IN THE week Russia invaded Ukraine, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton called 1980s Afghanistan “the model” for Western approaches to the war.

In Afghanistan, “a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out,” Clinton observed.

The US and its allies should pour weaponry and “advisers” into Ukraine, bog the Russians down in a long war and eventually defeat them.

Clinton smilingly acknowledged the obvious riposte — “there were other unintended consequences, we know” — a blasé reference to the way the US-funded and armed mojahedin gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaida, with the “anti-Soviet warrior” Osama bin Laden becoming the mastermind of the worst ever terrorist attack on the United States in the September 11 bombings.

But she didn’t dwell on that. After all, from the point of view of US power the 1980s Afghan strategy was a tremendous success. It bled the Soviets white and played its part in the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the decade. 

The late US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of the way Washington set out to lure Moscow into a war it couldn’t win and in the process crippled its rival. That this imposed decades of war and suffering on Afghanistan never bothered the White House; that its consequences later involved the deaths of thousands of US citizens wasn’t seen as too high a price either.

The analogy with Ukraine can be taken too far. 

The idea that the US deliberately provoked Russia into attacking its neighbour is common in Chinese media coverage, where the argument runs that by entrapping the Russian army in a long war Washington rallies the EU under its unquestioned leadership while leaving the US military free to target China. 

This narrative tends to downplay the role of revanchist Russian nationalism so obvious from Vladimir Putin’s own statements about the conflict and Russia’s clear responsibility for starting a war of choice.

Nonetheless Clinton’s “Afghanistan model” is clearly the approach Western powers are adopting — and this week’s Nato summit promising more heavy and advanced weaponry to Ukraine underlines that fact.

The more Western weapons flood into Ukraine, the closer the bloody conflict there comes to a proxy war between Washington and Moscow fought at the Ukrainian people’s expense.

There is understandably wide sympathy in the labour movement with Ukraine’s requests for weapons. The country has been attacked by its vastly larger and better-equipped neighbour.

But it is vital that socialists point to the dangers in flooding a warzone with arms, especially when this replaces any attempt to stop the war through negotiations, which are taking place.

Already evidence is mounting of appalling crimes being committed by both sides in the Ukrainian war. This is shocking but not surprising: the murder of civilians has been a feature of every modern war, with war crimes by US, British, Australian and other forces in the Afghan and Iraq wars well established. 

Though war crimes must be investigated and those responsible held to account where possible, the most urgent task is to prevent more such atrocities by ending the war itself.

And given Britain’s own security services were expressing concern at far-right groups seeking combat experience with neonazi groups like the Azov Battalion before the war, the chance of “blowback” in the form of terrorist attacks by forces we are currently arming is not negligible.

The peace movement is under severe pressure in Britain. The voices calling for a simplistic rallying behind Nato and smearing doubters as apologists for Russia seek to drown us out.

But the biggest victims of a prolonged war via the “Afghanistan model” will be the Ukrainian people. The biggest beneficiaries the arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon that were gleefully talking up the “tensions” in Ukraine as a source of profit as the invasion loomed.