Gorbachev Considers Victory in Afghanistan Impossible
The last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, warns NATO that a victory in Afghanistan is impossible and that the international organization should withdraw its troops from there in order to avoid a possible new Vietnam.
Gorbachev was the one who, as leader of the Soviet Union, pulled out the Soviet troops 20 years ago, after a 10-year invasion.
He praised the decision of President Obama to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan, but warned that getting out of this situation would not be easy to do. “Victory in Afghanistan is not possible,” Gorbachev warned in an interview for BBC.
Gorbachev revealed that before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan an agreement was signed between the Soviet Union, Iran, India, Pakistan and the United States.
According to this agreement, the parties were agreeing that Afghanistan should remain a neutral, democratic country, that would live in good relations with its neighbors and with the United States and the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, he added, while agreeing upon this, the Americans were also training Afghan troops, the same militant troops that are now terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more Pakistan.
That is why, the former president thinks, it will be difficult for the United States to get out of this situation.
Looking at the alternative, Gorbachev said that not even sending half a million troops in Afghanistan would not solve the problem, and that if the United States wishes to avoid a new Vietnam it must pull out of Afghanistan.
According to Gorbachev, the best NATO can achieve now is to help Afghanistan get back on its feet and the people rebuild their country destroyed by the war.
Speaking of the problems in Russia, the former Soviet president said that Russia is only half way down the road of democracy, from totalitarianism to freedom, and that there still are some problems that must be addressed and resolved.
He also criticized the party in power led by Prime Minister Putin did everything in their power to turn away from democracy, in order to remain in office.
Mikhail Gorbachev is the leader that created in the late 1980s the doctrine of glasnost’ and perestroika which referred to putting a human face on a totalitarian Communist regime and rebuilding the entire system.
His doctrine did not mean toppling Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and in the other nation having such sort of regimes, only a new approach and a new management.
By the end of the 1980s, in 1989 to be more precise the regimes began to fall in Europe one after the other, in East Germany, Poland and Hungary at first, in Romania by the end of the year, in the bloodiest anti-Communist revolution, and in the Soviet Union itself in 1991.
In Asia there was an attempt in China that failed in the Tienanmen Square in a bloodshed but the regimes in Central Asia changed one by one to the point that now only China and North Korea retain a strict Communist regime, in north Korea a Stalin-like one, and in China one that experiences in practice the doctrine of Gorbachev.
Hated in Russia by some people who accuse him of destroying the Russian Empire (the fall of Soviets led to territorial losses for Russia of lands it had always considered traditionally Russian, like Ukraine or Kazakhstan and Georgia), Gorbachev is praised by the people in the free world as the one whose role in the fall of Communism was essential.
Putting a smiley face on a criminal regime proved to be impossible as some of these Eastern European countries chose to throw Communism away (in most of them the Communist parties are declared illegal along with their brethren the Nazi movements) and take the path followed by the Western countries.
Some of them have joined the European Union, some remained in the influence sphere of Russia, but none of them wishes to return to Communism.
