It has become a pub bore's cliché to argue that we will never prevail in Afghanistan because no foreign power ever has: not even the Russians, whose nine-year occupation cost the lives of 14,000 of their soldiers and 35,500 wounded, and which ended in humiliating retreat in 1989. Those Cassandras irritate Western leaders, whose response is to insist that it is different this time. "We are not an occupying army," Gordon Brown told the BBC on Friday. "It's not like previous interventions.... We are actually creating the conditions by which the Afghans themselves, and not an occupying army, can run their own affairs."
Ture, history does not repeat itself in every detail. Nato, for instance, would never adopt the scorched earth tactics of the Soviet Union, which led to the deaths of more than a million civilians and the creation of 7 million refugees. In 1987 the Soviets carpet-bombed and bulldozed Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city, reducing its pre-war population from 200,000 to 25,000. The underlying motive of the Western mission, furthermore - the destruction of al-Qa'ida - has the justification of self-defence and is legitimised by the UN.
Nevertheless, the spectre of Soviet-style failure hangs over the coalition as never before. President Obama, as he dithers over a troop surge, is in the same shoes as Mikhail Gorbachev when he came to power in March 1985. He, too, inherited a counter-insurgency that had stagnated - and opted for a surge to force the result. Troop levels rose to 108,800: almost precisely the number that the US will have in the field if Obama agrees to General McChrystal's request for another 40,000. It did neither Gorbachev nor the Afghans any good: 1985 turned out to be the bloodiest year of the whole war. "The more troops you bring the more trouble you will have here," Russia's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov said recently. "If this trend is the rule, if you bring here 200,000 soldiers, all of Afghanistan will be under the Taliban." Kabulov, who served in Kabul as a junior diplomat in the 1980s, understands better than most that nothing unites the fractious Afghans more effectively than the presence of infidel soldiers on their holy soil.
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