Gorbachev to NATO: You Can’t Win in Afghanistan

Posted on Oct 27, 2010

AP / Dmitry Lovetsky

Mikhail Gorbachev speaks at the 2007 unveiling ceremony of the Raisa Gorbachev Institute of Pediatric Hematology and Transplantology in St. Petersburg, Russia. The bas-relief depicts his wife, Raisa, who died in 1999.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev knows a thing or two about warfare in Afghanistan, having ordered Soviet troops out of the country two decades ago, and Wednesday he passed on a little advice to the NATO troops and allied forces fighting there now: Victory is “impossible” on that battleground.  —KA

Mail Online:

Russia is set to return to the war in Afghanistan 21 years after its forces were driven out of the country.

Moscow has agreed to help train the Afghan army and anti-narcotics troops—at the request of the same Western countries who helped remove Russia from the country in the late 1980s.

But Mikhail Gorbachev today warned Nato that victory in Afghanistan is ‘impossible’.

The former leader of the Soviet Union, who pulled Russian troops out of Afghanistan in 1989, said President Barack Obama is right to start withdrawing U.S. forces from the country next year.

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