Gorbachev drew on his experience in a CNN interview Sunday during which he again played the part of peacemaker, urging Obama to pull troops out of Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, it seems from media leaks that President Obama is moving in the opposite direction. The speculation now is that he will increase U.S. forces by a number slightly less than the 40,000 that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested, a decision that would make no sense at all. If the goal is, as McChrystal's report defined it, to rebuild Afghan civil society from the ground up, something on the order of the half-million troops that were dispatched to Vietnam will be required. But that cannot be done without a draft, and we all know that outcome would not be politically acceptable to either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Nor is such nation-building advisable, even if the American public and the treasury would support it. Our war in Afghanistan is no more warranted than the one the Soviets waged. Ironically, they were opposing Muslim fanatics we supplied with Stinger rockets and whose descendants we now blame for terrorism. In the name of fighting Soviet imperialism, our CIA recruited the worst of the worst and called them freedom fighters until we renamed them terrorists. We got it terribly wrong then, and yet we still insist that we know what we are doing in that country.
When Gorbachev came to power, he - like Obama - inherited a war that was not in the interest of his nation. If the response of a Soviet dictator was to end it, might we not be justified in expecting the enlightened president of a democratic society to do the same?
Mikhail Gorbachev's Sermon on the Mount
Unfortunately, it seems from media leaks that President Obama is moving in the opposite direction. The speculation now is that he will increase U.S. forces by a number slightly less than the 40,000 that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested, a decision that would make no sense at all. If the goal is, as McChrystal's report defined it, to rebuild Afghan civil society from the ground up, something on the order of the half-million troops that were dispatched to Vietnam will be required. But that cannot be done without a draft, and we all know that outcome would not be politically acceptable to either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Nor is such nation-building advisable, even if the American public and the treasury would support it. Our war in Afghanistan is no more warranted than the one the Soviets waged. Ironically, they were opposing Muslim fanatics we supplied with Stinger rockets and whose descendants we now blame for terrorism. In the name of fighting Soviet imperialism, our CIA recruited the worst of the worst and called them freedom fighters until we renamed them terrorists. We got it terribly wrong then, and yet we still insist that we know what we are doing in that country.
When Gorbachev came to power, he - like Obama - inherited a war that was not in the interest of his nation. If the response of a Soviet dictator was to end it, might we not be justified in expecting the enlightened president of a democratic society to do the same?
Mikhail Gorbachev's Sermon on the Mount
