US President Joe Biden’s April 14 announcement of the withdrawal of combat forces from Afghanistan caught many observers by surprise. The Pakistan Army was not one of them. It has insisted for two decades that foreign military victory over the Taliban was impossible, and that the western presence was as unsustainable as was the Soviets before them. Although US forces have now been in-country for twice as long as the Soviets, the latter’s experience and the Pakistani response are useful guides for what lies ahead. The Soviets in 1979, like the Americans in 2001, had never intended to linger in Afghanistan. But year after year, their friends in Kabul pleaded for just a little more time to turn the corner. The result was that they found themselves stuck, trapped by the inability of their new client regimes to contain the insurgencies that bloomed in the countryside.