Word: afghanistans
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After his most recent trip to Islamabad, I asked Gates how he could consider Pakistani officials who support Haqqani's network as allies. "It's frustrating," he said, then went quiet. I suggested that his silence said a lot. (See pictures of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan...
...pictures of U.S. marines in Afghanistan...
...symbolism of Gates employing the very machines left behind by the Soviets is more unsettling than ironic. Before finally throwing his support behind McChrystal's push for a troop surge late last year, Gates repeatedly warned that even the Soviets could not win with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed...
Lately Gates has been pressing Pakistani generals to go after the jihadis they helped create - men like Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose son now wields the deadliest force in North Waziristan, from which he launches attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. To Afghan and Pakistani audiences, Gates likes to reiterate that the U.S. made a big mistake when it abandoned the region after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. This time is different, he says. But the Pakistanis are not convinced. They still count the Taliban as a bulwark against Indian influence in Afghanistan and an ally in the civil war that...
Gates is prone to bracingly honest language that is not necessarily reassuring from a man who has the weight of Obama's Afghanistan policy on his shoulders. But that may be because Gates has something of the writer's sensibility about him. He has the look of a man both in the moment and at a slight angle, peering in, through dark glasses, upon the human comedy. In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, he wrote, "I was, during the remarkable events from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, there in the shadows, the proverbial fly on the wall...