We know for certain that Obama is NOT withdrawing.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on his experience of military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the U.S. can’t win the conflict there and should begin pulling out its soldiers.
Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.
“I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” Gorbachev said in Russian through a translator. “What we need is the reconciliation of Afghan society -- and they should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.” Read more at Bloomberg
Russia failed:
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent tanks into Afghanistan to support a Marxist regime in 1979, betting superior firepower from the ground and air would keep the country within Moscow’s fold. Soviet aims were thwarted by an Islamist mujahedeen movement supported by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
While there was support in the Moscow establishment, Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Communist Party concluded that Soviet objectives couldn’t be achieved.
“We thought that that would lead nowhere,” Gorbachev said. “So we started to disengage our troops from any kind of hostilities in Afghanistan.”
The pullout began in 1988 and ended in February of 1989, nine months before the Berlin Wall fell.
The Taliban, an outcrop of the mujahedeen that dominated Afghanistan in the 1990s, took control of most of the country in 1996. The U.S.-led invasion five years later, following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was meant to displace the Taliban, accused of harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda.
