Days after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan after a 20-year effort by the U.S. to keep it from doing just that, Mikhail Gorbachev called the mission in that troubled country “a failed enterprise from the start.”
In a rare interview, the former Russian president and last leader of the Soviet Union before it fell in 1991 told the Russian Information Agency (RIA) last week that the U.S. and NATO “should have admitted failure earlier.”
“Like many other similar projects, at its heart lay the exaggeration of a threat and poorly defined geopolitical ideas,” said Gorbachev, who oversaw the Soviet Union’s withdrawl from Afghanistan in 1989, “To that were added unrealistic attempts to democratize a society made up of many tribes."
Gorbachev, 90, dismissed the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan as “a failed enterprise from the start, even though Russia supported it during the first stages.”
Known for his “Glasnost” policy that opened up the Soviet Union to the public and world, Gorbachev ended up presiding over the fall of the Russian Communist empire in 1991 shortly after a failed coup against him.
Elena Servettaz, Russian broadcast journalist and author, told Newsmax that “Gorbachev was the one who brought me and other students of that year into our profession — he welcomed our entering the Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism. I have a lot of respect for this great man.”
But rather than disagree with her hero’s assessment of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Servettaz pointed out that “ I think about the fact that four U.S. presidents were in Afghanistan. And only one finally took Americans out of it.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.