Afghanistan's lessons for Iraq

"For the Americans, it is dictatorship or democracy - the word 'nationalism' is never heard," says Mr. Roy. "They can't understand, like in Palestine, that somebody could choose a dictatorship for nationalist reasons. It is something totally unthinkable in Washington."

One difference between the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq may work in the US favor. While the resistance to the Soviets was "spontaneous and universal," in Iraq it has focused on a narrow region known as the "Sunni Triangle."

And despite the host of problems, many Iraqis remain grateful to the US for ending the Hussein regime.

"If the Americans are able to crush the Sunni Triangle without sparking off other places, it will be OK," says Roy. "They will never win Iraq, but they will get enough time to get out, while saving face and claiming victory."

Even getting to that point will not be easy, if the Soviet experience is any gauge.

Emergency meetings at the White House last week formulated a new strategy, to speed up "Iraqification" of security, by replacing US soldiers with freshly minted Iraqi units.

When the Soviets tried it, political reliability was a major problem, says Davis of Jane's. He saw the results repeatedly: newly recruited Afghan soldiers sitting down to tea with mujahideen units, handing over their guns and going home.

"It starts with a low-level hemorrhaging, desertions of a few people with weapons. Then you have a few officers being shot," says the Bangkok-based Davis. "Then you run the danger - if the opposition in Iraq can attain what it does not have now, which is a degree of political cohesiveness - of whole units going over to the other side.

"In Iraq, the dangers are so much more pressing, because of the speed with which the Americans are trying to push this strategy through," says Davis. "That is bound to be exacerbated by the fact that, right now, [guerrillas] will be ensuring that their moles are in the intelligence services, and signing up to join new units."

One difference in the Soviet and US comparison does not work to US advantage, he says. It took more than three years for the Afghan resistance - unable to shoot straight at the start of the war, and making "stupid mistakes" - to get their act together. That's a luxury US troops don't have in Iraq.

"You've got a disbanded army, Iraqi special forces that were well trained and took minimal casualties in the war, and weapons stockpiles all over the country," says Davis. "So the Iraqis have moved straight into sophisticated guerrilla operations, virtually from day one."

A further parallel is the broader, nation-shaping ambition of the Soviets and US, says Dmitri Trenin, a Soviet military veteran with the Carnegie Moscow office. In the 1980s, Moscow tried to impose a Soviet-type system on Afghanistan; today the US is placing "too much emphasis on democracy, and not enough on good governance and rule of law," he says.

And in Iraq, the US faces difficulty because it is the "perfect machine for waging war," but "not a good machine for imperial policing," Mr. Trenin says. "The US never liked the idea, it doesn't have the culture."

But the root problem is one that has dogged foreign invaders throughout history, Trenin says: "Occupying powers are never popular."

The lessons of the Soviet experience have not been lost on US military historians. Robert Baumann of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was a graduate student in Moscow when the war began, wrote a case study on Soviet Afghanistan and discovered what he called a "pervasive pattern: tactical successes that did not add up to tangible, strategic gains." And though he is obliged not to discuss current US military operations, he can speak of the Soviet example.

"Sometimes [Soviet leaders] were captives of their own propaganda," though not telling the public much for the first five years of the war "hurt them badly," Mr. Baumann says.

"Even when they did start reporting combat, it masked the circumstances," says Baumann. "Meanwhile, you've got all these soldiers coming home, with a different version of the truth."

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