...118,000 men -- a number ominously close to the 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today...

I cannot believe that Mr Annen unintentionally forgot to mention the allies and the non-governmental contractors.

So, the number of Western troops in Afghanistan is HIGHER (and by far) then the biggest number of the Soviet troops there.

And (as hinted in the article) the US Army is fighting in much more COMFORTABLE conditions: there is no superpower trying to shed as much blood as possible out of the US soldiers, Pakistan is a dubious ally not a merciless foe, etc. etc.

So, the US Army & its allies are actually doing much WORSE than the Soviet Army.

Another important lie in the article was about the reasons for the fall of the Nadjibullah's government: the real reason was that despite the agreement to the contrary, Pakistan (endorsed and assisted by the US) did NOT stop supplies to the Muslim opposition. So, when Eltsin effectively betrayed Nadzhibullah by ordering to stop vital supplies, the latter one kept as long as there was fuel (he did not even spare few drops for his plane to escape).

Nadjibullah was a brave man...

The third lie is about the Soviet social program in Afghanistan: it did start BEFORE the war and was never stopped. In fact, before the war the Soviets were regarded by the Afghans as “best friends” (well, given the amount of money the USSR pumped in there, that was not a surprise). This, of course, changed when the troops moved in but, as I mentioned, the war did not stop (although, obviously, dwarfed) the attempts of the Soviets to build up hospitals, factories and schools.

"[T]he Taliban today have no comparable international patron." What about Pakistan's ISI?

Anyone who could write an article like this obviously does not read independent military analysts. The Taliban is a non-existent military force in its death throes. Military historians are already writing up Afghanistan as a US victory. Here's a good place to start in the Winning article series:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20110302.aspx

Pakistan is the common denominator for the West’s war in Afghanistan increasingly resembling that of Soviet Union.

While US supported Pakistan-based Islamic Mujhahiddins with stinger missiles that led to the failure of Soviet Union’s Afghan mission, US itself is the main reason for its own failure in Afghanistan.

The roots of the ‘current Afghan tragedy’ are in Washington where Bush administration decided to allow Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan (now relocated to Karachi by Pakistani ISI to protect them from possible US drone attacks) and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Duplicitous Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.

Adm Mullen had following to say about America’s primary ally in its fight against terrorism, to the foreign news media on 1/13/2011: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again it, [Pakistan] is the epicenter of terrorism in the world right now. It is absolutely critical that the safe havens in Pakistan get shut down. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without that. It’s not just Haqqani Network anymore, or Al Qaeda or TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), the Afghan Taliban, or LET (Lashkar-e-Tayyeba), it’s all of them working together.”

And previous US ambassador Anne Patterson to Pakistan, wrote in a secret review in 2009 that ‘Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups - Haqqani‘s HQN, Mullah Omar‘s QST, Al Qaeda and LeT - and will not abandon them for any amount of US money, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.

However US has been deliberately ignoring Taliban’s Pakistani connections in fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/2010, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/2010 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/2010 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

US Afghan mission was destined to fail because US deliberately ignored Pakistan’s terrorist connections.

The author, in his final paragraph infers the possibility that the US experience in Afghanistan might turn out better than the Soviet Union's, if only the US could somehow manage to instill a spirit of good government, implment a true democratic process, and eradicate widespread corruption. Not asking for much is he?

We have been trying to change Afghanistan for over ten years now, and what do we have to show for all that? No one claims success or even modest progress towards the type of state we would like to see. The fact is that our military and political leaders don't have the courage to admit that we long ago failed in the primary mission (capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his aides - drive the Taliban criminals from power), and that even the most hopeful of them see no end in sight. The concept of cointer-insurgency is one that requires more patience and resources than we have or may be able to apply to the situation. The Taliban have been resurgent for several years, coming back from the brink after we drove them out in 2003. Corruption continues and we appear to be very uncomfortable with Karzai as "our man in Kabul". Pakistan treats the US as an ATM machine, while giving us little in return - they continue to shield OBL, Mullah Omar and the leadership of the very insurgency that we are fightin next door. We have become their b*#ch.

There is no commitment to ending this thing soon, and even the best scenarios envision another decade or more fighting an insurgency that is still based across the border in Pakistan. It is highly likely that we will finally leave Afghanistan having failed in just about every respect. We will leave as the Soviets did.

While Annen's premise is trite and the comparison between the Soviet situation in 1985 and our situation today is fairly thin, his conclusion is a "no duh" statement. That building up the army and giving them modern weapons and capabilities will not a self-sufficient Afghan state make. Obviously State and other allied agencies and political/strategic efforts have to modernize the Afghan state politically, and ensure there is as honest a government as is realistic that is in touch with its people in all its provinces. A tall order, but one that Americans and ISAF partners are up to if given enough time and resources.

I read with sad amusement about our various efforts to "win" in Afghanistan. I cannot recall one tactic or strategy that has been put forth by our military or civilian leaders which was not tried by us during the Vietnam War. Or tried by the French during the Indo-China War, or even in more recent history by the Russians, who knew all about our Vietnam efforts, but, obviously, didn't learn much.
It is all hubris to attempt to change Afghans or Vietnamese or any others.. People get the governments they deserve. If they do not want to fight for a "better" government, who the heck are we to choose for them? This Afghan War is a total waste. Unfortunately, only a real cynic like Henry Kissinger could end it now----sign anything, declare peace, and get the hell out.

Discouraged by FOREIGN POLICY's censorship I was not going to comment here anymore. But this wonderful article above needs praise for its wisdom. We should remember that France was a real democracy, yet its military was a sink hole of corruption and incompetence. That is what I fear most becoming the character of our commanders. We now have 2x the Four Stars as we did in Vietnam with only 1/2 the size of the force. Executive top-heaviness has always been the cancer killing corporate or bureaucratic success. Worst still, America having a volunteer military, allows many citizens to think "ain't my kid going to war," leaving the generals carte blanche. Just as you would want only the best pediatric care possible for your children, so would you want the best command for your patriotic sons&daughters that enlist. But the attitude I quote above allows far too many Americans to display an ominous disconnect syndrome, insisting that: "No one forced them to join, they volunteered because they like to kill; so let them do what they're getting paid to do as long as it isn't in my backyard."

This is not much different from that old Marine, Bing West, who said that Marines should be allowed to do what they do best: "KILL PEOPLE!" When asked, after he wrote a book on how we're losing Afghanistan, how the young grunts feel about the war, he insisted that they don't think about such things because, after all, all they joined up to do is kill and live rough. Look at French history and note how such attitudes doomed the French military and its young recruits.

Bob Woodward wrote the most well informed and thorough early histories of our post-9/11 wars when "ain't my kid going to war" permitted half the expeditionary force to fight inadequately trained and supplied as Reservists that had joined up on the promise that they would be called up only to defend the homeland against fire, flood, chaos and invasion in return for payment of their tuition; so they need serve only one weekend a month and one month a year in training. Suddenly, mom&dad soldiers—well past the maximum age accepted into the regular forces were finding themselves locked into endless servitude under Bush's "stop loss" policy, supplied and commanded as second class soldiers. To this complaint' SecDef Rumsfeld could only say that sometimes you don't get to go to war with the army you want (!!@#%^$##&&**!!!)!

So, generals from one star or more became star chasers to that fourth by promoting a kind of warfare they in no way understood. Facing "towel heads" armed with only Kalashnikovs and Korans, our mom&dad soldiers very quickly left behind orphans and widows on the home front as tribute to command incompetence and strategic drift at the top. As the generals did to French presidents before him, the generals are locking in our President in self-promoting mil-babble like the plagiarized text they produced on COIN warfare. Intellectual bankruptcy is matched only by chicanery through which the outcomes of their operations are hidden in Pentagon "secrecy" classification. But thanks to Wikileaks, none of us can pretend: "Wow! I just didn't know!" It is the task before us as Americans to know and to know well what is going on. One American, Bob Woodward, has done his duty. I am not saying that we should take his books as "this is it," but he is a starting point from which every one of us should begin to look at what these generals are doing with OUR children.

I often urged judging our generals by the same standards by which we judge our physicians. A loss rate such as that of the media darling, Gen. Petraeus, would certainly cause people to demand investigations were he a physician…and, commensurate liability for incompetence and cover-up. Whatever you find, be objective and perseverant in your search. We cannot abandon our children to history two decades hence when their fate will be abandoned to dusty library shelves, topic of PhD theses. Our generation was abandoned to the command incompetence of leadership in Vietnam. A fantastic book appeared exposing it: DERELICTION OF DUTY—AFTER the fact! We cannot allow repeat of the worst errors, at great cost to Iraqi, Afghan-- and maybe some day Iranian—lives, on top of the lives of all our heroic children that enlisted, as generals chase stars for their lapels. The Vietnam War was under constant scrutiny of MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE. Yet this war has fallen pray to blogging careerism instead of responsible debate. Americans are seeking reassurance so they can go back to their ME-ism, not the truth so they can properly exercise their responsibility as citizens in whose name all this is done. The fate of the French Army by 1962 should ring in our ears. It is OUR kids, the kids of ALL OF US, whom we allowed to go to war intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb against mere religious peasants. There's no global Jihad in Afghanistan, as there was CIA meddling, guided by the Pakistani ISI of mujahedins that the Soviets felt they had to respond to. We are stacking our command incompetence against the devout will of tribal Afghans so that we may impose on them what Petraeus himself calls a "criminal syndicate." Obama, here as in all issues, proved to be a moral weakling. He adjudicates by going through with the Salomonic threat of cutting the baby in half. Because, over and over again, cutting the baby in half is no solution, as half-babies are non-viable, Obama has suffered policy failure after policy failure. Yet, the brouhaha over McChrystal, the mythmaker, should make it clear that we have a duty to investigate if in fact Petraeus did really betray us
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"Finally, today's Afghan government possesses a crucial advantage that Najibullah's government lacked -- a nascent, if flawed, democratic process that can be used to bolster its support among the Afghan population"

I wonder if there is really a democratic process in our understanding. Although IEC chairman Fazal Ahmad Manawi called the November 2010 parliamentary elections a "major success" ony 1,2% of the 2500 candidates were representatives of a political party. There were also 7 million fewer voters than in the 2009 presidential elections. In the province of Ghazni despite of its Pashtun majority no single one was elected to parliament. In contrast Ghaznis Hazara minority succeded in winning all of the 11MPs.

There is a Afghan saying: a house will collapse sooner or later if its first stone is wrongly laid. Todays Afghan "democracy" is risking a collapse of the system and maybe there will be a "night of the long knives" some day.