U.S. repeats Soviet missteps in Afghanistan, envoy says
da: The New York Times
It is one of a flow of disarming asides that Russia’s ambassador to Kabul deploys while warning of the grim prospects that he says will doom the American enterprise in Afghanistan if the United States fails to learn from mistakes made during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.
“I know quite a lot about the past,” the ambassador, Zamir Kabulov, said in polished English with a broad smile during an interview in Kabul one morning last week. “But almost nothing about the future.”
In fact, it is precisely because of a belief that the Soviet past may hold lessons for the American future that a talk with Kabulov is valued by many Western diplomats here. That is a perception that has drawn at least one NATO general to the Russian Embassy in Kabulov’s years as ambassador, though the officer involved, not an American, showed no sign of having been influenced by what he…
