"Who are you?" Yousaf, a Pakistani intelligence official, asks the man who has walked into the hotel room where Yousaf has just strangled a naked woman named Annelise.

The man pauses, then says, "My people are dying in Afghanistan."

This is a scene from Wednesday night's episode of "The Americans," a show currently set in 1982, and so that line, one spoken by men of many nationalities, in many centuries, is another way of saying, "I'm with the K.G.B." The expression on Yousaf's face (he is played by Rahul Khanna) makes it clear that he's got it. The agent, Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), is a spy, along with his wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell), whom he calls to help them remove the body. She quickly arrives with plastic sheeting, a camera with which to take compromising photos, and a suitcase that looks as if it couldn't possibly be big enough, until the three of them sit down and begin breaking the bones in Annelise's body. Philip persuaded Annelise to sleep with Yousaf because he needs to learn more about the mujahideen, the religious fighters who are harassing Russian forces with the backing of the Pakistanis and the C.I.A., and Yousaf can help.

What do we know about the mujahideen now? The Soviets invaded Afghanistan when the regime they'd backed fell apart, and kept committing forces even though, from the start, there was no good sense of how it would end. Steve Coll, in his book "Ghost Wars," quotes Yuri Andropov telling the Politburo, a few months before troops went in, "We know Lenin's teaching about a revolutionary situation. Whatever situation we are talking about in Afghanistan, it is not that type of situation." The brutality of the Soviet campaign might have met with Lenin's approval. By the time the Soviets left, in 1989, many hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians were dead, along with about fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers, and the Soviet Union had been set even further off balance, financially and morally. Coll quotes a Soviet soldiers' song:

Afghanistan

A wonderland

Just drop in a store

And you'll be seen no more

In "The Americans," a K.G.B. officer says that the U.S. wants to make this "our Vietnam"—at the same time that the viewer is wondering if this is, rather, our Afghanistan. The C.I.A. officers Yousaf meets in a dive bar are channelling money and weapons to the forces who became the Taliban and, in some cases, drifted to Al Qaeda. The morning after the "Americans" episode aired, one of the lead stories in the Times concerned unresolved questions about whether Saudi Arabian funding of the fighters continued even after the Soviet departure. This is where the historical perspective in the show gets interesting. In the season première, the K.G.B. team in Washington sits in front of a television set and watches as militants murder a Russian man on videotape. Are we supposed to identify a little with the Russians, given the films we see now, or with the Americans who are in the same picture, if just off-camera? (We don’t want the Russians to win, do we?) It is hard to know, watching, whether we should be sorry for them or for ourselves, and the cost of our idealism.

All this could become facile and didactic, but it hasn't (yet); if anything, the show has made the case that one doesn't simply switch historical roles as easily as Philip and Elizabeth put on their disguises. Wars lead to other wars, but they are not interchangeable. And each country reacts to terror in its own way—as Jordan's response to the murder of one of its pilots also reminded us this week. Last season, the series focussed on the Contras, more of a retro-camp choice, and there is some of the same spirit here, too, with jokes about Reagan and Brezhnev's relative ages. But Afghanistan promises to be more disconcerting.

Yousaf is calmer the second time he and Philip meet, by an empty hotel pool. He is carefully dressed, and ready to reminisce about Annelise. ("I thought she was such a silly little creature when we first met. But she had a degree in art history. She spoke French"—a succinct epitaph for the upper-class amateur spy.) Perhaps he is relieved just to have to sell out some Afghans rather than his own people. What is striking about “The Americans,” a show in which betrayal, in its infinite variety, seems to come so easily, is the faith it puts in patriotism. It's why Nina, after reciting the K.G.B. oath, confesses in the first season that she's been talking to the F.B.I., and, as Oleg, her lover and colleague, says, does "everything she can to fix it." It's why Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), her lover and F.B.I. handler, though he believes in her entirely, will not hand over critical files to save her life. Martha believes in the importance of her absent husband's supposed F.B.I. work, and will lie to help him. Jared, confessing that he's murdered his parents and his sister, rambles about a "motherland" that he has never seen. There are even hints that Annelise, who is very blond, is inspired by atavistic Scandinavian nationalism. "Sweden needs you," Philip says. (That's where she thinks he's from.) There are some conscious traitors, but they tend to be weak or troubled—Elizabeth refers to one as a "degenerate"—or to come back home. Gregory, a black K.G.B. operative, decides that he'd rather die in America than live in Russia. It is why the Soviet war in Afghanistan, like our own, proves difficult. (In particular, we have had difficulty with the phenomenon of financial corruption without commitment, paired with the rage of ordinary Afghans who don't like to see their government for sale.)

And, at the close of the episode, patriotism is what Elizabeth gives Philip as a reason they should give their daughter, Paige, to the K.G.B. to be trained as a sleeper. Elizabeth’s earlier arguments, about how it might be good for her—Paige is an idealist, "looking" for something—hadn't gone over well. Now, when she admits that it amounts to sacrificing their child—noting that when their country called her own mother "didn't even blink"—Philip finally seems to be listening.

There is one exception: a Russian defector named Zinaida Preobrazhenskaya (Svetlana Efremova), who emerges alive from the shipping crate used for her exfiltration at the same time the dead Annelise is stuffed into a suitcase. (The title of the episode is "Baggage.") She works at a geopolitical institute and, we are told, can tell American intelligence a lot it doesn't know. She is booked on "Meet the Press," loves Milky Way bars, and, as in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," the first place she wants to visit is the Lincoln Memorial. But in the scene we see of her press conference she does not attack the Soviet system, and, instead, says that she decided to leave for one reason: "Its Army was creating so much suffering for the people of Afghanistan." This may recall Sakharov, but also Ellsberg (or Manning). Wars play on patriotism, and yet, for some people, war may be the one thing that can unsettle it, or detach it from the related concept of loyalty to a government—perhaps because of its idealistic aspect. When a reporter asks Zinaida if Brezhnev's death—also a plot point—will change anything, she takes a breath, and says, "I cannot tell the future, but the entire Politburo is behind this terrible war." And people are dying in Afghanistan.