On Obama: The Virtue of Doubt

By David K. Shipler

            President Obama deserves praise, not criticism, for the views on Afghanistan attributed to him in former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s memoir. In the book’s most quoted lines, Gates writes of a meeting in March 2011, “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.”

Gates doesn’t mean this as a compliment, but if it’s accurate, then two cheers for Obama. It’s just too bad his actions didn’t coincide with his doubts—a familiar pattern.

Let’s take Gates’s observations one at a time:

Obama was obviously right to distrust his commander, David Petraeus, who was felled the following year as CIA director by an extra-marital affair, and whose counterinsurgency brilliance was always overstated. Petraeus was a charming man of poor judgment.

Obama was justified about Karzai, who has proved to be a puppet without strings—a self-absorbed enabler of corruption who cannot govern his country or practice sensible diplomacy with his chief benefactor.

Obama was correct in not believing in “his own strategy” of beefing up troops in Afghanistan, articulated during his 2008 campaign.
The “strategy” originated as a political attack on the Bush preoccupation with Iraq and never developed into a credible way of securing the military victory in Afghanistan. Bob Woodward in Obama’s Wars stenographically describes meetings in which the top brass, plus Gates, did in fact “game” Obama by repeatedly coming back with proposals that thinly disguised their stealthy inclusion of more troops than Obama had told them he wanted. Indeed, a picture emerges of a president hemmed into such narrow parameters by his military and intelligence establishments that the flawed policy he adopted—perhaps reluctantly—lacked any hint of inventiveness. (Gates has said in interviews that he thought Obama believed in the strategy when he approved it in 2009 and only gradually came to doubt it.)

That Obama didn’t consider the war his own is neither shocking nor unreasonable, since it wasn’t his own. He didn’t start it, didn’t like the way it had gone, and was trying to end it on acceptable terms.

“For him, it’s all about getting out,” Gates chastises. Well, let’s raise a glass to Obama for that. Gates himself wanted to get out—get out of his job—as he writes: “Even thinking about the troops, I would lose my composure with increasing frequency. I realized I was beginning to regard protecting them--avoiding their sacrifice—as my highest priority. And I knew that this loss of objectivity meant it was time to leave.”

Time to leave, by which he means time for Robert Gates to leave—and to leave behind tens of thousands of troops who were being bloodied for no good result. For if the initial invasion to oust the Taliban from power was justified, the long aftermath has been fruitless.

Afghanistan will go its own way when we go ours, and that way is likely to be, yet again, a patchwork of fiefdoms and tribal loyalties laced through with “Islamist” Taliban-type fundamentalism. It’s an old lesson, but it has to be relearned repeatedly: Outside powers have never been able to remake Afghanistan, not Genghis Khan, not Britain, not the Soviet Union, not the United States. If Obama sees that, give him credit. 

I keep remembering a week I spent in Afghanistan in 1988 as Soviet troops were preparing to leave, and sensing the clock ticking down on the government of President Najibullah, who on the tenth anniversary of the pro-Soviet “revolution,” staged an ostentatious parade of military equipment, troops, and flag-waving citizens akin to the holiday displays in Red Square. It seemed like a final spasm of celebration, although Najibullah kept his seat until 1992, when he took refuge in the U.N. compound until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. They seized him, beat him, shot him, and hung his body in the street.

On the eve of their departure, the Soviet soldiers I spoke with were candid and conflicted. “This war is evil,” Private Yuri Moshnikov told me, a week before he was scheduled to leave. “No one needs this war. Afghanistan doesn’t need it. We don’t need it.” Yet he also thought “the situation in Afghanistan would have been worse” without Soviet intervention.

As reflective American troops might struggle today to find nuanced answers, so did a Soviet sergeant, Aleksei Sayenko. “Of course it was good to help them,” he said, “but for how long I’m not competent to say. It’s a very difficult question for me. If we were some help, it wasn’t a mistake.”

The soldiers should write the epitaphs for the wars.