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With the release of excerpts of former Secretary Robert Gates’ memoirs, reviewers are abuzz about Mr. Gates’ views of President Obama’s approach to Afghanistan. While Gates agreed with President Obama’s decision to “surge” troops into Afghanistan, he assessed that the president “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 described President Obama as “skeptical if not outright convinced [the strategy] would fail.” Gates’ disapproval is directed at President Obama’s lack of faith in the mission, rather than problems with the mission itself.
Perhaps this public accusation will, counterintuitively, give President Obama some room to reveal his own doubts about the campaign in Afghanistan, thus far closely held, and reorient Washington’s assumptions as decision-makers take a hard look at the shape of the post-2014 mission.
As I explained in my article last week, a handy rule of strategy-making is to first list the assumptions that undergird the strategy’s logic and to identify any risks that might interfere with those assumptions. And in that same article, I criticized the optimistic assumptions of a post-2014 strategy document signed by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander, General Joseph Dunford, and our man in Kabul, Ambassador James Cunningham. The document offered wishful thinking on the compatibility of U.S. and Afghan views of conflict, and on the possibility of free and uncorrupt national elections.
As an alternative, I offer the following goals and assumptions, which are both more realistic and more likely to serve our national interests than the ones that continue to lead us astray in Afghanistan and seem likely to do so even beyond 2014.
National Goals
Assumptions and Risks
Unless Washington decides to recalibrate its goals and assumptions in light of the experiences of the last few years, the United States should get used to disappointment.
Ryan Evans is the assistant director of the Center for the National Interest. He is the editor-in-chief of War on the Rocks.
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