Today the Kremlin mocked U.S. President Trump’s statements on American forces withdrawing from Afghanistan, perhaps in a moment of karma for the Soviet withdrawal in failure late last century from the same country. POTUS declared in the State of the Union address, “It’s time,” and added 19 years was enough.
Russian Presidential Special Representative for Afghanistan, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second Asia Department Zamir Kabulov said in an interview with Russian state news agency TASS, “They will have to leave, sooner or later. And they need to withdraw without a loss of face. We in Russia are ready to offer help – to the extent we are capable of doing so – so that this agreement could be achieved.”
“However, as they say, [the US] will have to pay for the broken dishes in Afghanistan by reconstructing the country earnestly now, but not like in the previous 17 years,” he continued.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured in, but the effect is invisible,” he added. “The donors should behave in another way, while Afghanistan’s future government should show responsibility about foreign aid.”
“Then things will move on and we will reconstruct Afghanistan, if not as a prosperous state but as a normal one,” he stressed, added TASS.
When asked if Moscow trusts US President Donald Trump’s intentions to pull the US force out of Afghanistan, Kabulov answered, “I’d prefer to trust, since the US president says it.”
“When he substantiates this with comprehensible – at least to me – logic, it is a step in the right direction,” Kabulov said. “Actually, he says right things: 17 years, one trillion [US] dollars and the lives of 2,300 Americans. What for? For the war to go on and for them to spill blood.”
