Corridors of Power

Corridors of Power is written by veteran foreign affairs correspondent Roland Flamini and appears in World Politics Review every week by Sunday morning. Click here for the Corridors of Power archives.

WHO OWES WHOM? -- Invasions, as the Bush administration can attest, are costly undertakings. But in the case of Iraq, the United States is unlikely to follow the example of the Russian government, which has sent Afghanistan the bill for the 1979 Soviet invasion and subsequent occupation. Moscow is asking the Afghans to pay $9 billion it says Russia spent on "development" in Afghanistan in the infamous decade that the country was under direct Soviet control.

What development? says the protesting Afghan government. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prevent Kabul's communist government from collapsing. The incursion turned out to be Russia's Vietnam. In the subsequent fierce fighting against the Mujahideen insurgency, Afghanistan was reduced to a shambles from which the political chaos that followed up to and including the Taliban did not help it to recover.