MOSCOW, Sept 18 (AFP) - Russia's Afghan war veterans have warned the United States against repeating
Soviet mistakes in its attack on Afghanistan, thought to be one of the most likely targets of a US retaliatory strike after last week's deadly attacks.
"The Soviet Union's example shows that Afghanistan is an impregnable fortress," Yevgeny Zelenov, Russian lawmaker and veteran of the wars in Afghanistan, told AFP on Monday.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which was secretly planned by top Soviet officials and disguised as help to a "brotherly people", is now considered one of Moscow's great political mistakes.
The war, which lasted more than 10 years, claimed nearly a million Afghan lives, as well as some 14,000 killed and 50,000 wounded among the Soviet troops, according to Russian sources.
"In crying out for vengeance, the American public seems to have forgotten Vietnam. Once the first US soldier is killed, the tide of public opinion will turn," Zelenov predicted.
"An eventual ground operation presents too great a risk to the United States
and the American administration knows it. I don't think it will go beyond air strikes," he added.
However, air strikes might prove fruitless against Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban rulers, warned Ruslan Aushev, head of Russia's Caucasian republic of Ingushetia and former hero of the Afghan war.
"Afghanistan is not the Balkans, there is no vitally important infrastructure left whose destruction would paralyse the Taliban," Aushev said as quoted by
the Interfax news agency.
But the country is home to Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the deadly suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington.
"American firepower will in effect strike at civilians, while bin Laden and the Taliban conceal themselves in the mountains where all of the US air force cannot reach them," Aushev added.
"Afghanistan is neither a plain nor a desert, but mountains which can be overcome only with prohibited weapons -- chemical or biological arms," Zelenov agreed.
"If Americans do nothing but bomb Afghanistan, they will risk creating a new
terrorist threat and provoke the hatred of all Islamic states," Vladimir Kostushchenko, the head of an Afghan veteran association, told AFP.
Still, a ground war has its dangers as "though Americans have sophisticated munitions, their infantry has had little experience" since the Vietnam war, Kostushchenko said.
According to Kostushchenko, the only way for the United States to "win this new war" is to "liberate" the Afghan people from "the Taliban oppression."
To do so, Washington would have to "launch a ground operation, but strike only at the terrorist bases, avoiding civilian casualties," the veteran argued.
"By making civilians suffer, the Soviets became an enemy for the Afghans. The United States must not repeat our mistakes," he added.
Moscow has signalled its assent to whatever action US President George W. Bush might take in response to the terror attacks in which more than 5,000 people died, including 117 Russians, according to Moscow's embassy in Washington.
However, Russia has declined an active role, still pondering the possibility
of allowing the United States use of former Soviet military bases for launching an attack on Afghanistan.