Deployment of 17000 additonal troops to Afghanistan coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Soviet pull-out from that country.

Deployment of 17000 additonal troops to Afghanistan coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Soviet pull-out from that country. “They have repeated all our mistakes”, said Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin.Soviet troops in Afghanistan called the mujahedeen fighters “dukhi”, or ghosts, for their ablity to spring up out of nowhere and then blend back into the terrain. Indeed, the USSR’s last war continues to haunt Russian relations with an old adversary that seems intent on ignoring history.Today’s New York Times writes of the tensions between the US and Russia engendered by the closure of an important American base in Kyrgyzstan. The base was very important for re-supplying Afghanistan and the US believes that Russia had pressured its southern neighbour to close the base to put a spoke in the wheel of the US led operation.The Russian response?“A lot of these things,” he said, “are the consequences of the attitude that NATO takes and has taken in recent years toward mutually important issues that touch upon the interests of Russia — beginning with the Balkans and Yugoslavia, Kosovo, NATO moving eastward, to Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltic states. And if more attention had been paid toward Russia’s opinion, then the situation would now be much better.”Nevertheless, the US and Russia share an overwhelming number of strategic goals in Afghanistan, so any Russian posturing is more about linkage rather than genuine attempts to hobble American success.The Kremlin also seems reluctant to offer significant help until it knows the Obama administration’s stance toward Russia. Relations soured under George W. Bush after he called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO, and proposed an anti-missile system for Eastern Europe. Mr. Obama has not yet said whether he will pursue those policies.