Watching events unfurl in the Republic of Georgia is eerily reminiscent of sitting in front of the huge, paneled TV in my parent’s den in 1979 as Peter Jennings announced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the land from which we had emigrated.

I was 12 years old at the time, and my mother was wiping tears from her eyes as my father started making phone calls, hoping to find out if our family and friends were safe. The question on every Afghan’s mind was: What will the United States do about this? Surely we wouldn’t allow the Soviet Union to violate another nation’s sovereignty, especially when the odds were so unfair. When President Carter decided that the U.S. would boycott the Moscow Olympics the following year, my parents were angry to find that that was to be the extent of our nation’s response.

My classmates thought the boycott was unfair to the athletes who had trained for so long to be able to compete, and it was a controversial decision at the time. Meanwhile, my father’s brother disappeared in Kabul, and my mother was hearing through relatives that three of her brothers and one nephew had been arrested by the secret police. I felt that my family existed in an alternate reality, very far from the day-to-day concerns of our community in Carrollton.

In the end, dozens of my relatives sought refuge in the U.S., Europe and Australia. My adolescence was dominated by the rising death toll in Afghanistan, and the horrors being perpetrated against innocent villagers. It was the beginning of the end of civil society in Afghanistan, culminating in the power vacuum that allowed the influx of the Taliban, many of whom are children of the Afghans who spent years in the refugee camps in Pakistan, brainwashed in madrassahs.

I do not know how many have died due to war since the Soviet invasion. I am not sure that a reliable number exists. I do know that a nation-state died, one that had provided free college and medical school education to my father, uncles and aunts, and had a repository of priceless antiquities, including the now destroyed giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Afghanistan is now considered “fourth world,” in that its health and education indices rank among the lowest on the planet. It is known not for its beautiful carpets, lapis lazuli or breathtaking mountain peaks. It is known as the land of opium and oppression of women. And a land where Americans are dying in an effort to bring it back to a place where civil society can once again survive, and perhaps flourish.

I finally saw the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and it brought back so many painful memories of a childhood feeling powerless to stop the decimation of my nation of origin. Reading the accounts of what is transpiring in the Republic of Georgia, I have to wonder how much has really changed in the “former Soviet Union.”

I have watched with chagrin as the Soviet role in the destruction of Afghanistan fades further from our collective consciousness, and pundits expound on how Afghans are so “warlike and tribal,” as if they haven’t had to be “warlike and tribal” to simply survive the atrocities of the past 30 years. I hope that I am not the only one experiencing deja vu. And I pray that we use the benefit of history to prevent further parallels between the tragic history of Afghanistan and the near future of the Republic of Georgia.

> Dr. Hogai Nassery is director of Grady Health System’s Department of Community Medicine and an assistant professor at Emory University’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine.