Word: afghanistan
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...video of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...Soviet Union as an implacable and evil adversary. During the Reagan Administration, he sided with hard-liners who got the Soviets wrong. He failed to recognize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a true reformer. He didn't believe that Soviet power was collapsing. "He said the Soviets would never leave Afghanistan. They did. He said [former Afghan President] Najibullah would never survive the Soviet departure. He was totally wrong. Najibullah survived three or four years," recalls Mort Abramowitz, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research at the time. "People make mistakes. Bob is not infallible...
...same thing happened in Afghanistan. The absurdities of the NATO campaign, in which each country's forces operate according to their own particular caveats - many of which include no fighting - shocked Gates during his visit a year and a half ago. "He heard that we had a soldier who was shot and was in Spain's AOR [area of responsibility]. The Spanish troops had to call back to Madrid to seek permission to medevac him," a Pentagon aide told me. "The soldier lived. But Gates was furious." He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac...
Gates has gone out of his way to woo Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so much so that they've come to seem inseparable. "Gates needs her," says Bruce Riedel, who led Obama's strategic review of Afghanistan early last year. "No one would take Gates' view on what the Democratic Party would support in Afghanistan seriously. He's not a Democrat...
...though everyone talks about bringing soft power and a civilian surge to Afghanistan, in reality there are very few civilians to surge with. From the moment Gates put McChrystal in charge of the war, the military usurped control of the Afghanistan debate; ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who reports to Clinton as her special envoy to the region, was relegated to the sidelines...