The Soviet spectre haunting Afghanistan

As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation.

It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet forces rolled into Afghanistan. The idea was that by installing a new leader and mounting a brief show of force, the rebels would be intimidated back into line. Six months, the old men in the Kremlin told themselves, that is all it would take.

And so began a vicious ten-year war that saw the deaths of 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans. When the war ended in 1988, it was not because the Soviets had been beaten on the battlefield but because they had been exhausted. Any hope of winning the war depended on a political, military and economic commitment that Moscow simply could not countenance — some generals even talked of deploying a million men.

So too for the United States, and the sight of their withdrawal, similarly exhausted by their own Afghan experience, does provide a degree of Russian schadenfreude, especially for a generation of military officers who remember their own miserable time there.