When the Great Game between the British Empire and Russia was transplanted by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards, that, of course, culminated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, which I note was another Western intelligence failure. The United States spent uncounted billions arming the mujahedin in their war against the Soviets in the 1980s, and that war cost, we think, about one million civilian Afghan lives, as well as something like 90,000 mujahedin fighters and 18,000 Afghan troops.