What’s wrong with Obama not trusting the US military?

Robert Gates’s book does not seem to have added much to our understanding of the Afghan conflict, writes Alan Philps.

Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, has made headlines around the world with a blistering memoir that is sharply critical of President Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan war. The Obama White House, in his view, has shown a shocking inability to think and act strategically.

Tell-all memoirs are part of the American political fabric. They allow officials who have been bruised in bureaucratic battles to give their rivals a kicking so that history may deal with them kindly.

Mr Gates’s book Duty is extraordinary on a number of levels. His barrage is aimed at a sitting president who has three more years in office, and much of it deals with a conflict that is still at a delicate stage. While US troops are due to leave Afghanistan this year, President Hamid Karzai has still not decided whether to let some 10,000 remain to stiffen the Afghan security forces as they take over the fight against the Taliban.

Even more extraordinary is that Mr Gates had a reputation as a loyal public servant, keeping his own counsel while others rushed to brief the media. When he became president in 2009, Mr Obama kept Mr Gates on from the George W Bush administration, to beef up the military credentials of a new administration that knew nothing of war.

By doing this he knowingly created a “team of rivals” around him, in a capital where the war against the far enemy, the Taliban, was no less ferocious than the struggle between the near enemies, the White House and the Pentagon.

It can be safely said that Mr Gates’s reputation for loyalty, wisdom and confidentiality will not survive Duty. The book is not out yet, and it may turn out to be an exemplar of even-handedness imbued with strategic insight that can be read with profit by historians for decades to come. The excerpts released by the publisher’s publicity department, however, indicate the opposite.

In one passage, Mr Gates recalls his impressions from a meeting at the White House. It turns out that behind his Yoda-like exterior, Mr Gates was “seething” at the president and his advisers, who saw the world through a political, not a military, lens.

“As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand 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.”

Where to start? All presidents and prime ministers are right to be suspicious of the military. Generals over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to fighting insurgencies. In America, the uniform confers authority that a mere civilian can never achieve. As Mr Gates admits elsewhere, the military were not the submissive servants of the commander in chief. They were leaking their plans to the Washington Post in order to force Mr Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan.

As for Mr Karzai, it would have been a far more serious allegation to state that the Mr Obama was bewitched by the Afghan leader’s charm.

Mr Karzai is a difficult man to deal with but it is hard to see how it could be otherwise: the leader who fawns over the superpower that liberated his country and put him in power cannot be expected to have much credit with his own people. In the Second World War, the only leader that Winston Churchill couldn’t stand was the eternally prickly and status-conscious Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces.

The accusation that Mr Obama did not believe in his own strategy is more serious. How could he send troops to die for a cause he does not believe in? In truth, Mr Obama was elected to end the Bush-era wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having voted against the Iraq war, he could bring that swiftly to an end, but Afghanistan was more problematic.

A sober assessment would conclude that the war was unwinnable in the long-term, whatever strategy was adopted, so Mr Obama should have cut his losses. But a new president, especially a Democrat with no military spurs, could not go against the advice of the military. He had to give them one last chance.

In the end, after months of dithering, the military got what they wanted – 30,000 more troops – though with a deadline to withdraw they did not feel comfortable with. As Mr Gates concedes, the president gave the military another five years. Bizarrely, he concludes that Mr Obama made the right decisions.

So if the president was right, who cares what Mr Gates was feeling at the time? As the moral philosopher Harry G Frankfurt has pointed out, the journalistic question “How did you feel?” is the source of much of what is tawdry and meretricious in public life. The proper questions are, how could things have been done better and what assurance was there of success?

Perhaps when the book is published we might know what other strategies Mr Gates was pursuing. For the moment, we know of none.

It is clear that Mr Gates felt bitter pain at the death and disfigurement of US troops he sent to war. When addressing troops, he often seemed close to tears. His empathy for the military is to his credit. The origin of the book may be the contrast between the strong emotions he felt boiling inside him and Mr Obama’s cool and detached demeanour.

It seems he wanted Mr Obama to show more enthusiasm for the military. He praises Mr Bush who “had no second thoughts about Iraq, including our decision to invade”. No matter that this was actually the wrong decision that led to the Afghan fiasco.

Mr Gates himself was against the decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan, thinking it too uncertain. Yet the cool and calculating Obama decided it was worth the risk, and he was right.

Mr Gates’s 640-page book does not seem to have added much to our understanding of the Afghan conflict. He should have turned down the advance.

On Twitter: @aphilps