“People ask: ‘What are we doing there?’” Gorbachev observed. “Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war?”
If the Soviet Union did not get out of Afghanistan, “we’ll disgrace ourselves in all our relations,” Gorbachev answered himself. In the presence of the Politburo’s inner circle and his closest advisers on reform, he had been thinking aloud about the Afghan problem altogether. By November the issue seemed mainly one of timing. “The strategic goal is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops,” Gorbachev told his colleagues that day. “We have to set a clear goal: Help speed up the process so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.”
”
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Moscow, November 1986, from Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars.
It is simply stunning the degree to which the United States’ experience in Afghanistan mirrors the Soviet Union’s just over two decades ago. Ironically, if it weren’t for the outpouring of clandestine funding and weapons to the Arab anti-Soviet jihad fighters from the CIA and its shaky allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the development of international terrorism in the region—the raison d’etre for America’s war there—may have never came to be.
