"It is now (nearly) nine years since the coalition invaded Afghanistan and nothing has changed," said retired Lieutenant General Ruslan Aushev, 55, who served five years in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation there from 1979-1989.

However, Aushev, who was made a Hero of the Soviet Union after being wounded on his third Afghan deployment, admitted that NATO and US troops face a fiercer enemy today than did Soviet troops.

Then, the Red Army untrained for the mountainous terrain found themselves bogged down in an unwinnable guerrilla war against Mujahedeen Islamist fighters backed financially and militarily by Washington.

"Today, the situation is more complicated. The Mujahedeen were more moderate than the Taliban, who are radical. In our era, there were no suicide bombers," said Aushev, who now heads the Afghan veterans committee.

Major General Makhmud Gareyev was a former deputy chief of the Red Army general staff and a top military adviser to Afghan President Najibullah, who was overthrown by Islamic insurgents in 1992 and hanged by the Taliban four years later.

After the Soviet pullout in 1989, Gareyev stayed behind to support the Kremlin's client regime.

He expressed doubts that the current mission in the region had much chance to deliver long-term stability, if coalition forces did not rapidly shift strategy.

"The Americans are fighting a people and not a regular army. Napoleon never could win in Spain. They should understand that it is impossible to fight against a nation," Gareyev, now president of the Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow, told AFP.

The only strategy forward for the US-led coalition forces is to focus on reconstruction and development in Afghanistan, according to Gareyev and other Russian veterans.

"They have to change their politics and find other solutions. They must help rebuild the country and offer financial, economic and humanitarian aide," he insisted.

Moscow initially saw its incursion into Afghanistan in December 1979 as a brief mission to bolster its Afghan supporters but became bogged down in a protracted and bloody struggle that lasted nearly 10 years.

The war, which cost over 13,000 Soviet lives and killed as many as one million Afghans, helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the takeover of Afghanistan by the Islamist Taliban.

Retired General Victor Yermakov, who commanded Soviet forces in Afghanistan from 1982 to 1983, has been among the first to point to the Soviets' failure as a warning to the West, calling Afghanistan an "impossible" fight.

"The only way to be respected, would be to take the money now spent on maintaining troops in Afghanistan and spend it instead on agricultural development and the reconstruction of schools, mosques and roads," Yermakov said in an interview with Russian state television Vesti-24.

One week before a London conference aimed at promoting Afghanistan's development, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a long-term, non-military strategy to stabilise Afghanistan along those lines.

The plan unveiled Thursday calls for sending more civilian experts to the region to rebuild the Afghan farm sector, improve governance and bring extremists back into mainstream society.

US President Barack Obama said in December that the United States would deploy another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2010 -- on top of more than 70,000 already there -- to undercut a resurgent Taliban.

Under his plan, US troops are to begin withdrawing in July 2011.

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