KABUL: The United States risks losing the war in Afghanistan if it continues to repeat the mistakes that once helped the Taliban's forerunners defeat the Soviet Union, Russia's outgoing ambassador in Kabul said.
Zamir Kabulov, a veteran diplomat who worked in the Soviet embassy in Kabul throughout the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the gloomy picture of present-day Afghanistan reminded him of his own diplomatic past.
"There are many similarities between the Soviet embassy of the 1980s and the American embassy of 2009," he told a group of reporters late on Wednesday ahead of his departure next week.
"There are a lot of similarities as well as differences. The outcome in both cases is quite poor. It makes me feel very sad that after having spent so much time in Afghanistan ... I am leaving a country that is still at war without any firm prospects of improvement," added Kabulov.
The remarks by the Russian ambassador, whose surname coincidentally means "from Kabul" in Russian, come at a time when NATO-led troops are engaged in the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, when the Taliban were forced from power.
Twenty years since Moscow's humiliating withdrawal following its own 10-year war, Kabulov's words resonate in Kabul's diplomatic circles.
"Neglect of the population. Failure in establishing firm cooperation with local communities. Leaving them at the behest of the enemy," Kabulov said, listing examples of Soviet mistakes he believed were now being repeated.
Speaking at the lavishly refurbished embassy compound, ransacked in the post-Soviet mayhem of the 1990s, he said the country was slipping back into chaos because efforts to rebuild the economy and win people's "hearts and minds" came too late.
"If you compare the situation with five or six years ago, it is of course much worse," he said. "Our partners have lost a lot of opportunities to really control the country, to help assist the Afghan government, ... provide law and order."
Kabulov said, however, that scaling down US forces in Afghanistan at this stage would be another mistake.
Insurgency growing: The head of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan said on Thursday that the insurgency in the country was growing and the success of the military campaign there could not be taken for granted. General Stanley McChrystal described the situation in Afghanistan as serious. "Neither success nor failure can be taken for granted," he said in a speech in London.
"It is complex, difficult terrain, both the land and the people. It is a tribal society with a culture vastly different from what most of us are familiar with," he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"I discount immediately anyone who simplifies the problem or offers a solution ... or says 'this is what you have got to do' because they absolutely have no clue about the complexity of what we are dealing with.
"In Afghanistan, things are rarely as they seem and the outcomes of actions we take, however well intended, are often different from what we expect."
Also on Thursday, Britain's Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth said any increase in soldiers was some way off and not guaranteed. "Before I agree to any increase in troop numbers, I must be sure that the balance of risks is acceptable by evaluating the capacity of the supply chain to properly equip an increased force," he told the Labour Party's annual conference.
Talks: Speaking at the same meeting, Foreign Secretary David Miliband repeated a call for talks with lesser elements of the Taliban if the poison was to be drawn from the insurgency. "The way to defeat this enemy is to divide it - separate the hardcore from the rest," Miliband said.
"Does that mean the Afghan government talking to the Taliban? Yes, with a simple message: Live within the constitution and you can come home to your communities and have a share of power, but stay outside, in hiding ... and you will face an unremitting military force." reuters
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