When in “Doubt”, “Strategize”

There’s just one small thing missing from the news stories that have come pouring out about the soon-to-be-published book by former defense secretary Robert Gates. But to find the omission, start with the thing all of the stories do have: the revelation that President Obama allowed himself to feel doubt.

The descriptive language is strikingly similar across several different cultural lines, showing up in publications on the left and right, legacy newspapers and new media outlets. The Fox News version sounds like the version offered by the Huffington Post: In one, “Gates writes that Obama appeared to doubt his own strategy in Afghanistan”; in the other, “former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claims that President Barack Obama had doubts about his own strategy in the war in Afghanistan.”

Breaking the pattern only to turn up the volume on it, the Washington Post just makes the claim sound more dire: “Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan.”

So what’s missing? Only this: a description of what that policy was supposed to be. Or to put that a little differently, no one ever manages to mention what the point of the whole exercise ever was. What did Barack Obama doubt? What “strategy” did he frown at? Does the United States have a strategy in Afghanistan that no one in the government has gotten around to mentioning?

To be sure, the reports all throw a phrase or two at that point. In the Washington Post, for example, Obama appears to have doubted “a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011.” And clearly he did doubt that phased withdrawal, because now it’s 2014 and the administration is negotiating a status of forces agreement that would keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan through at least 2024. If anyone knows why, they’re not saying. Or, rather, they’re not saying it in words that have any meaning that can be reliably established and consistently maintained.

The United States seeks to “stabilize” Afghanistan by what means? Toward what end? What is the country supposed to look like when the U.S. is finished with it? If the country could become “stable” under a vicious kleptocracy, or “stable” under Taliban rule, would the alleged “strategy” of “stability” be considered successful? A tightly packed mound of dirt is stable. The eggs in my refrigerator, being packed tightly in a carton and set down on a bolted shelf, are stable. It must have been my military strategy to stabilize tomorrow’s breakfast like that.

A “surge” isn’t an intent; 30,000 extra troops isn’t a goal; stability isn’t a strategy. All are means to an end. The surge of extra troops is applied to suppress or destroy enemy forces, creating stability so that (fill in blank) can happen over the long term. It is, God help us all, supposed to mean something. We will wage war until Germany, Japan, and Italy offer their unconditional surrender, and their forces are withdrawn from every nation they have invaded and occupied in Europe and Asia.

Imagine if, instead, the United States had entered World War II with nothing more than an expressed intent to “stabilize” Asia and Europe before a “phased withdrawal.” Would the President of the United States have dared to doubt such a strategy? I sure as fuck hope so.

But Barack Obama has doubts about this substance-free word salad, this haze of half-intent. Just imagine it—whatever could be wrong with him?

The reality is that the United States government doesn’t know what it’s doing in Afghanistan, and has nothing it can achieve there that will be worth the cost. The most powerful military in the world has been at war against a force of lightly armed foot soldiers since October of 2001. We will hit the thirteenth anniversary of the war this year, and American troops will go on fighting and dying, serving the vague cross-your-fingers-and-hope “strategy” that some stability will fall out of a cabinet somewhere and land on Afghanistan. It will not. As Colonel Gian Gentile has argued, a big pile of tactics doesn’t amount to a strategy. We don’t have one.

Come to think of it, see if you can spot the glaring omission from the first paragraph of the New York Times story on Gates’ memoir:

After ordering a troop increase in Afghanistan, President Obama eventually lost faith in the strategy, his doubts fed by White House advisers who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

Leaving aside the fact of this remarkable rhetorical universe in which a “troop increase” is itself a “strategy,” the thing no one ever thinks to mention is whether or not all of those “news reports suggesting it was failing” were right or wrong. That omission offers its own answer.

The president was right to doubt.