Some #'ers on refugees and casualties, courtesy of a short book (188 pgs. text, plus about 50 pgs. of annotated footnotes and bibliography), "Afghanistan's Endless War, " by Larry P. Goodson, who studied under Louis Depree [along with Oliver Roy, considered two of the leading scholars on Afghanistan and political Islam~ Christian Parenti, son of Michael, the hack, who I had dinner with the other night, recommends Roy highly. Christian, btw, is rather scathing about the vagaries of Northern California radical kultur), published recently in pb. by Univ. of Washington Press.
Pg. 5, talkng about the Soviet-Afghan War from '78 to '89. "Nearly 2 million Afghans have been killed so far, (as well as 15,000 Soviet soldiers), and 600,000 to 2,000,000 wounded. More than 6 million Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan, creating the worlds largest refugee population since 1981, while 2 million Afghans were internally displaced. Thus more than 50 % of Afghanistans indigeous population (estimated at 15-17 million at war's beginning, now estimated to be 22 million) became casulties, killed, wounded or refugees.
From the next paragraph, "The Soviet Army and the Afghan communist government planted an estimated 30,000,000 land mines throughout the country, most of them completely unmarked and unmarked. Afghanistan's natural resources, particularly the natural gas reserves near Shiberghan, flowed north to the Soviet Union in the 80's and Afghanistan's economy collapsed."
Pg. 57, "In the early spring of 1979 war came to the cities of Afghanistan, In mid-March there was a general uprising in Herat. More than 100 Soviets were reportedly hunted down and killed in savage violence that claimed 3 thousand to 5 thousand lives....The government in Kabul felt the pressure generated by the uprisings in the countryside, particularly the savage fighting in Herat and the defection of its troops in Jalalabad [previous paragraph said Afghan Army strength went from 80,000 to 30,000 from late '78 to spring '79). In April Afghan government troops with Soviet advisors massacred 1,170 men and boys in Kerala village in Kunar, near the border with Pakistan." Michael Pugliese