The Soviet Union could not win in Afghanistan and now the US is about to have something in common with that futile campaign — nine years, 50 days.
Yesterday, the US-led coalition had been fighting in the South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state. The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.
What started out as a quick war on Oct. 7, 2001, by the US and its allies to wipe out al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, has instead turned into a long and slogging campaign. Now about 100,000 NATO troops are fighting a burgeoning insurgency, while trying to support and cultivate a nascent democracy.
A Pentagon-led assessment released earlier this week described the progress made since the US injected 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan earlier this year as fragile.
The top US military commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, has said NATO’s core objective is to ensure that Afghanistan “is never again a sanctuary to al-Qaeda or other transnational extremists that it was prior to 9/11.”
He said the only way to achieve that goal is “to help Afghanistan develop the ability to secure and govern itself. Now not to the levels of Switzerland in 10 years or less, but to a level that is good enough for Afghanistan.”
To reach that goal, there is an ongoing effort to get the Taliban to the negotiating table.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has set up a committee to try to make peace and the military hopes its campaign will help force the insurgents to seek a deal.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 27, 1979, its stated goal was to transform the nation into a modern socialist state. The Soviets sought to prop up a communist regime that was facing a popular uprising, but left largely defeated on Feb. 15, 1989.
In 1992, the pro-Moscow government of Mohammad Najibullah collapsed and US-backed rebels took power. The Taliban eventually seized Kabul after a violent civil war that killed thousands more.
It ruled with a strict interpretation of Islamic law until it was ousted by the US-led invasion.
Nader Nadery, an Afghan analyst who has studied the Soviet and US invasions, said “the time may be the same [for the two conflicts], but conditions are not similar.”
More than a million civilians died as Soviet forces propping up the government of Babrak Karmal waged a massive war against anti-communist mujahidin forces.
“There was indiscriminate mass bombardment of villages for the eviction of mujahidin,” Nadery said. “Civilian casualties are not at all comparable.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and an Afghanistan expert, said NATO forces have killed fewer than 10,000 civilians and a comparable number of insurgents.
The allied military presence has also been far smaller and more targeted. Even now, nearly all operations are restricted to the south and east of the country where the insurgency is most active.
O’Hanlon points out that at the height of the resistance, there were 250,000 mujahidin representing all Afghan ethnic groups fighting the Soviets, while “the current insurgency is perhaps one-eighth as large and is only Pashtun.”
“We do have big problems, but there is no comparison between this war and what the Soviets wrought,” he said. “The Soviet war set Afghanistan back dramatically from what had been a weak but functioning state. NATO has, by contrast, helped Afghanistan to a 10 percent annual economic growth rate, 7 million kids are now in school and most people have access to basic healthcare within a two-hour walk.”
He also pointed out that although Karzai was hand-picked by the US after the invasion, “he has since been elected twice by his own people.”
However, the US and its allies have made strategic mistakes, including taking their eyes off Afghanistan and shifting their attention to the war in Iraq. In those crucial years, the Taliban and their allies surged back and took control of many parts of the Afghan countryside and some regions in the south — especially parts of Kandahar and Helmand.
Wadir Safi, a professor at Kabul University who served as civil aviation minister under the Najibullah government, said risks surround the US effort because “the Americans never reached the goal for which they came.”
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