, who had recently replaced General Akhtar at ISI, to cease all such operations at once.
The Bear Trap (Afghanistan’s Untold Story)
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My baby called me up. She said- Why don't you ever take me out? Pick me up in your brand new car....You shake the short change from the old fruit jar...
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