Former Canadian Chief of the Land Staff Andrew Leslie stated that "where we are now is failure. There’s no doubt about it." Mikhail Gorbachev, the former President of the Soviet Union who had overseen the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, argued that "NATO and the United States should have admitted failure earlier" and that the NATO campaign in Afghanistan was "a failed enterprise from the start" which was founded on "the exaggeration of a threat and poorly defined geopolitical ideas".