Russian President Putin's unprecedented visit to the region, to stress its importance for Moscow, reveals that pining for the age of the Czars and the dream of restoring past glory apparently also goes through restoring the role played by the Soviet Union, which formed an empire larger than the one ruled by the Romanov dynasty but one that ended in terrible collapse that returned Russia to its natural size, without contrived Communist distension. The Soviets, engrossed in a Cold War with the West, found in the ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict an appropriate gateway to wrestle the “imperialists" over influence in an oil-rich region, and thus chose the side of “republican" or “secular" regimes, which were later revealed to be mere meaningless labels for the rule of intelligence services and of political families and tribes, which made use of extreme violence against their peoples when it came to the alternation of power. During this phase too, the Soviets got involved in Afghanistan and sent their troops to defend a Communist regime loyal to Moscow, under the slogan of implementing the “Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation" between the two sides, and under the pretext of defending their Southern front. During the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, they made use of all the weapons available to them – planes, tanks, missiles and heavy artillery – in order to subdue the regions that had risen up against the regime in Kabul. But their war, which lasted ten years, ended in complete failure and a shameful withdrawal. Today, Moscow returns to play the same role under different appellations: peace in the Middle East instead of conflict, Russia instead of the Soviet Union, and Syria instead of Afghanistan. It had supported the regime of Babrak Karmal, and thus Muslims and the West had stood against it; and it is supporting the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, and thus Arabs, Muslims and the West are standing against it. Although it is unclear who is leading the other, Moscow or Damascus, towards Afghanization and towards repeating this disreputable experience, all indications point to the fact that Russia has begun to sink in the Syrian quagmire as it had in that of Afghanistan. And what is information about the participation of its military experts, thousands of whom are deployed in Syria in plans to confront the rebels, and about a battery of missiles manned by Russians downing the Turkish plane, and what is Moscow's boasting of supplying Damascus's army with weapons and helicopters used to repress the opposition, but signs of such involvement under the slogan of protecting Russia's strategic interests in the region. The Assad regime also provides supporting factors for the Afghanization of its country. Indeed, it has, with its limitless violence, literally driven the opposition to bear arms, after it had started as a peaceful movement, one that still insists on returning to its peaceful nature. The regime has also summoned the violence of extremist groups it had sponsored and used in Iraq and Lebanon, groups which have seized this opportunity to reappear, after the world had isolated and weakened them in a confrontation that is still ongoing. The facts show that Assad's army has resorted and continues to resort, the governorate of Homs being an example of this, to the systematic destruction of entire villages and neighborhoods, with unjustifiable intensity, such that their inhabitants will not be able to return to them when the fighting stops, as a result of the devastation they have suffered. This means that those inhabitants have been displaced inside their own country in a planned and premeditated manner. This in other words falls under “ethnic cleansing" that would consecrate the division of Syria into areas subjected to the regime and others that are no longer under its control – a situation nearly identical to that of Afghanistan on the eve of Soviet intervention. Assad knows that the survival of his regime in contingent on Russia continuing to support it. And he is doing whatever he can to convince it to continue resisting the pressures exerted by the whole world for such support to stop. Yet Moscow has to choose either to continue protecting his collapsing regime and to share in its inevitable defeat, or to prove that it has learned the lesson of Afghanistan and that it will seize the opportunity provided to it by the international community to bring about the transition of power in Syria.
