Obama, Gates and the trouble with the Afghanistan blame game

Spencer Ackerman

In new memoir, former US defense secretary Robert Gates reportedly faults Obama for lacking faith, but reality is more grey

Robert Gates’ new memoir is the first entry in the “Who lost Afghanistan?” sweepstakes. It will not be the last.

This coming Tuesday marks the publication of Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War, the former US defense secretary’s long-awaited book detailing his time in the Pentagon at the helm of two unpopular and failing wars. Leaks of the book’s content to the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as an essay adapted from the memoir published by the Wall Street Journal, show Gates sharply criticizing President Barack Obama for losing faith in his own Afghanistan strategy during the critical year of 2009. It amounts to a retrospective narrative in which avaricious civilian politicians trample the advice of military professionals better attuned to the harsh truths on the ground.

Gates writes, according to the early reports, that Obama distrusted senior military leaders, who urged the president towards the “surge” strategy that had previously been employed in Iraq – recasting the war as a counterinsurgency campaign, implemented by tens of thousands of additional troops and an intensified air campaign. Not only was Obama skeptical of their predictions of what military power could accomplish, Gates believes, but he was more committed to ending the war than to waging it.

“Obama was respectful of senior officers and always heard them out, but he often disagreed with them and was deeply suspicious of their actions and recommendations,” writes Gates, the only person to serve as defense secretary for presidents from different political parties. “Bush seemed to enjoy the company of the senior military; I think Obama considered time spent with generals and admirals an obligation.”

The trouble for Gates’ memoir – which, for full disclosure, I haven’t yet read – is that from the vantage point of 2014, it is hard to see how Obama wasn’t correct, on the merits, and how Gates and the Pentagon aren’t guilty of overpromising what the military could accomplish in Afghanistan. It may be lost in the media din about Gates’ criticism, but Obama gave the generals almost everything they asked for. General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, wanted 40,000 “surge” troops; Obama gave him 30,000 in 2010, and got commitments from Nato to make up almost all of the difference, on top of over 20,000 that Obama had already ordered into Afghanistan during 2009.

The strategy implemented in Afghanistan was the counterinsurgency campaign the generals desired, largely a duplicate of the strategy in Iraq. That strategy considered weakening the Taliban in southern Afghanistan the key to a virtuous circle of events that would not only stabilize Afghanistan, but weaken al-Qaida leadership across the border in tribal Pakistan.

But Obama would not commit to keeping the surge troops in Afghanistan beyond 2011. In his book Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward detailed a dramatic scene in which the president extracted a commitment from the military leadership that they would not request additional forces after the 18-month lifespan of the troop surge. “I don’t want to be in a situation here where we’re back here in six months talking about another 40,000,” Obama told the brass, according to Woodward. Gates evidently considers that and other White House-Pentagon interactions on Afghanistan an indication of Obama’s lack of faith.

Another way of looking at it is that Obama demanded that the military actually produce the results in Afghanistan it promised. As Woodward recounts, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pledged in November 2009, “We won’t come back and ask for more troops again.” Petraeus agreed, “You’ve got one bite at this apple … It ought to be a decisive one.”

Once Obama turned the war over to McChrystal, and later to his successor, David Petraeus, fierce fighting took place, particularly in southern Afghanistan – fighting that combined not only conventional soldiers and marines, but, under Petraeus especially, a sharp escalation in airstrikes and special operations raids.

But never did the generals convert their faith that intensified military pressure would convince the Taliban to sue for peace into a viable strategy. Nor could they articulate how escalation in Afghanistan would ultimately weaken al-Qaida in Pakistan. Looking just at Afghanistan, military historians are likely to question the generals’ decision to flood southern Afghanistan with US troops, rather than focusing on the porous eastern Afghanistan border region.

The results that have come in thus far do not look good for Gates and the generals. The Taliban doesn’t just remain a potent force in Afghanistan; it has snubbed both US and Afghan government peace overtures, evidently waiting out the US troop drawdown slated for the end of this year. The longest war the US has ever fought is also its least popular, which clashes against the assumption Gates implicitly makes that the public would have accepted an open-ended troop commitment. A recent US intelligence assessment reportedly concluded that any gains made in the war will fade after 2017. And the US’s installed pick for the Afghan presidency, Hamid Karzai, continues to be an unreliable partner, undercutting a cornerstone principle of counterinsurgency strategy – something the military chose to ignore in 2009.

Whatever setbacks occurred for the al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan resulted from a massive, controversial escalation in drone strikes there, and the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which points to a deep cleavage between the Afghanistan war and the destruction of al-Qaida that was once its purpose.

But Obama certainly deserves massive amounts of blame for Afghanistan. Whatever the flaws of the military strategy of 2009-2010, Obama embraced it, and now it is his responsibility. Obama turned the ambivalence Gates identified into geopolitical reality by vocalizing mixed and irreconcilable messages about the war to different audiences: to the American public, he is ending the war; to foreign audiences, the US will remain in Afghanistan via a still-uncompleted pact to station a residual troop presence there after this year. The net result is that few of the relevant actors in the Afghanistan war can easily plan for what the war will look like after 2014.

The strongest indictment of Obama on Afghanistan comes from an implication that Gates’ memoir raises. If Obama indeed lacked confidence in the troop surge and counterinsurgency strategy, then implementing it was a cynical calculation that gambled with the lives of US troops and Afghan civilians.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the US’s minimal achievements in Afghanistan as the war, never a political priority for anyone in Washington, fades from attention. That blame, and the recriminations that go with it, is likely to spur many an account like the one Gates provided, especially if former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, a surge advocate, runs for president.

But the tragedy of the Afghanistan war is that the realities on the ground in Afghanistan eluded both White House civilians and senior military officers, whether they were stationed in Kandahar, Kabul or back at the Pentagon. Avoiding future military tragedies will depend on both civilian politicians and a post-Afghanistan officer corps rejecting an enthusiasm for faddish martial ideologies that promise, but do not deliver. Far more than any inevitable conflicts between civilians and the military, that is the enduring lesson of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars Gates worked hard to rescue.