Lost at the bottom in a blog post on The Lede, the news blog of The New York Times edited by Robert Mackey, is this observation by Zamir Kabulov, the Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan and who was a KGB agent in Kabul during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Last October Mr. Kabulov told my colleague John Burns that the U.S. had "already repeated all of our mistakes," and moved on to "making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright." One of the biggest mistakes the Soviets made, Mr. Kabulov said, was letting the force grow too large. "The more foreign troops you have roaming the country," he said, "the more the irritative allergy toward them is going to be provoked."

Afghanistan is not a country easily occupied and its population does not take well to occupation. Back in March when the President conducted his first strategic review that led to the first increase in troop levels to over 60,000, a Taliban spokesman told the Al Jazeera television network that President Obama is repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union, which lost 15,000 soldiers when it tried to occupy Afghanistan in the 1980s. "If more troops were going to win the war, then the Russians would have won the war," the spokesman was quoted as saying.

More troops are not the answer.