Veterans of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan predict failure in Iraq

Veterans of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan predict failure in Iraq

By Matthew Schofield

McClatchy Newspapers

Captain Vladimir Vshivtsev was blinded in 1986 in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. He notes similarities between the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. (Matthew Schofield/MCT)

Captain Vladimir Vshivtsev was blinded in 1986 in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. He notes similarities between the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. (Matthew Schofield/MCT)

MOSCOW - Eighteen years after the Soviet army pulled out of Afghanistan in a humiliating defeat that hastened the collapse of an empire, many soldiers who fought there believe they're seeing history repeat itself.

The United States - then the force behind the Afghan resistance - now appears trapped in a similar downward spiral in Iraq, besieged by a collection of forces not unlike those it trained and equipped to cripple the Soviets two decades ago.

For many, the similarities go beyond the symbolic. Retired Capt. Vladimir Vshivtsev was blinded by an improvised roadside bomb 20 years ago in Afghanistan. He shudders every time he hears about a U.S. soldier killed or wounded by a similar device in Iraq or Afghanistan, he said.

"They're fighting the same war again," he said. "Sure, the political stuff is different, but the military result is going to be the same: failure."

The political reasons for the two invasions were as different as the governments that launched them. The United States went to war in Iraq ostensibly to disarm a dictator of suspected weapons of mass destruction, then set its goal as establishing democracy. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union mounted its invasion in 1979 ostensibly to save communism in a place where it had never taken root.

But Russian soldiers, officers and experts point to many parallels. The Soviets also arrived to flowers and smiles, fought with a similar sized force (by the mid-1980s) of about 120,000 men and lost about 1,300 dead each year. They arrived a superpower, full of hubris, and departed humbled. Their political leaders never really understood the war.