Russia: US Must Admit That Afghan War Ended in Its Defeat

"The twenty-year US military campaign in Afghanistan ended a year ago. The results of the longest war in the history of the United States are deplorable," the embassy said in a message on its Telegram channel, TASS reported.

"The humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Afghanistan a year later, threatening to become even more lethal scalewise than 20 years of military conflict were. We are convinced that Washington should admit that the Afghan war ended in defeat for the United States. Moreover, it brought nothing but troubles and the collapse of false hopes to the Asian state," the Russian diplomats added.

They also recalled that the terrorist group Al-Qaeda maintained a presence in Afghanistan.

"With the connivance of the authorities of the Islamic Republic and their Western partners, ISIS (ISIL or Daesh) and other terrorist groups have taken root on Afghan territory. Drug production has increased tenfold, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state. The US military campaign turned into a tragedy for ordinary Afghans. According to official data, more than 150,000 Afghans, including 48,000 civilians, were killed, and another 75,000 were wounded. Hundreds of thousands have become refugees," the embassy pointed out.

As the Russian diplomats stressed, "economic achievements in the former Islamic Republic, so widely advertised by American partners, appeared to be ‘Potemkin villages’, which vanished immediately after the withdrawal of foreign troops. Trillions of dollars of US taxpayers have been wasted. <...> IIt is necessary now to alleviate the sufferings of Afghans. Huge sums are needed to reconstruct the destroyed country. The first obligatory step in this direction is to unconditionally return all funds of the Central Bank of Afghanistan frozen by the US", the embassy concluded.