occurred even beforethe Soviet invasion, as a result of aerial bom-
bardments, but the two years following the invasion also witnessed
substantial military operations because of the policy of ‘establish-
ing a cordon sanitaire along the Pakistan border’ (Sliwinski,
1989b: 75).
A number of operations were notable either for their scale or for
their impact on the course of battle in particular localities. In
March 1980, a major operation was launched in Kunar, with
an estimated 1000 casualties amongst regime opponents and
civilians (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 36). In June 1980, a
Soviet motorised battalion was devastated in an ambush on the
Khost–Gardez road to the south of Kabul. In July 1981, a major
regime operation was successfully mounted near Sarobi to secure
the Kabul–Jalalabad road, but in April 1982, the regime suffered a
serious setback when intruders in Bagram airbase destroyed 23 air-
craft. In 1983, as was noted in Chapter 2, Soviet tactics shifted
towards clearing the population rather than simply attacking the
resistance. However, major offensives directed at concentrations of
resistance forces continued. In August 1984, the Soviets launched a
coordinated operation to break the siege of the Jaji garrison in
Paktia, following up with major strikes from January 1985 at other
resistance targets, aimed at facilitating the establishment of more
regime bases along the border with Pakistan (Urban, 1990: 163).
And in April 1986, a force in which (for once) the Afghan Army
was numerically more significant than its Soviet allies succeeded
in seizing the Mujahideen’s ‘showcase’ eastern base of Zhawar.
From a wider perspective, however, these operations delivered
somewhat less than one might have thought. The withdrawal of
regime forces to the points from which they had initially been
deployed typically created a vacuum to which resistance forces
rapidly returned. The Soviets and their regime allies simply lacked
the manpower and matérielto occupy on a permanent basis the
territories from which they could occasionally eject their opponents
(Akhromeev and Kornienko, 1992: 169).
In southern Afghanistan, the regime had severe difficulties even
in asserting control over the whole of the city of Kandahar. The
The Karmal Period, 1979–1986 87