Word: afghanistans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ticket out of Afghanistan is the ability of the Afghans to maintain their own security," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in June. The Soviets believed the same thing two decades earlier, although they were disappointed. "There was a simplified view that the presence of our troops would set Afghanistan on the right track," Politburo member and former Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko said in February 1987. "And now I would not bet a dime that they can create their own Afghan army, no matter how much resources we invest...
...discuss now whether we did the right thing by going there," Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze said in January 1987. "But it is a fact that we went there absolutely not knowing the psychology of the people or the real situation in the country." (The U.S. has "not sufficiently studied Afghanistan's peoples whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley," says McChrystal's August assessment...
...Like the U.S. mission, the Red Army lacked sufficient troops in Afghanistan to control the countryside. "After seven years in Afghanistan, there is not one square kilometer left untouched by a boot of a Soviet soldier," Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the top Soviet military officer, said in November 1986. "But as soon as they leave a place, the enemy returns and restores it all back the way it used to be." (McChrystal's take: "The insurgents control or contest a significant portion of the country, although it is difficult to assess precisely how much due to a lack...
...Pakistan was also a key feature of the discussion in both the White House and the Kremlin, although their conclusions differed. "There's no way we're going to be able to close the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," Gromyko declared in February 1987, "so we need to end this war." (Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen warned last month, "We have this safe haven in a sovereign country that is threatening, plotting against Americans and other Western countries, and it must be eliminated.") See TIME's photo-essay "On the Frontlines in the Battle Against the Taliban...
Read "A Window on the War in Afghanistan...