Gates's Legacy

FP asked five experts to weigh in on what the U.S. defense secretary leaves behind.

AUGUST 17, 2010

In his profile of Robert Gates, Fred Kaplan argues that the Pentagon leader has, in less than four years, "changed the way the Pentagon does business and the military fights wars more than any defense secretary since Robert McNamara."

Gates told Kaplan in their exclusive interview that he hopes to leave office sometime next year, saying, "It would be a mistake to wait until January 2012" to retire. Assuming he does leave, what legacy will Gates leave behind? FP turned to five prominent defense experts for answers.

 

Gary Hart:

War is not the time to rock the Pentagon boat, most would argue, and that would be doubly true of two simultaneous wars. Reformers, however, would argue that the chaos of war is exactly when major military changes should be made.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, identified primarily with establishment thinking and Republican administrations, has proved to be a remarkable transformer, or at least one who sets a course for transformation. Perhaps least noticed, but even more important than cancellation of weapons systems, was the elevation of combat brigade colonels to brigadier status. The watchword of military reformers is: Weapons don't win wars; people win wars.

History will confirm that Secretary Gates has launched two important transformations, both of which will take years if not decades to complete. The first is the winding down of the giant Cold War weapons systems. The second is the rapid promotion of combat officers now experienced in the warfare of the future -- irregular, unconventional conflict. As to the former, the F-22 and the C-17 are the first to go. But future conflict will require more, smaller carriers and littoral ships, smaller combat units, consolidation of the Special Forces, unmanned aircraft, and lighter, quicker, more lethal force structures and weapons systems.

Even more important, though, is the rapid advancement of mid-level ground combat officers experienced in the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts who have pioneered in the transition away from traditional nation-state conflicts with great armies meeting in the field to the nontraditional, indigenous counterinsurgency warfare that will continue to characterize 21st century conflict as far into the future as we can see.

Gary Hart, a former U.S. senator, is scholar in residence and Wirth Chair professor at the University of Colorado.

Haraz N. Ghanbari-Pool/Getty Images

 

MARTY MARTEL

2:02 PM ET

August 19, 2010

Gates' legacy is continuing 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.