For almost a decade, Russia has stayed on the sidelines of the war in Afghanistan, in part because of its bad memories of the 1980s, when the Afghan mujahedin, with the help of Stinger missiles provided by the U.S., handed the Red Army a humiliating defeat. As Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitri Rogozin put it this week in a stroke of understatement, “We’ve been to Afghanistan, and we didn’t really like it over there.” But on Friday, Oct.
