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KATY CLARK: Afghanistan is sometimes called the “graveyard of empires.” The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. They thought their troops would stay six months, but they stayed 10 years. And when the war was finished, the Soviet Union itself was near collapse. The World's Jeb Sharp looks back at the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and what it says about the challenges facing the US there today.

JEB SHARP: It's easy to think of Afghanistan in war-torn, mythical terms. But historian Williams Maley says you'd be surprised.

WILLIAM MALEY: From about 1929 until 1978, Afghanistan was one of the most peaceful countries in Asia and indeed Afghanistan was, in a sense, a place of retreat within the region to which people would go when they wanted some relaxation.

SHARP: In 1978, the Afghan communists took power in a coup, tipping the country into the Soviet cold war camp. The Soviets watched warily as their counterparts in Afghanistan began a ruthless modernization campaign that met fierce resistance. It wasn't at all clear the Afghan communists could hold onto power without Soviet help. Svetlana Savranskaya, of the National Security Archive in Washington, has studied declassified documents from the period.

SVETLANA SAVRANSKAYA: There was a discussion in the Politburo, which was the ruling body of the Soviet Union, whether they should intervene to save what they saw as a socialist revolution in that country, but also the other reason was whether the Soviet Union should intervene militarily to secure its southern borders.

SHARP: The issue became more urgent when an uprising in the city of Herat in March 1979. But, Savranskaya says, at that point Soviet leaders decided not to intervene.

SAVRANSKAYA: Because they believed that a military intervention in Afghanistan would undermine the international prestige of the Soviet Union, would undermine the arms control negotiations that were going on with the United States.

SHARP: But a few months later that calculation changed. Iranian radicals had taken US diplomats hostage in Tehran. Moscow feared the United States would try to intervene in the region. In addition, the Soviets no longer trusted the Afghan Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin.

SAVRANSKAYA: It's really the security concerns and a certain case of group thinking that drove the Soviet invasion. They believed that Amin represented a threat by aligning with the United States and therefore, the invasion, in the Soviet eyes, became unavoidable.

SHARP: At the time, the West interpreted the Soviet invasion as an aggressive cold war land grab. But a different picture has emerged over time. William Maley says the idea was to install a Soviet-friendly leader, Babrak Karmal, and then get out.

WILLIAM MALEY: It's quite clear from the documents that the Soviets very much hoped that they would be able to withdraw about six months after their invasion and leave behind a regime headed by Babrak Karmal, which would be capable of ruling the country without too much difficulty. What I think the Soviets underestimated was the extent to which their very act of supporting Babrak Karmal and his associates de-legitimated those people in the eyes of the Afghan people.

SHARP: It wasn't long before Soviet troops were fighting just to prop up that regime. And because the rest of the world saw the battle as a cold war struggle, Afghan resistance fighters received powerful backing from the United States and its allies. The war dragged on at enormous cost, turning into the Soviet Union's Vietnam. Here's Svetlana Savranskaya again, quoting from a 1986 memo by the Soviet Army's chief of staff:

SAVRANSKAYA: He says, “After seven years in Afghanistan, there is not one square kilometer left untouched by a boot of a Soviet soldier. But as soon as they leave the place, the enemy returns and restores it all the way back the way it used to be. We have lost this war. The majority of the Afghan people support the counter-revolution. We lost the peasantry who have not benefited from the revolution at all. 80 percent of the country is in the hands of the counter-revolution and the peasant situation is better there than in the government-controlled areas.

SHARP: Savranskaya says the Soviets realized early on there was no military solution, but that knowledge didn't make it any easier to withdraw.

RODRIC BRAITHWAITE: It normally takes people 10 years to get out of an impossible position.

SHARP: That's Rodric Braithwaite, former British Ambassador to Moscow.

BRAITHWAITE: Because they have to leave with honor, they have to leave able to say that their young men didn't die in vain. And we've seen that happen in Vietnam; it happened with the Russians; to some extent it's happened in Iraq; and it's happening now in Afghanistan.

SHARP: Braithwaite says there's a tendency to dismiss the Soviet experience as irrelevant to today's situation. After all, there was enormous international support for the US-led invasion to oust the Taliban in the aftermath of September 11th. But Braithwaite says the parallels are unmistakable, right down to the good intentions of the invading force.

BRAITHWAITE: The Russians believed as we believe, that they were bringing some kind of a better life to the Afghans. They weren't simply engaged in an imperial enterprise; they believed that they were bringing enlightenment, modernity, the liberation of women, education and a whole lot of good things to the Afghan people. So there's a lot of similarity. We went in and we still are there with the best intentions. The trouble is, the intention's not relevant to the people who happen to actually live there.

SHARP: Observers say there are other parallels including relying too much on a hand-picked leader without enough popular legitimacy. Svetlana Savranskaya says the Soviets lost faith in Babrak Karmal much as Washington has lost faith in Hamid Karzai.

SAVRANSKAYA: That is so reminiscent of the discussions in the Soviet central committee about Karmal because he was seen as so reliable and so sharing the Soviet policy, and then suddenly a) he's not popular. He's seen as a puppet domestically, but also he's becoming less reliable and more critical of the Soviets and they think, “Well, we will just change the leader and make sure the next leader is the good one.” And then the policy becomes so personalized that you don't have any other actors or agents you can talk to in the country because you're so tied, you're so associated with one person, one political force.

SHARP: Still, Savranskaya doesn't think the US-led intervention has to be doomed. She thinks it's just a cause and that with more international cooperation and more emphasis on bringing Afghan factions together, there's a good chance of success. Former Afghan interior minister Ali Jalali says it's not the invasion itself that was wrong, but the Bush Administration's approach. He says Washington took its off the ball with its invasion of Iraq. And he thinks it's important to focus on how the current Afghan intervention is different from the Soviet one.

JALALI: The Soviet invasion actually took place in order to prop up an unpopular regime. The international intervention to remove the Taliban took place to remove an unpopular regime and the majority of international community was with the resistance of Afghanistan. Today, the majority of the international community is trying to support the Afghan government.

SHARP: All that may be true, but the US-led war in Afghanistan is still going badly. The Obama Administration hopes to change that with renewed focus and more resources. Meantime, the Afghan people are still waiting for the life of security and justice they've been promised so many times. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.

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