Afghanistan failings sound echoes of Russia's forgotten war

Afghanistan failings sound echoes of Russia's forgotten war

Date: September 02 2009
Jonathan Steele

IT IS deja vu on a huge and bloody scale. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, is about to advise his president that ''the Afghan people are undergoing a crisis of confidence because the war against the Taliban has not made their lives better'', according to leaked reports. Change the word ''Taliban'' to ''mujahideen'', and you have an exact repetition of what the Russians found a quarter of a century ago.

Like NATO today, the Kremlin realised its forces had little control outside the main cities. The parallels don't end there. The Russians called their Afghan enemies dukhy (ghosts), ever-present but invisible, as hidden in death as they were when alive, which echoes the way some British units have failed to find a single Taliban body.

The Soviet authorities never invited Western reporters to embed, but you could track down veterans of the Afghan war in Moscow's gloomier housing estates. They were conscripts, unlike Western troops there now, so perhaps they had a heightened sense of anger. But many of our soldiers might share the sentiments that Igor expressed, as he hung out with his mates one evening in February 1989 and let me listen: ''You remember that mother who lost her son. She kept repeating, 'He fulfilled his duty. He fulfilled his duty to the end.' That's the most tragic thing. What duty? … If she opened her eyes to our whole Afghan thing, she'd probably find it hard to hold out.''
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NATO's war aims echo the Soviets' - prop up a modernising and secular government against the threat from fundamentalist tyranny. The Soviet advantage was that they were operating in an age when nation-building by foreign powers was in vogue. The Kremlin did not have to fall back on the claim that terrorism had to be stopped in Kabul in order to keep it from the streets of Moscow.

The big difference, so far, is that after years of remorseless losses the Soviet leadership realised the war was unwinnable. Mikhail Gorbachev tried talking to the enemy to form a coalition Afghan government (shades of the current ''Do we talk to the Taliban?'' debate), and when they and their Western backers refused, he pulled out. Does Obama have the sense to do the same? In January 1989, six weeks before the Russians completed their withdrawal, I wrote: ''The Soviet invasion was an outrage which the majority of the world's nations rightly condemned … But the manner of their departure has been nothing but honourable … What led to the U-turn was a combination of factors: the political mistakes of their Afghan allies (in 2009 read ''the corrupt Karzai Government''), awareness that the entry of Soviet troops had turned a civil war into a holy crusade, and recognition that the mujahideen could not be defeated. It required a new leadership in Moscow to accept what Russians had privately known for months.''

Yuri put it graphically: ''It wasn't a Soviet-Afghan war. It's a civil war. A powerful country like ours can't be defeated. If we had sent in more men, it would have been outright occupation or genocide. We thought it was better to leave.''

Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/afghanistan-failings-sound-echoes-of-russias-forgotten-war-20090901-f6vd.html?skin=text-only