"Did you like Beirut? You would adore Mogadishu", had thrown a diplomat rightly to the Americans before they intervene in Somalia, December 9, 1992. This time, these are the Russians who allow themselves of the warnings. "Vietnam, next to it, was a part of picnic", warns Colonel Iouri Shamanov, who directs in Moscow an association to help the families of the victims of the Afghanistan war.

"If the Americans enter in the war, I pity these boys. And their mothers, and their sisters and their brothers. It will be worse ten times than Vietnam", estimate the colonel, who spent five years at the head of a regiment in Afghanistan. Ten years of war (1979-1989), 15 000 deaths and 50 000 injured on the soviet side, and, to finish, a stinging defeat...

Of the intervention of the USSR in the Afghan mountains remain 650 000 veterans and an enormous traumatism. Interrogated by the medias, these "veterans" are unanimous. Impassable mountains, difficult climatic conditions, remoteness of the rear bases, unforeseeable clan games: "The example of the USSR showed that Afghanistan is an impregnable fortress", sustains a former fighter who become a Douma deputy, Evgueni Zelenov. "Afghanistan is not Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is not the plain or the desert, but mountains that cannot be reached but with forbidden arms, chemical or biologic". The officers underline that it certainly exists a difference of size between the situation of Moscow twenty years ago and the one of Washington today. The first was isolated and didn't have any chance of victory as long as the mudjahedeens could find support and bases of retreat in the neighboring Pakistan. The United States benefit today from a much more favorable international situation.

However, they must keep a lesson of the soviet experience: "By making the civil population to suffer, the Soviets became enemies for the Afghans; the United States must not repeat our mistakes", say the leader of an association of former veterans. Not to make suffer the civilians... The recommendation is recurrent, coming from General Valentin Varennikov, one of the commanders of the soviet operation who also became a deputy. "It is necessary to eliminate the warehouses of weapons and the bases with the aviation and missiles. But it is necessary to know precisely where are these bases. One must not strike at places of gathering in order to not harm the civilians", he says in Argumenti i facti. According to him, to "enter over there with troops, it would be ridiculous. It is sufficient to refer to the rich experience of the English and Russians."

The general is not the only one to go back up farther in history, on this side of the years 1980. Boris Gromov, the general who became Governor of the Moscow region, who had ordered to the soviet withdrawal, he also think that the Americans can expect a "second Vietnam". He especially likes to repeat that, when one speaks to him of victorious military operation in this country, he recommends a reading: the one of the book of Friedrich Engels - author, with Marx, of the Manifesto of the Communist Party - entitled Afghanistan and concerning the British colonial wars of the XIXe century. "I read it myself when I was in Kabul, he says in Moskovski Komsomolets. If the members of the Politburo had read this book, it is little likely that they would have taken the decision to intervene in 1979". ENDS LE MONDE US EXPLOSIONS 22901