Nato's failing mission is increasingly coming to resemble the Soviets' disastrous campaign
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 Sean Smith's recent photographic account of the fighting in Helmand and the failure of the British units he was with to find a single Talib body.
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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), but when they and their western backers refused, he pulled out anyway. Does Obama have the sense to do the same? In January 1989, six weeks before the Russians completed their withdrawal, I wrote in this newspaper: "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."
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Another major difference that has not been commented on is the number of casualties/fatalities.
Almost 1,300 in the current war is an order of magnitude less that the approximately 15000 fatalities that the russians suffered.
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" - David Cameron, UK Prime Minister. 13 May 2015.