MINSK, September 1. /TASS/. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said that the United States in Afghanistan has suffered a fiasco and had to flee the country in disgrace.
"This fiasco has turned into a disgraceful escape," Lukashenko told the media on Wednesday.
The Belarusian leader believes that the United States’ pullout from Afghanistan was a logical march of events.
"There has never been a force capable of overpowering Afghanistan. Nor will there be any. This has never happened in history," the news agency BelTA quotes Lukashenko as saying.
At the same time he believes that it is too early to make any final conclusions regarding the Afghan problem.
"This chaos that is seen at [Kabul’s] airport is a sad picture, of course. But it would be wrong to absolutize this and think that the Americans are stupid," Lukashenko said. "They have spent more than two trillion dollars on this war. A total of 85 billion dollars, as Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon told me yesterday, was invested by the Americans into creating weapons reserves there. They have airlifted the hardware and left it there. True, there is great hustle and bustle in Kabul. But we should not be misled by any means. The Americans are smart guys, and they may be playing a long-term game. Why did they leave advanced military hardware there?" Lukashenko asked.
He believes that the United States should have airlifted their forces to neighboring countries - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, abandon their hardware, and leave the region without any problems.
"No country would have refused to accommodate the US troops with their equipment. And that would have been normal. Yet, they preferred to act otherwise. They might have left the region within just one week. Without much ado. But they did not adopt such a plan," Lukashenko said.
The radical Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia) launched a massive operation for establishing control of the country after the United States declared its intention to pull out. On August 15, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani stepped down and left the country. The Taliban entered the capital Kabul without encountering any resistance. The United States’ 20-year-long military presence ended last night, when the last American soldier left Afghanistan.