Interview: Robert Gates

The U.S. defense secretary tells Foreign Policy when he's leaving the Pentagon -- and what he hopes to leave behind.

INTERVIEW BY FRED KAPLAN | AUGUST 16, 2010

In an exclusive interview, Robert Gates, the first U.S. defense secretary to serve both a Republican and a Democratic president, tells military writer Fred Kaplan that he hopes to leave office next year, possibly as early as January, but certainly by the end of 2011.

"It would be a mistake to wait until January 2012," he says. "This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year."

Gates, according to Kaplan's profile of the secretary for Foreign Policy, has "changed the way the Pentagon does business and the military fights wars more than any defense secretary since Robert McNamara" in less than four years at the Pentagon's helm -- and he has "extraordinary influence" on President Barack Obama, despite their vastly different personal histories.

Gates also shares, for the first time, the details of his summer 2009 turnabout on Afghanistan, the war that he knows will define his legacy. An article by military historian Frederick Kagan, arguing that the U.S. military invasion was nothing like that of the Soviets and that comparisons between the two interventions are fatally flawed, changed the defense secretary's mind about the war.

But, Gates adds, if there are no concrete signs of progress with the recent U.S. troop surge, then he will recommend a change of course for Obama's year-end Afghan strategy review. "We're just not going to plunge ahead with exactly the same strategy if it's clear it's not working," Gates tells Kaplan.

The interview was conducted July 12 in Gates's office at the Pentagon, several weeks before he announced a sweeping series of cuts to key programs, including the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Excerpts:

Fred Kaplan: You may remember the last time I was here, which was late in 2007. You had one of these countdown meters. And I asked you at the time -- I said, you know, there are some people on the Hill who would like you to stay for whatever the next term is. And this line of yours has been quoted a fair amount. You said, "Well, I never say never, but the circumstances under which that would happen are inconceivable to me." "Inconceivable" is a pretty absolute word. So what happened? Why are you ... here? Why did you stay?

Robert Gates: Once there started being speculation around that time that I might be asked to stay no matter who was elected, I confess that I started what ended up being eight- or nine-months-long covert action. And it was to try and build a wall of clarity that I did not want to stay high enough that nobody would ever ask me.

FK: (Laughs.) Well, "inconceivable" goes quite a ways up there.

RG: And I, you know, I was very consistent for a long period there in saying that, because I really didn't want to be asked, knowing that if I were asked, I would say, "Yes." For the same reason I never hesitated -- you know, I wrestled with the [director of national intelligence] job a couple of weeks back in January of 2005. The instant [National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley called me about taking this job, I said, "Yes." I just -- in the middle of two wars, kids out there getting hurt and dying, there was no way that I was going to say, "No."

And I felt the same way going into 2008 -- that if somebody asked, I worried a lot about the baton getting dropped in the changeover between administrations. And so I knew if the president, whoever was elected president, asked me to stay that I would say, "Yes." Now, you know, the timing was always sort of vague in my mind: six months, a year, just to provide a smooth transition and so on -- [it] ended up being longer than that.

Haraz N. Ghanbari-Pool/Getty Images

 

MARTY MARTEL

5:52 AM ET

August 16, 2010

Gates responsible for Afghan mess

The biggest and the worst legacy that Secretary of Defense Gates will leave behind will be the legacy of Afghan mess that he engineered with other Bush officials by mollycoddling Pakistan at the expense of Afghanistan.
Of all the people in administrations of Bush and Obama, Gates knew that Taliban’s Pakistani connections are fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/10, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/10 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/10 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

Yet Gates has continued to justify Pakistani government’s (Pakistani Army as well as civilian government) terrorist connections by always evading to answer most fundamental question - why didn’t he order drone attacks on Mullah Omar’s QST in Baluchistan?

General McChrystal had warned about Pakistan’s sheltering of Taliban terrorists in his August 2009 report to Obama: Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) based in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, is the No. 1 threat to US/NATO mission in Afghanistan. At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Mohammed Omar (Afghan Taliban Chief) announces his guidance and intent for the coming year‘.

All American officers in southern Afghanistan know that they can not prevail in the ongoing military operations, unless Taliban strongholds across the Durand Line in North Waziristan and Baluchistan are neutralized. Adm Mullen and Gen Patraeus evidently do not want to acknowledge that hard options have to be considered if their soldiers are not to die at the hands of radicals, armed and trained across the Durand Line.

As Matt Waldman reported, “support for the Afghan Taliban is ‘official Pakistani ISI policy’ and is backed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s civilian administration. Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign in Afghanistan.”

The ISI is said to compensate families of suicide bombers to the tune of 200,000 Pakistani rupees, claims the report. Thus US aid to bankrupt Pakistan finances the death of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. So in a way, US is financing the death of its own troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistani government issued its usual denials just as it had denied umpteen times the existence of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s ‘Quetta Shura Taliban (QST)’ in the provincial capital Quetta of Baluchistan. But General Stanley McChrystal called QST as the biggest threat to US Afghan mission in his report to President Obama in August, 2009.

Pakistan has denied presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil umpteen times and just recently Adm Mike Mullen repeated in Islamabad that Osama is hiding in a very secure place in Pakistan.

But US can not even use its drones to destroy QST that is causing daily deaths of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan since 2002! That shows Obama’s continuance of Bush’s mollycoddling of Pakistan.

As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/10 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

With the trio of Pakistan apologists - Gates, Mullen and Petraeus - guiding US Afghan policy, no wonder US Afghan mission is headed for failure.

 

HAMMAL90

6:49 PM ET

August 16, 2010

100 percent Right

the pakistan state policy is to support taliban because pakistan is not going to kill their assets ..................i am a baloch ,and a member of on going struggle ,the pakistani state also using the taliban against baloch cause ,pakistan is collecting fund against taliban but using the military aid against baloch freedom fighters in balochistan

Secular Independent balochistan is the solution of Afghanistan and this region

 

KINGK

2:34 PM ET

August 16, 2010

Why didn't you discuss

Two issues I am suprised you did not cover.
First, why didn't you question him on the strategy for preventing Iran from building nukes and what the time table is, if any, for the use of military intervention? How long/far is Obama willing to let them go before taking military action and what form of military action is anticipated?

Second, why didn't you ask him if he intends to run for office and, if so, whether or not he would run on a ticket with Hillary Clinton (presumably with her as Pres and him as VP candidates, but not necessarily it could be vise versa). Does the timing of his intended departure have anything to do with his political aspirations?