Gorby speaks out

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, has been giving the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization some home truths about Afghanistan this week.

With reports from Brussels highlighting possible future Russia-NATO cooperation
in Afghanistan, to be announced at next month’s NATO summit, Gorby gave a TV interview
warning that the war against the Taliban is “unwinnable.” He said that Obama is
right to be drawing down the 100,000 U.S. troops in the country and said there is
no alternative to withdrawal to avoid “another Vietnam.”

What did he get for his pains? He was slapped down by NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
who said in a TV interview that Gorbachev’s remarks reflected his “own negative
view of things.” But unfortunately for Rasmussen, Gorby actually knows what
he is talking about.

Under his leadership, the Russians were forced into a humiliating withdrawal after
a 10-year occupation that ended after the CIA conspired to empower the mujahedeen
and Osama bin Laden. They must be appalled about the prospect of power-sharing talks
going on behind the scenes with the Taliban. Gorbachev noted that they are “the
same ones who today are terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more of Pakistan.”

The hated Soviet-installed President Najibullah was killed in 1996 by fanatical
followers of the same Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, who is today the object of indirect
U.S. peace overtures. Najibullah was allegedly castrated before his mutilated body
was strung up, with banknotes shoved up what remained of his nose — a grim reminder
that corruption was not invented by the Karzai government.

Gorbachev has also been speaking his mind about his old friend Vladimir Putin, now
the Russian prime minister, accusing him of shutting down the democratic forces
in Russia as president. Putin’s ruling United Russia party is “a bad copy of the
Soviet Communist Party,” the former Communist Party leader told The New
York Times. There again, he knows what he is talking about.

In today’s increasingly authoritarian Russia, Gorby is remembered with bitterness
as the leader responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, once described by
Putin as the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century. But on Afghanistan
and on the political forces now at play in his homeland, Western leaders would do
well to heed his words.