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Pillar noted that the key operations for the 9/11 attacks took place in Germany, Spain, and flight schools in the U.S. -- NOT in the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. And he observed that, today, terrorists can now choose among several unstable countries besides Afghanistan, and U.S. forces cannot secure them all.
"The issue is whether preventing such a haven [in Afghanistan] would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States enough to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure and the barriers to success in Afghanistan," Pillar wrote, adding:
"Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from the perception that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan."
Unlike most of Obama's hawkish advisers, Pillar brought to his assessment the experience of a soldier as well as a substantive analyst. He served as an Army officer in Vietnam, and that lends an on-the-ground realism of the kind that is in very short supply these days. He also seems to have read Sun Tzu, who observed:
"He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. " If victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull, and their ardor will be dampened. "If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the state will not be equal to the strain."
Another policy realist who was shunned by the Obama administration was former Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was appointed to supervise intelligence analysis by Adm. Dennis Blair, then-Director of National Intelligence.
But the Likud Lobby protested that Freeman was overly friendly with Arabs, and he got the heave-ho only six-and-a-half hours into his new job. About a year later, Blair was gone, too.
Obama Boxed In
With well-grounded analysts like Pillar and Freeman excluded, Obama was left complaining in 2009 that the Pentagon was framing the options on Afghanistan to ensure that he agreed to a sizable escalation, which had dangerous political as well as strategic consequences.
"I can't let this be a war without end, and I can't lose the whole Democratic Party," Obama complained, according to Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars.
When Obama added a caveat to the escalation, requiring that a U.S. military withdrawal begin in July 2011, the Pentagon brass quickly undercut him, insisting that the timetable was meaningless and would be largely ignored.
"We're not leaving Afghanistan prematurely," Gates declared at a dinner given by Secretary Clinton for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, according to Woodward's book. "In fact, we're not ever leaving at all."
On March 11, Gates told NATO that the draw-down beginning this summer would not be dramatic, vowing that he would not do something that would "affect the significant gains made to date, or the lives lost, for a political gesture."
With Obama's pledge to begin the U.S. withdrawal dismissed as "a political gesture," the President was made to look both feckless and weak. Amazingly, this does not seem to bother him in the least.
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of troops in Afghanistan, also has depicted the Afghan War as open-ended.
"I don't think you win this war," he said, in Woodward's Obama's Wars. "I think you keep fighting. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."
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