In 1985 the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan was at a turning point. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become Communist Party chief and was looking for an exit strategy. The Red Army wanted more troops.

Both had lost faith in Babrak Karmal, the Afghan President whom they installed in 1979 but who was now weak, incompetent and confined mostly to his palace.

Sound familiar?

It is easy to overstate the parallels between the Soviet and Nato campaigns in Afghanistan. President Obama faces similar challenges as he prepares to decide — probably in the next month — how to avoid the same fate as the British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th.

He, too, faces calls for a surge of up to 80,000 more troops to defeat a militant alliance nurtured in neighbouring Pakistan. And he, too, has lost faith in President Karzai as a credible partner, for many of the reasons that the Soviets started to doubt Mr Karmal.

“[Karmal] was certain that we needed him more than he needed us and he believed that we would be there for a long time, if not for ever,” said Anatoliy Chernyayev, a key adviser to Mr Gorbachev, in one account of the Soviet campaign.

Mr Karzai looks almost certain to remain in power after agreeing to a second round of a presidential election on November 7. He is expected either to win or form a national unity government beforehand.

The problem is that Mr Karzai, whose credibility was already in question before the election, has lost even more legitimacy after a million of his votes were found to be fraudulent.

Even if he remains President, analysts and diplomats say that he will have to make dramatic changes to the way that he governs or risk being cut adrift by his Western backers. Nato members made that clear at a meeting yesterday in Bratislava, where Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, urged them to increase their contributions.

“I think whoever is going to send more troops to Afghanistan will put up some conditions,” said Søren Gade, the Danish Defence Minister. “They need to see the new Afghan president and say, ‘If we send more troops to your country, you have to deal with this, this and this’.”

Western officials in Kabul said that there are several priorities. The first is to unify the country by reaching out to Abdullah Abdullah, the former Foreign Minister who came second in the first round of voting, and will probably be runner-up in the second.

Dr Abdullah is half Tajik and half Pashtun, but he is most popular in the Tajik-dominated north, whereas Mr Karzai is a Pashtun and derives most of his support from the Pashtun south.

Reaching out does not necessarily mean appointing opposition figures to the Cabinet but could involve holding cross-party consultations on key policies at Loya Jirga-style meetings.

Second is to tackle corruption — especially related to the drugs trade — by forming a new Cabinet that excludes crooks and representatives of powerful warlords. Third is to improve governance at all levels by basing decisions on realities and available resources, rather than tribal politics.

There are more specific demands from individual Nato members, such as Britain, which is concerned that Gulab Mangal, the competent governor of Helmand, may soon retire. British officials fear that he will be replaced by Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, who was removed as Helmand governor at their insistence in 2006 after nine tonnes of opium and heroin were found in his basement.

Mr Karzai will no doubt resist many of these demands, especially if he wins the run-off easily. He will face pressure to reward the warlords who backed him in the election.

If he continues to govern as before, Western governments may soon have no option but to withdraw troops because public support, which is already shaky, will disappear. “The status quo in Afghanistan right now is not sustainable,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised President Obama on Afghanistan, said. “We are losing this war.” Mr Gorbachev reached similar conclusions in 1985 and decided to sack Mr Karmal and increase the Soviet troop presence to more than 100,000 before starting to pull out in 1987. Not that Mr Karmal’s successor fared any better.

Mohammad Najibullah oversaw the Soviet withdrawal and a civil war before seeking refuge in a UN compound in Kabul in 1992. Four years later the Taleban dragged him out, tortured him to death and strung him from a traffic light.

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