Twenty years ago, the last Russian army troops departed from Afghanistan after a fatal war that went on for nine years, seven weeks and three days. Without the relegation of armed forces and or a political miracle, the U.S. government will remain in Afghanistan for longer than the Russians did, substantially longer.
Recently the United States began to plan a reinforcement of military personel in Afghanistan. They have decided to employ an additional thirty thousand soldiers over the span of the next year. By that time, the U.S.A's presence will have equaled the length of the Russians stay and will eventually surpass it come the end of 2010. If the United States' history is any guide, political campaigning in 2012 will categorize the war as Barack Obama's war. He has in fact switched the emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan. Obama pledged to pull troops out of Iraq and deploy them into Afghanistan.
Obama's critics will complain about the Afghan war's cost - more or less seventy billion dollars a year- and call for an answer in terms of what it has or hasn't accomplished and when it will finish.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forecasts "a long and hard fight." By an ironic twist of history, Gates was instrumental in getting Russian military personnel out of Afghanistan while he was deputy director of the CIA. At present, Gates is involved with having more American army in Afghanistan, and it is not hard to imagine that sooner or later the U.S.A. will confront the same excruciating decisions the Russians confronted
RETALIATION TO MASS MURDER
By early January, the United States death toll in Afghanistan stood at 630 and Afghan casualties, both armed forces and civilian, are a fraction of those compared to the Russian war. The Russian and American wars in Afghanistan differ immensely in scale and intent. The Russians desired to shore up a Marxist government and at the peak of its involvement, had an 115,000-strong military force in the state. More than 600,000 of its soldiers were serviced there and the encroachment attracted international disapprobation, complete with a (partial) Western boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Russia.
In contrast, the United States intrusion of Afghanistan was in revenge to the carnage of 3,000 people in New York's twin towers and at the Pentagon on 9/11, 2001. That lash out was executed by extremities of al-Qaeda, which had been given backup and secure haven by the Taliban authorities of Afghanistan.
Another perplexing element: Afghans do not like when foreigners intervene in their matter. The British and later the Russians, found this out at great cost. In his memoir, Gates heralds the exit of the Russians as a cracking triumph and contributes: "Afghanistan was at last free of the alien encroacher."
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