The Australian website reports on January 1, 2011 that former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser said today that the United States and its allies cannot win the war in Afghanistan.
According to 1980 Australian Cabinet documents -- just released to the public today -- Fraser, who was Australia's prime minister at that time, thought it was enormously serious when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979.
Comparing the current war in Afghanistan with the one in the 1980s, Fraser said he did not oppose the 2001 United States-led invasion when the original plan was to destroy al-Qaeda. "But the objective became not hunting al-Qaeda, but establishing an American-style democracy in Afghanistan, and I thought that was absurd," Fraser said.
Explaining why the U.S. cannot win the war in Afghanistan, Fraser said, "You can make military gains in an area, but then the Taliban fade away -- they move somewhere else. There are not enough troops to make an area safe, to hold it, to garrison it."
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