Was the Afghan war the Soviets' version of Vietnam? Listen in on a debate of that subject, as featured on the weekly CNN program "Postscript" -- which accompanies the COLD WAR series.

CNN World Affairs Correspondent Ralph Begleiter, Former U.S. Defense and State Department official Zalmay Khalilzad, Russian historian Vladislav Zubok and American scholar Thomas Blanton consider whether the Afghanistan conflict led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the war's legacy in international affairs.

Khalilzad is a program director at the RAND Corporation -- as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was assistant undersecretary of defense for policy planning during the Bush administration. Khalilzad also was a State Department adviser to the Reagan administration during the Afghanistan conflict.

Zubok is one of the leading historians of the Soviet side of the Cold War and the author of "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War." He has studied extensively in Soviet and American archives and has taught classes on the Cold War at Amherst College, Ohio University in Athens and Stamford University. In 1993, Zubok was employed by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, and since then has worked at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and is now a fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington.

Blanton is executive director for the National Security Archive. The NSA is a non-governmental research institute providing information from U.S. government and official archives for scholars, journalists, members of Congress, lobbyists and others. Their research teases out documents still classified to give a complete picture of what really happened.