Word: sovietizing
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...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 that President Obama today faces, eight years after U.S. troops went in. And eavesdropping, retrospectively, on the Soviet debate...
...independent National Security Archive at George Washington University recently translated chronicles of the Soviet discussion, mostly from notes taken by Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's senior foreign policy aide at the time. While the U.S. insists it is not an occupying force as the Soviets were, both missions faced many of the same challenges. "We should honestly 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...
...Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, six years after the Soviet invasion, was flummoxed by the situation he had inherited from his predecessors. Obama too: "For six years, Afghanistan has been denied the resources that it demands because of the war in Iraq," the President said in March in a clear slap at the Bush Administration...
...Second-guessing of the original invasion was rampant in the Soviet debate. "I am not going to 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...
...European Union. The irascible Czech President refuses to fly the E.U. flag over Prague Castle. He argues that climate change - targeted in one of the E.U.'s signature policies - is a myth. On his only visit to the European Parliament, in February, he bluntly compared the E.U. to the Soviet Union. So it is no surprise that the 68-year-old former economist should try to sink the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to overhaul the E.U.'s decision-making process and has been a decade in the making...