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Kansas City StarThe 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 Sept. 11 terrorists a haven. The seven years of war since the U.S. intervention, though, look familiar to the Russians.
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