MOSCOW, 14 February 2004 — Fifteen years ago, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, ending a disastrous 10-year invasion that claimed the lives of at least 15,000 soldiers and fuelled the rise of radical Islamic extremists such as Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. The Afghan invasion still provokes heated debate in Russia, now bogged down in a bleeding guerrilla conflict in its mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya that has raged for much of the past decade, killing 10,000 Russians according to the official toll. The general who led the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Boris Gromov, in an interview with the Russian...