Word: afghanistanism
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...apparatchik, a gifted infighter and faithful servant? In this Administration, Gates is the key broker on the question that haunts every U.S. President: how and when to wield military force. But in the last years of a long public career, that makes him the face of a war in Afghanistan that is going badly and getting worse. "Gates has too much experience in D.C. not to get out when he's on top," says an old friend and admirer. But has he waited too long this time? (See photos of Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize...
...Whatever Gates chooses to take a position on, Gates is the single most influential guy," says Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a skeptic of the Administration's strategy in Afghanistan. Gelb points out that in early December, days after President Obama's West Point speech announcing his decision to send 30,000 additional troops (on top of the 32,000 deployed in 2009) to the war zone and then begin bringing them home in July 2011, Gates went on the Sunday talk shows to say the withdrawal would depend on conditions...
...achieved "two victories in one year," in the words of an in-house fan. In December he won passage of a watershed Pentagon budget that shifted spending from theoretical, conventional wars to the unconventional ones the military is actually fighting now. He also helped Obama execute a surge in Afghanistan, a plan Obama had campaigned on in 2008 but which has since become known as the "Gates option." "Sixty-two thousand forces committed in one year of a liberal Democratic President's first term? That's pretty remarkable," says a senior Defense official...
...advising the White House on intelligence. "He knows just when to give his advice, to whom to give it, and he's extremely good at forming alliances with other people in the government to advance his point of view." (See a slideshow of the war in Afghanistan up close...
With nowhere to go, Gates was given an impromptu tour at the airport by his former military adviser General David Rodriguez, now No. 2 to General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. He ushered Gates through a hangar outfitted as NATO's new cyber-command-and-control center. One of his staff whispered, "An enormous well-oiled machine for eatin' bad guys." In another hangar, Gates got a glimpse of the fledgling Afghan air force and stepped into the cockpit of an old Russian Mi-17 attack helicopter. "Don't you love the irony of Gates...