In the aftermath of the proxy Soviet-US war in Afghanistan, President Gorbachev, supported by the UN, argued that America should join an international diplomatic effort to stabilise the region, with the aim of preventing the rise to power of Islamic extremists. America declined. During a fascinating post comparing Obama's pending decision on Afghan strategy with the decisions taken by the US back then, the New Yorker's Steve Coll notes that one member of the current cabinet will be all too aware of what America got wrong:
The C.I.A. argued in favor of the military solution. It then concluded, as one assault after another on Najibullah-defended cities failed, that the U.S. had no further interests in the country and should pack up its financing and diplomacy and go home. A few years later, the Taliban took Kabul. One of the American policymakers responsible for this sequence of policy decisions—who was deeply skeptical of Gorbachev during the late nineteen-eighties and who was present at the decision to abandon the difficult work of regional diplomacy in 1991-1992 that Gorbachev favored—was Robert Gates, who is now Secretary of Defense.
Comments