Word: mcchrystal
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...power-sharing deal between Karzai and Abdullah is considered the much more likely outcome. But in reality, the manner in which the electoral stalemate is resolved doesn't substantially alter the basic choice facing Obama: either send tens of thousands more U.S. troops, which U.S. commander General Stan McChrystal says are necessary simply to halt the Taliban's advance, or draw down to a policing operation against al-Qaeda and abandon the goal of defeating the Taliban...
...Afghanistan. "We went in, but how to get out - our head[s] are splitting from this. Of course we can just pull out fast, without thinking of anything and blame the former leadership who started all this." The dilemma may sound familiar as the Obama Administration weighs General Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops, but the quote comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party, during a debate that raged in the Kremlin during 1986 and 1987. Moscow was grappling with some of the same issues eight years after the Red Army invaded Afghanistan...
...admit that our efforts over the last eight years have not led to the expected results," a senior military commander confided to Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov in an August 1987 letter. "Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result." (The recently leaked assessment by McChrystal noted that "Afghans are frustrated and weary after eight years without evidence of the progress they anticipated...
...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...
...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 of [U.S. and allied] presence...