As President Obama’s defense secretary, Bob Gates concluded this about his boss during a session in the White House Situation Room:
“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] 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.”
Duh.
Notwithstanding the headlines Gates has generated with his new memoir, “Duty,” President Obama has himself given many signals his “new way forward in Afghanistan” owed more to domestic politics than to any real effort to defeat our enemies.
He did so in his very announcement of his new strategy at the United States Military Academy in December 2009. “After 18 months,” the president told the cadets, “our troops will begin to come home.” That sentence came immediately after the one saying our “vital interest” required 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan.
In hindsight, we can today see more clearly what the president was doing by using West Point to announce a timetable for withdrawal: He was sounding retreat.
Then why have a surge at all? The answer is Obama couldn’t just pull us out because he’d spent the 2008 campaign decrying Iraq as a distraction had prevented us from winning the “necessary war” in Afghanistan.
So forget the snarks at Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton’s admission she opposed the Iraq surge because of politics. If what Bob Gates says is true, Americans were dying in Afghanistan for a strategy their commander-in-chief didn’t himself believe in.