Gates believes Obama made the right decision on the Afghanistan drawdown, and still believes America’s goals there are “within reach.”
He first admits that while “President Bush always detested the notion,” the war in Afghanistan was, “I believe, significantly compounded by the invasion of Iraq.” That’s because “resources and senior-level attention were [Gates’ italics] diverted from Afghanistan.”
There was another problem, too: For years, US goals in Afghanistan “were embarrassingly ambitious and historically naive compared with the meager human and financial resources committed to the task,” Gates argues.
These “embarrassingly ambitious” goals included “a properly-sized, competent Afghan national army and police, [and] a working democracy with at least a minimally effective and less corrupt central government.”
But prior to 2009, “the meager human and financial resources committed to the task” made these goals nearly impossible to accomplish, Gates writes.
“That’s why I continue to believe that the troop increase that Obama boldly approved in late 2009 was the right decision – providing sufficient forces to break the stalemate on the ground, rooting the Taliban out of their strongholds while training a much larger and more capable Afghan army.”
In order to do this, Gates notes, Obama “overruled the policy and domestic political concerns of his vice president and virtually all the senior White House staff.”
