PARALLELS WITH THE PAST-How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan, How the Americans are Losing.

• Author: Wilkinson, Theodore S.

By Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/201104.goodson_iohnson.afghanistan.html

It was no secret to Rudyard Kipling how proud, independent, and hard to subdue the Afghan people were when the British Empire was at its peak and Kipling wrote his classic Ballad of East and West.

Still, the Russians a century later proved Santayana's rule that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Professors Goodson and Johnson build a strong case that the US and NATO are now following the same pattern, finding three important parallels in the steps the Soviet Union took when it found itself bogged down in Afghanistan in the mid-80's, and the strategic course followed by the U.S. and NATO as the war has dragged on.

The three similarities that the authors address are said to be current elements of U.S. and NATO strategy: the focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the development of "Afghan" solutions to the range of security concerns.

As their casualties mounted, the Soviets had fallen back to these approaches with no success. Eventually they learned that "it is virtually impossible to defeat a rural insurgency in a largely agrarian country by securing the urban areas."

They tried reconciliation...