This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Baxter with Anna Barshafskaya. She at the Washington

Institute has a new book, Putin's War in Syria, Russian Foreign Policy and the Price

of America's Absence. This is the background to Putin and Obama and Carrie and Lavrov and

their counselors entering into an exchange that led to what appeared to be a cooperation

in the Syrian Civil War in 2013. But we're now in December of 1979 and this is critical

to understand how Mr. Putin and his Kremlin counselors are going forward in Syria now.

Anna Afghanistan, December 79, the 103rd Guards Airborne Special Operations, land in

order to protect, we were told, the Soviet regime from terrorist undermining. This is critical

not only because Soviets will spend years in Afghanistan before the agnominous retreat

similar to what we've witnessed in America, but also because this I understand from your

reporting becomes the chrysalis of the Russian allegation that the United States created

al-Qaeda, that the United States is responsible for terrorism. It begins here in Afghanistan,

is that correct Anna?

Right. You know, and two things to point out, two points on this. First, the reason why

I talk about Afghanistan is because if you look at the initial stages of the Russian

Syria intervention, many analysts predicted that Russia will find itself in a quagmire

that it will be another Afghanistan for Russia. The sort of the ghost of Afghanistan had

arisen almost immediately. But if we look at how the Soviets handled Afghanistan, it is

in fact a fundamentally different way of handling an intervention than from the way Putin

has handled Syria. And so what the Syria intervention shows, this is really a key point, that

it was designed precisely to avoid another Afghanistan. And in fact it shows a number

of key lessons learned from some of those failures. And of course, the other is, as you

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