Russian advice: More troops won't help in Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

Russian advice: More troops won't help in Afghanistan
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

MOSCOW — The old diplomat sighed as he recalled his years in Afghanistan, and then leaned forward and said in a booming voice that no escalation of troops would bring lasting peace.

As the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986, Fikryat Tabeyev saw the numbers rise to more than 100,000 troops without any possibility of victory against a growing insurgency.

Even with President Barack Obama's plan initially to send 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to that mountainous nation this year, the combined NATO-American force will be smaller than the Soviet contingent was. Moscow's failure to pacify Afghanistan, which broke the back of the Soviet Union, doesn't mean that the same fate awaits Obama's efforts, but ignoring a decade of experience there would be a mistake, former envoys and generals warn.

The Soviets rumbled into Afghanistan in 1979 to rescue a weak communist regime, a very different reason from the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, which sought to deny the 9-11 terrorists a haven. The seven years of war since the U.S. intervention, though, look familiar to the Russians.

Many challenges that bedeviled the Soviets confront the American operation today, the retired envoys and generals said. Among them are vicious tribal rivalries, a weak central government, radical Islamists, power-hungry warlords, incompetent or corrupt local military commanders, failing infrastructure and the complexity of fighting guerrilla groups. The former officials also cautioned that trying to bring democracy to Afghanistan, or anything resembling it, will be as fruitless as their attempts to install communism.


Rest of article at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/63581.html

[formercia]

1. My, how things change, yet still remain the same.

I'm surprised the Brits were stupid enough to get involved. This is what happens when you try to keep the party going at all cost.

[elleng]

2. 'The fundamental problem in Afghanistan

is that it isn't a country in the way the West thinks of countries, said retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev, who did two tours there and left as a regimental commander.

"There has never been any real centralized state in Afghanistan. There is no such nation as Afghanistan," said Aushev, who's a former president of the Russian Caucasus republic of Ingushetia and now heads a veterans group in Moscow. "There are (ethnic groups of) Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks, and they all have different tribal policies."

As a result, any occupation force will spend much of its time propping up a government that has little relevance outside Kabul and trying to corral disparate ethnic groups and tribes into a national army that's often unwilling to fight, Aushev said.

"We made the same mistake when we put the weak Babrak Karmal as the head of state," Aushev said of a former Afghan president. "He was so weak that no one obeyed him. He was hiding behind the backs of Soviet soldiers. . . . Today the situation is the same; (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai is being protected by U.S. special forces."'

[ixion]

3. They don't call it "The Graveyard of Empire" for nothing

it's a fools errand, that will do nothing save for costing money and lives.

We'd be doing ourselves a favor to get the hell out of there.

[bridgit]

4. One of the true oddities; we provoke the Soviets into Afghanistan to give them their...

Vietnam Style experience and...there we are sucked into their Afghanistan Style experience oh well it's only a world destroyed and dwindling treasure