Is Afghanistan Repeating History?

The Russian ambassador Zamir Kaboluv said turning over combat operations to Afghan troops, like these on patrol with U.S. soldiers, was crucial to defeating the insurgents. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

U.S. Repeating Soviet Missteps In Afghanistan, Envoy Says -- International Herald Tribune

KABUL: It is one of a flow of disarming asides that Russia's ambassador to Kabul deploys while warning of the grim prospects that he says will doom the American enterprise in Afghanistan if the United States fails to learn from mistakes made during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.

"I know quite a lot about the past," the ambassador, Zamir Kabulov, said in polished English with a broad smile during an interview in Kabul one morning last week. "But almost nothing about the future."

In fact, it is precisely because of a belief that the Soviet past may hold lessons for the American future that a talk with Kabulov is valued by many Western diplomats here. That is a perception that has drawn at least one NATO general to the Russian Embassy in Kabulov's years as ambassador, though the officer involved, not an American, showed no sign of having been influenced by what he heard, Kabulov said.

"They listen, but they do not hear," he said with another wry smile.

"Their attitude is, 'The past is the past,' and that they know more than I do." Perhaps, too, he said, "they think what I have to say is just part of a philosophy of revenge," a diplomatic turning of the tables by a government in Moscow that is embittered by the Soviet failure here and eager for the United States to suffer a similar fate.

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My Comment: History always has the tendency of repeating itself. Is Afghanistan one of those cases? .... only time will answer that question.