IT is déjà vu on a huge and bloody scale. Gen Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, is about to advise his president that “the Afghan people are undergoing a crisis of confidence because the war against the Taliban has not made their lives better”, according to leaked reports. Change the word 'Taliban' to 'mujahideen', and you have an exact repetition of what the Russians found a quarter of a century ago.

Like Nato today, the Kremlin realised its forces had little control outside the main cities. The parallels don't end there. The Russians called their Afghan enemies dukhy (ghosts), ever-present but invisible, as hidden in death as they were when alive — which echoes Sean Smith's recent photographic account in Guardian of the fighting in Helmand and the failure of the British units he was with to find a single Taliban body.

The Soviet authorities never invited western reporters to embed, but you could track down Afghan war veterans in Moscow's gloomier housing estates. They were conscripts, unlike British and US troops, so perhaps they had a heightened sense of anger. But how many British vets would share the sentiments that Igor expressed, as he hung out with his mates one evening in February 1989 and let me listen? “You remember that mother who lost her son. She kept repeating, 'He fulfilled his duty. He fulfilled his duty to the end.' That's the most tragic thing. What duty? I suppose that's what saves her, her notion of duty. She hasn't yet realised it was all a ridiculous mistake. I'm putting it mildly. If she opened her eyes to our whole Afghan thing, she'd probably find it hard to hold out.”

The details of the Soviet war were different from today's. The enemy used primitive mines rather than today's more sophisticated, remotely triggered roadside bombs. Without infrared night-sights for their sentries, Russian outposts were easy to overrun. It's just that Nato relies more on drones rather than helicopters to fire its missiles — and civilians still get hit.

Nato's war aims echo the Soviets' — prop up a modernising and secular government against the threat from fundamentalist tyranny. The Soviet advantage was that they were operating in an age when nation-building by foreigners was in vogue. The Kremlin did not have to fall back on the claim that terrorism had to be stopped in Kabul in order to keep it from the streets of Moscow.

The big difference, so far, is that after years of remorseless losses the Soviet leadership realised the war was unwinnable. Mikhail Gorbachev tried talking to the enemy to form a coalition Afghan government (shades of the current “Do we talk to the Taliban?” debate), but when they and their western backers refused, he pulled out anyway. Does Obama have the sense to do the same?

— The Guardian, London