The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden

Author:Milton Bearden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363060
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Kremlin, February 27, 1987

It seemed that Gorbachev had his consensus, Anatoly Chernyaev said to himself as he reviewed the minutes of a series of Politburo meetings over the last five weeks on the question of Afghanistan. Muhammad Najibullah had made his visit to Moscow in December, and he had made a good impression. The word in Moscow was that he was a serious-minded man who could take the difficult first steps of preparing for the day when he would not be supported by the Soviet army.

There was no turning back from the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, though the Kremlin was still reluctant to declare to the world that its policy of intervention had been flawed from the start. Such sentiments had not, however, prevented frank comment among Politburo members on past errors. At sessions held on January 21 and 22, Eduard Shevardnadze had made it clear that the decision to exit was the right one and pulled few punches when it came to where he thought the blame for the Afghan debacle should lie.

“I won’t discuss right now whether we did the right thing by going in there,” the Foreign Minister declared, easing into exactly the criticism he said he would avoid. “But we did go in there absolutely without knowing the psychology of the people and the real state of affairs in the country. That’s a fact! And everything we’ve done and are doing in Afghanistan is incompatible with the moral character of our country.”

“It was incompatible that we went in?” Gromyko asked pointedly.

“Yes, this, too,” he said. “The attitude toward us is more negative than it seems. And we’re spending a billion rubles a year for this. An enormous sum, and responsibility needs to be taken for it. Let us add up again in every detail how much Afghanistan needs to get by at the present time! Nikolay Ivanovich,” he said, referring to Nikolay Ryzhkov, the architect of Gorbachev’s economic restructuring program, appointed to the Politburo in 1985 and soon after promoted to head of the Council of Ministers, “doesn’t have this data right now, but in the United States they think we’ll need two billion a year. And the Japanese think it’s three billion. I’m not even talking about the costs in lives.”

“We won’t talk right now about how this revolution came into being,” Gorbachev interjected, “how we reacted and how we vacillated about whether or not to deploy troops.”

“Yes, yes,” Gromyko assented, nodding in agreement.

“Right now we must address the present and determine what steps need to be taken.”

“The report of Eduard Amvrosieyevich [Shevardnadze] provides a realistic picture,” said Ryzhkov. “The previous information was not objective. The situation forces us again to approach the problem in a serious way.” He spoke of the difficulty of making progress in an illiterate society and of the misery of people’s material prospects. “It’s better to pay with money and kerosene than with men,” he said. “Our people don’t understand what we’re doing there, or why we’ve been there for seven years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.