LONDON, August 16. /TASS/. The international community made a number of mistakes in Afghanistan, which resulted in the seizure of power by the movement Taliban (outlawed in Russia), Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC on Monday.
"If it’s a failure, it’s a failure of the international community to realize that you don’t fit things overnight. I’m afraid that when you deal with a country like Afghanistan, its thousand years of history and civil war, you might have to manage it for hundreds of years. It’s not something you just rock in and rock out and expect something to be fixed," Wallace said. "But, also it’s a failure to recognize that, you know, military might on its own might do what it did and half the mission was entirely successful."
Earlier, Wallace said that in his opinion the way the United States pulled out of Afghanistan was a mistake and that the West would have to face the consequences of that decision. He warns that under the Taliban Afghanistan might become a haven for terrorist groups again.
The Taliban movement’s militants, according to the TV broadcaster Al Arabiya, entered Kabul on Sunday without meeting any resistance and took over the offices vacated by government forces. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The Taliban later declared it had established control of all of the Afghan capital’s neighborhoods.