Secretary Gates’ View from the Afghanistan Front

Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group

In a candid interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Defense Secretary Gates offers an upbeat view of the war in Afghanistan that suggests he is still wearing Pentagon-issue rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any hard evidence that would allow the American public to double-check his prescription.

However, Secretary Gates does put forward an argument on presumed progress in Afghanistan that should leave Americans rubbing their eyes.

First, Gates believes there may be a “payoff” when the July 2011 deadline passes without any substantial drawdown of US troops. The idea, apparently, is that the Taliban will have the rug pulled out from under them when our troops aren’t gone by August. As Secretary Gates puts it:

“The Taliban were messaging that we were leaving in July of ‘11. It seemed to me that if we were willing to be patient we could do some judo on them. Because if the Taliban were all persuaded we were going to be gone by the end of July ‘11, they were going to be in for a really big surprise in August, September, October, November and so on, because we are still going to have a huge number of forces there.”

It seems, however, that if anyone was thrown by that judo-move it was Vice President Biden, our sometimes-strategic partner Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the American public (though not necessarily in that order). The Taliban, for their part, appear well-aware of the Lisbon plan to keep NATO combat troops in Afghanistan until 2014, have increased their ranks to historic levels despite last year’s “surge” of US troops, and are preparing for a major offensive this Spring.

Secretary Gates goes on to use a particularly confusing metric to show improvement in our strategy and application of resources in Afghanistan: US combat deaths.

“I would argue that we have only begun to get both the strategy and the resources in place to really fight this war in the last 18 months or so. When I took this job on December 18th, 2006, between 2001 and that date, we lost 194 kids. We’ve now lost 1,145. So in terms of a real war, this war has been going on not ten years.”

Well, Gates is correct in one respect: the war has gotten more “real”. Coalition casualties, civilian deaths, cost to US taxpayers, and Afghan government corruption have all increased over the past year. UN representatives in Afghanistan are now going on the record saying that the security situation has deteriorated to its lowest point since 2001.

Secretary Gates also told Mr. Hayes that the significant progress being made isn’t necessarily obvious to those following developments from the US, saying, “I believe the closer you are to the front, the better it looks.”

But Americans have a clearer view of these developments than Gates assumes. A USA Today/Gallup poll taken in January found that 72% of Americans favor Congressional action this year to speed up the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. These folks don’t need to be on the ground in Helmand or Kandahar to see that a strategy dependent on military escalation is a prescription for failure. They have a close-up view of the other frontlines: the fiscal frontlines.

A majority of Americans from across the political spectrum see these frontlines running straight and unbroken from the billions spent on the battlefields of Afghanistan to the unemployment lines in their hometowns, to the picket lines in front of their statehouses. When will Secretary Gates and the Obama administration get the picture?

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