Gates and the Urge to Surge

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Our Secretary of Defense is insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which "insurgents" attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as "contact," but are merely "incidents."

Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost. In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield." Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."

As Vietnamese Communist forces converged on Saigon in April 1975, the U.S. withdrew all remaining personnel. Summers was on the last Marine helicopter to fly off the roof of the American Embassy at 5:30 a.m. on April 30. As he later recalled, "I was the second-to-the-last Army guy out of Vietnam -- quite a searing experience."

Why is this relevant? Because if Obama repeats the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, U.S. Marine choppers may be plucking folks not only off the U.S. embassy roof in Baghdad, but also from the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. No ignoramus, Gates knows that his comments about the Taliban losing "every time" that there is contact with coalition forces is as irrelevant as those of Col. Summers 34 years ago.

Yet, it would be folly to expect Gates to give advice to a superior that challenges the policies that Gates thinks his superior favors. Gates has been the consummate career careerist, going back to his days as head of analysis at CIA in the 1980s when he fashioned intelligence reports that gave the policymakers what they wanted to hear. Instead of the old-fashioned "bark-on" intelligence, the Gates variety was "apple-polished" intelligence.

He wants to stay on as Defense Secretary and apparently thinks that his life-long strategy of telling his superiors what they want to hear will now work with Barack Obama. Gates is nearing the end of a highly sophisticated campaign to convince Obama and his advisers that the current Defense Secretary is just who they need at the Pentagon to execute Obama’s policies – and look really bipartisan to boot.

The President-elect’s position has long been that we need to send "at least two additional brigades" (about 7,000 troops) to Afghanistan. So the Defense Secretary would have us believe, as he said Friday, that "surging as many forces as we can" is an outstanding idea. And with troops having to leave Iraqi cities by next June, in the first stage of the U.S. withdrawal demanded by the draft status-of-forces agreement, there will be more soldiers available to send into the mountains of Afghanistan. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?

Ironically, this resembles closely the proposed policy of Sen. John McCain, who argued during the debate with Obama on Sept. 26 that "the same [surge] strategy" that Gen. David Petraeus implemented in Iraq is "going to have to be employed in Afghanistan." For good measure, Gov. Sarah Palin told Katie Couric "a surge in Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there, as it has proven to have done in Iraq."

Oops! Within a week, Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan undercut McCain and Palin, insisting emphatically that no Iraq-style "surge" of forces will end the conflict in Afghanistan. Speaking in Washington on Oct. 1, McKiernan employed unusual candor in describing Afghanistan as "a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq." The country’s mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks, and history of civil war make it a unique challenge, he said.

"The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’" McKiernan continued, adding that what is required is a "sustained commitment" to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution. McKiernan added that he doubts that "another facet of the Iraq strategy" — the U.S. military’s programs to recruit tribes to oppose insurgents — can be duplicated in Afghanistan. "I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes," said McKiernan.

Recently, President-elect Obama has been relatively quiet on Afghanistan, and one lives in hope that before he actually commits to sending more brigades to Afghanistan he will assemble a group of people who know something about that country, the forces at play in the region, and insurgency. If he gathers the right people, and if he listens, it seems a good bet that his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan being the good war will remain just that, rhetoric.

In any event, press reports suggest that Gates has only another week or so left to pretend to the President-elect that he thinks the ideas reflected in Obama’s rhetoric are outstanding. And, as Gates’ predecessor Rumsfeld might have put it, you have to go with the rhetoric you’ve got. Right now, the word "surge" brings nods of approval at influential dinner parties in Washington.

What does Gen. McKiernan know, anyway? Gates’ Pentagon says that McKiernan now has requested three additional brigade combat teams and additional aviation assets. And yet, he says he’s allergic to a "surge"?

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