Peter Beaumont: Chilling echoes of failure to win war in Afghanistan

It is eight years into the war in Afghanistan, and the most senior defence official running the conflict considers a letter from one of his officers. It is a depressing list of political and tactical failures.

"We should honestly admit that our efforts have not led to the expected results. Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result - stabilisation of military-political situation in the country. The protracted character of the military struggle and the absence of any serious success, which could lead to a breakthrough in the entire strategic situation, led to the formation in the minds of the majority of the population of the mistrust in the abilities of the regime."

"The experience of the past years clearly shows that the Afghan problem cannot be solved by military means only.

"We should decisively reject our illusions and undertake principally new steps, taking into account the lessons of the past, and the real situation in the country."

The date is August 17, 1987. The writer Colonel K. Tsagalov is addressing the newly appointed Soviet Defence Minister, Dmitry Yazov.

Fast-forward 22 years to the confidential briefing paper prepared for President Barack Obama by the senior US general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, in August 2009, eight years into the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan.

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and Isaf's [International Security Assistance Force's] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their Government," McChrystal argued in a document leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. He said the consequence had been a "crisis of confidence among Afghans. Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents".

The American led-effort, wrote McChrystal, was labouring under its own illusions regarding its competence.

"Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. [Nato and the US] does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

In Washington the talk has been of a "Vietnam moment". But what if Afghanistan is not the new Vietnam but rather "the new Afghanistan"?

As Artemy Kalinovsky, a fellow at the London School of Economics, argued in Foreign Policy magazine last month: "The US counterinsurgency field manual does not mention the Soviet experience once. Pentagon officials seemed to have little awareness about what Moscow had been trying to do there or for how long."

To cite one parallel, McChrystal has just announced he wants to relocate isolated firebases to relocate troops in population centres.

The Russians, confronted by a widening conflict, were forced to adopt the same strategy.

The Soviet war cost more than a million Afghan lives and, 26,000 Soviet soldiers. More than five million Afghans fled the devastated country. Soviet troop numbers reached 108,000 at their peak.

The mujahideen, unlike the Taleban today, benefited from US and other foreign military aid. And the present conflict has lacked the same intensity.

But while the scale is different, the intellectual failures associated with both wars are the same.

Neither the Russians nor the Americans intended to become embroiled in long wars.

Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, ordered the Soviet invasion to build a communist government that could stand on its own feet. It was an error repeated by the US-led efforts to rebuild the country as a democratic state.

The Soviet preoccupation with Afghanistan seems strikingly familiar. At a meeting in the Kremlin on April 1, 1979, after an uprising in Herat against the Afghan communist government, Moscow's most senior officials read a top-level report on the situation.

"Afghan reactionary forces [were] skilfully taking advantage of the almost complete illiteracy of the population, complex international and inter-tribal conflicts, religious fanaticism and nationalism."

It depicted a mujahideen insurgency in transition, "from covert subversive actions to open armed forms of activity" the aim of which was to "widen the front of the struggle, to force the government to disperse its forces across different regions".

Just as Western officials now home in on the failings of the Karzai regime three decades later, the Soviet leadership lamented the lack of legitimacy and authority of their man in Kabul - Nur Mohammad Taraki.

In both conflicts foreign forces have found themselves propping up a minority grouping with unsustainable claims to nationwide legitimacy. Russia backed the narrowly represented supporters of the PDPA, the fractious and divided Afghan communist party; now Nato has promoted a small elite surrounding Karzai's weak government.

Just as US and Nato forces would struggle after the new Taleban insurgency to prevent fighters returning to areas already cleared, the Russians suffered a similar problem.

Soviet officials complain of not being able to win on the battlefield decisively and of losing the "propaganda war". Recently US envoy Richard Holbrooke and McChrystal have talked of the need "to wrest the information initiative from the Taleban and other groups".

By the time Colonel Tsaglov put pen to paper, the new leader Mikhail Gorbachev had already decided to pull out. This week, by contrast, Obama is expected to announce his decision to escalate the war and send yet more soldiers. In the end it was the endless death toll - as much as the crippling cost - that persuaded Gorbachev to call for withdrawal.

Thirty years after Russian troops entered Afghanistan, Nato, like the Soviets, is confronted by ethnic divisions, corruption and weak government; by a population of which large parts are hostile to foreign intervention and hostile to attempts to modernise and centralise the state.

With troop commitments creeping towards the Soviet total, the unanswered question is whether this war can end in a different manner to the predecessor it mirrors in such startling fashion.

* Peter Beaumont is foreign affairs editor of the Observer

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