“The familiar road to failure in Afghanistan” provides a different analysis to why the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan than portrayed in the book and movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”:
“But the Russians never got over their basic weakness: they could take the territory, but they never had enough troops to hold it. As one Russian critic put it, they had tactics but no strategy.
“From the beginning there were critical voices both inside and outside government. The criticism grew as the bodies began to come home in their zinc coffins. People complained bitterly that the war was pointless and shameful, and that their sons were dying in vain. In 1983 the government began to look for an exit strategy. Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985—well before the first Stinger was fired—he told the Afghans that the Soviet troops would pull out in a year or 18 months.”
WATCHDOG: History never ends. The more time passes, the more we learn about what took place. Or at least we think we do! A wag of the tail.
