I have very little but extreme admiration for Bob Gates, as a human being and as a defense secretary. He has always seemed to me a very level-headed, pragmatic and sane realist – the kind of conservative that would bring me back to the GOP if there were more like him. So why is his book so baffling? Greg Jaffe puts his finger on one core flaw:
[Gates] recounts his thoughts during a tense 2011 meeting with Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in the White House Situation Room: “As I sat there I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” …
Gates’s problem with the president is less about strategy or substance than about heart. “I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him,” Gates writes. He compares Obama unfavorably with Bush, who “had no second thoughts about Iraq, including our decision to invade.”
That last formulation is close to deranged. Better to have a true believer pursuing impossible goals than a sober skeptic trying to make the least bad call? Dreher rightly asks why Obama’s skepticism is so scandalous:
Obama’s judgment of the sleazy Karzai was correct, Obama knew the war was unwinnable, Gates thinks Obama made the right calls — but he faults the president for not being a True Believer? As if George W. Bush’s unwillingness to reassess American strategy in light of cold, hard experience is a sign of wisdom and character! I suppose Gates has a point if he’s faulting Obama for pursuing a military strategy that he (the president) didn’t believe in, but does Gates believe that an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been the better strategy, even if it had been politically feasible (which it may not have been)?
Like almost everyone else, I’m relying on reports about the book, not the thing itself. But here’s my gut sense of where this deeply honorable man is coming from. By the time of Obama’s first inauguration, the only way to describe the Global War On Terror was what David Brooks recently called (about Israel/Palestine) a “tragic situation.” There were no good options. The idea of staying there for ever – the neocon fantasy – was simply inconceivable in a democratic society long appalled by the cost of war. A decision to suddenly get out would have compounded the failure. Obama’s response in Af-Pak was Bush’s in Iraq: a face-saving surge in order to get the fuck out of there without too much collateral damage. The killing of Osama bin Laden made it all a lot easier and the logic of withdrawal all the more compelling.
But there is a deep moral issue behind sending young Americans to die in order for a country to save face. I have to say that the Afghan surge remains to me the most morally disturbing of all Obama’s decisions in office. He knows his Niebuhr, and is clearly aware of the horrible but necessary decisions presidents have to make that can lead to the deaths and brutal injuries of many young patriots. Between 2009 and 2011, over a thousand Americans died in a war to save face. Obama sent many more soldiers to their deaths in Afghanistan than Bush did. I know there are no morally easy calls in wartime, and perhaps this was a defensible move in terms of global strategy and domestic politics (which has to be a part of any national security debate in modern times). But I can very well understand how Bob Gates, knowing all this, felt increasingly emotionally wrung out by sending so many men to die for one last push that, in the end, failed. The emotion in the book and, apparently, raging in his psyche all along, is perhaps best understood in that way. I find it admirable that a human being in such a position can feel that powerfully about the horrors of war.
But, on the broader picture, as Gates concedes, Obama was right.
Amy Davidson points out that Obama was shrewd to be suspicious of Karzai, noting that he has “not yet signed a bilateral security agreement on the status of American forces in Afghanistan after 2014” because he would like to wait, “maybe until after his country’s next Presidential election, in April”:
The arguments about staying in Afghanistan all have to do with not squandering what we have supposedly won there. That might better be protected by going, if it has anything to do with the rule of law. Why, after all, would Karzai want to wait until after the Presidential elections? He can’t run again, because of term limits—so why is he holding on to a bargaining chip in a game he should, by then, no longer be in? … There are close to a dozen candidates, a number of them Karzai’s allies, among them his brother, Abdul Qayum Karzai. The dread one has is that Karzai wants to make sure that he has leverage to insure we tolerate a fixed election. Is that the sort of player we want to be, and is that why Americans died in Afghanistan? Is that what we can stand?
Ambers ponders Gates’ comments:
The whole project of getting into these wars and staying, leaving a big American footprint — that’s what Obama ran against. He ran to get out of that.
What was up for debate was the mechanism of withdrawal, or how long it would take. Obama’s principle priorities were two: The safety of redeploying American troops and ensuring that al Qaeda could not be reconstituted in the region.
Why Gates should be surprised by this is difficult to tell from the excerpts. He is smart enough to have interpreted Obama’s campaign rhetoric realistically. He is also, funnily enough, convinced that Obama made the right calls.
Memoirs, and memory, are curious things.
Mark Thompson notes that Gates doesn’t spare Congress:
The fact is, Congress as a whole is a far bigger problem than Gates’ dealings with the White House. Executive branch relations can change with an election or new Cabinet secretary, but the congressional modus operandi that Gates cites is pathological. In concert with their uniformed Pentagon allies, lawmakers in key slots on the armed services and appropriations committees block progress and succor sloth through both their action and inaction. It has led to an immensely inefficient defense establishment, flabby in the wrong places and gaunt where it should be muscular.
Sprung flags Thom Shanker’s NYT review of the book:
My impression of Shanker’s review is that systemic dysfunction dominates Gates’ narrative: the book may portray a collective tragedy, a nation that can no longer govern itself effectively. As Shanker notes, Gates does not spare himself from criticism. There’s a dysfunctional Congress, a dysfunctional Pentagon, and two administrations that went severely awry, in his telling, in different ways. Contrast this collective dysfunction with his earlier portrait of five or six administrations that tacked left and right but ultimately hewed to a successful Cold War consensus strategy.
(Photo: A large load of mail sent to soldiers killed or wounded in action sits awaiting transport out of the Korengal Outpost October 29, 2008 in the Kunar Province of eastern Afghanistan. U.S. Army Viper Company of the 1-26 Infantry, based in the battle-scarred Korengal Valley, has had 6 solidiers killed since the unit deployed there in mid-July. Because of the delay in transporting items to such remote outposts, mail for soldiers killed in action often arrives many months after they died. By John Moore/Getty Images.)
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