It's not another Vietnam. It's another Afghanistan. Soviet Afghanistan

Joya

- It's not another Vietnam. It's another Afghanistan. Soviet Afghanistan

Caplewood

When Robert McNamara realized that the war in Vietnam had become a catastrophe, he wanted to understand the process by which all the smart people in Washington had made the decisions that lead to the Southeast Asian clusterfuck. The result was the Pentagon Papers, one of the most famous and important collections of documents ever printed on cellulose. As it turns out, the Russian General Staff went through a similar process with their similar Afghan disaster. An edited version of their study of their war was published in English in 2002 as The Soviet Afghan War. The following passage is quoted in Jeffrey Record's Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win

When the highest leaders of the USSR sent their forces into this war, they did not consider the historic, religious, and national peculiarities of Afghanistan. After the entry, these peculiarities proved to be the most important factors as they foreordained the long and very difficult nature of the conflict. Now it is completely clear that it was an impetuous decision to send Soviet forces into this land. It is now clear that the Afghans, whose history contained many centuries of warfare with various warring groups, could not see these armed strangers as anything but armed invaders. And since these invaders were not Muslim, a religious factor was added to the the national enmity.
[. . .]
The Soviets had designed their armed forces to fight large scale high tempo operations exploiting nuclear strikes on the northern European plain and China. . . . Soviet force structure, weaponry, tactics, and support infrastructure were all designed to support this operational vision. These were all inappropriate for the long counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

Sound familiar?