PORTLAND – A retired special forces commander who spent time with Soviet veterans of the Afghanistan war said that what he learned should give Americans pause when it comes to chasing down Osama bin Laden.

Bob Rheault, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces, said the soldiers told him that Afghanistan was the Soviet Union’s version of Vietnam.

It was a hard-fought guerrilla war on unforgiving terrain where bin Laden is believed to live under the protection of the Taliban government.

“That’s a terrible place to fight a war,” said Rheault, 75, who served as an Outward Bound instructor until last year.

Rheault, who was commander of the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam from 1968-69, operated a program designed to help Vietnam veterans deal with post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the conflict.

As part of a peace initiative, he and 14 Vietnam veterans met with 15 Soviet counterparts who fought in Afghanistan.

It was in 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall collapsed, that the group gathered for a mountaineering expedition in the Tienshan Mountains several hundred miles from the Afghanistan border.

The rough terrain in the Tienshan Mountains that divide the countries of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan brought back memories for the Soviet soldiers who had served in Afghanistan, said Rheault, of Owls Head.

“Where we were in the Tienshan was very similar to the terrain they fought in. It’s desert mountains – very, very dry, very, very rugged, unpopulated, difficult to find water,” he said.

The soldiers who lost the war in Afghanistan returned home disgraced, much like U.S. veterans of the Vietnam conflict, Rheault said.

“They felt the same way that we did. In order for us to have won, or for them to have won in Afghanistan, it would have taken a completely unacceptable level of violence and destruction,” he said. “It was already pretty bad.”

Based on his experiences with the Soviet soldiers, Rheault feels strongly that the United States needs to tone down the war rhetoric.

Raining down bombs won’t work, and sending in troops to get Osama bin Laden would likely bring about massive U.S. casualties, he said.

Already, Taliban rulers have vowed to wage a holy war against America if U.S. forces launch an assault on them.

“They’re going to fight hard,” Rheault said. “I think it would be crazy to go in there. What are you going to do? Send five infantry divisions in there? He’d gobble them up.”

The U.S. needs to commit greater resources for intelligence to avoid future tragedies and treat the current situation as a crime instead of stooping to the same level in a war where “collateral damage” would be unavoidable.

“What’s needed instead of the quite understandable rage of the American people and their desire to strike back is to understand that this is not war,” he said. “This is a crime that needs to be investigated.”