You don’t hear so much about “moral equivalence” any more, but in the 1980s it was the standard term of abuse used against anyone who drew analogies between the Soviet and Western positions on some issue, accusing them in effect of being blind to the difference between Western democracy and Soviet totalitarianism. Sometimes the critics had a fair point, but sometimes they were just trying to shout down those who pointed out inconvenient facts.

The critics would have had a field day last week with a BBC report, titled “Soviet lessons from Afghanistan“, which compared the predicament that the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan faced in the late ’80s with those that America and its allies face there today. The analogy has been made before, of course, but rarely with such compelling evidence. Moral equivalence indeed.

Trouble is, any time you try to articulate a reason why the cases are not comparable — why the fact that America is a democracy and the Soviet Union was a dictatorship actually matters in Afghanistan — it falls flat.

The Soviets were occupiers, not enablers of local self-government? That was certainly true at the start, but by 1986 at least Mikhail Gorbachev was desperately searching for a broad-based government that could hold the country together.

The Karzai government is a democracy, while the Soviet Union’s puppets were not? That claim’s looking pretty thin in light of the recent fraudulent election.

America has broad international backing that the Soviets lacked? True, but looking less and less relevant as the NATO allies scramble for the exit queue. NATO involvement was always something of a fig-leaf anyway, brought in after the fact to support what was always an American initiative.

The Soviets were only looking after their own interests? That’s exactly what Barack Obama has been telling the American public, to try to deflect criticism that he’s engaged in an abstract nation-building crusade.

The Americans are defending enlightenment values against Islamic fundamentalism? That’s one that the Soviets had at least as good a case on, back in the days when it was the Americans subsidising the fundamentalists, at an incalculable long-term cost.

The big difference has nothing to do with the “moral equivalence” claim: as the BBC points out, it’s that the Soviets had a hostile superpower doing everything it could to make life difficult for them. America and its allies, however, are making life difficult even without external help.

And, in the way of history to repeat lessons that were not learned properly the first time, America is now turning to armed militia groups to fight the Taliban, just as they used them to fight the government in the 1980s. (Although the New York Times coyly reports that the US is “not arming the groups because they already have guns”.)

Then, of course, some of those groups went on to help deliver the country to the Taliban, although such is the tortured nature of Afghan politics that some of the very same people are now in the anti-Taliban camp. As P.J. O’Rourke said at the time, “It will come as no surprise to students of past US foreign policy that the Alliance party with the greatest hatred for Western civilisation and the worst reputation for brutality is the party that got the most American money.”

Despite America’s blunders, when all’s said and done, I do believe there is an important moral difference between Western and Soviet actions. But, just as in the 1980s, that shouldn’t blind us to the facts on the ground, and to some really important lessons that the West can learn from its former rival’s failure.