NATO forces in Afghanistan to adopt Soviet experience.

At a new session of the Russia –NATO Council foreign ministers will discuss the situation in Afghanistan, with due regard for NATO’s plans to close down international presence there by 2014. It is possible that the issue of using the former USSR experience in Afghanistan, which would enable the West to protect itself against numerous mistakes, will be raised there.

The USA as the main player and an interested party in the whole story has finally resolved for itself the issue of leaving Afghanistan. The grandiose task the USA is facing now is to define both the tactics and strategy and to calculate the forces and the means which are necessary to painlessly withdraw that military and technical machine – in other words, that bulky and cumbersome thing – that has made numerous attempts over the past 10 years in a bid to introduce Western-style democracy in Afghanistan. NATO’s representatives have made an unofficial request to Moscow to share the materials dealing with and the analysis of the 1989 Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Unofficially – because Washington did not want to admit, at state level, the clear-cut parallels between 2 attempts to put Afghanistan under the control of outside forces.

Editor-in-Chief of the online daily “The Daily Journal” Alexander Goltz says.

“Any troop withdrawal is a difficult military operation that provides for the movement of a great number of people and military hardware, which at exactly that moment become the most vulnerable. Therefore, Russia’s experience in this field is of great interest. We should praise those who organized the pullout of Soviet troops because before the whole operation started, they managed to reach agreement with the heads of the opposition groups to the effect that they would not attack the Soviet troops. This was a great success of both the Soviet special services and the military.
Equally important is the experience concerning the movement of such a large amount of military hardware”.

According to journalists, Russian top brass showed understanding after they heard the request of their American colleagues. There are no reasons for refusing to satisfy their request. As you know, the stabilization of the situation in Afghanistan is a top priority not only for NATO but also for Russia. Deputy Director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis Alexander Khramchikhin says:

“The former USSR withdrew a unit of approximately the same size as the current NATO unit. And from Afghanistan as
well. NATO’s officials are showing a great deal of interest in technical issues. Nobody, except Russia, has such experience. Hence, there is no one else whom they could ask”.

At the same time, the situation in Afghanistan may worsen after the pullout of the coalition forces. In other words, the decision on a withdrawal and the withdrawal itself, to a great extent, is a political problem. Deputy Director of the Institute for Strategic Planning and Forecasting Professor Alexander Gusev says:

“The deployment of the U.S. forces (like the deployment of Soviet forces earlier) to a great extent defined the political configuration in Afghanistan, which existed there until recently. It is necessary to prepare certain political leaders and then to support them. There are several problems here which should be resolved quickly, these are all political problems”.

There is reason to believe that the 4th attempt to change the vector of development of the Afghan state structure that was made in the past 2 centuries ended in failure. The 2 attempts were made by the English earlier and one that was made by the now- defunct Soviet Union ended inconclusively too. As it appears, NATO’s intervention is a failure as well. It could have been more successful, if the Americans had taken into account the Afghan specifics at the very beginning.
They should have learned a lesson from the Soviet (and British) experience before they sent their troops there.

Voice of Russia