"The logical core of Matthew Hoh's resignation letter": a counterpoint to Fallows

James Fallows has a post titled "The logical core of Matthew Hoh's resignation letter." Hoh is the former army captain and Iraq War veteran who just resigned in protest a position of responsibility in Afghanistan, warning that he "fail[s] to see the value or worth" of military support of the Afghan government.

Hoh's resignation is an act of courage and principle, and he sounds some resonant alarms. When I read his letter, I couldn't help but wonder what would have been the impact if Colin Powell had picked a propitious moment to do something similar.

However, I must disagree with Fallows. I do not think that the passage he identifies is the core of Hoh's argument, nor is it entirely logical. Here it is:

"I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. [My (Fallows') emphasis.] Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights that the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries."

For starters, the claim that continuing U.S. efforts to fight the Taliban and prop up the Afghan government "would require us" to invade and occupy Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. is a red herring (leave Pakistan aside for a moment). The unspoken assumption is that terrorist threats from all lawless states are equal, and/or that al Qaeda could host itself equally effectively from Somalia, Sudan or Yemen, in each of which it has operated. Steve Coll has, I think, countered this assumption effectively:

It is simply not true that all potential al Qaeda sanctuaries are of the same importance, now or potentially. Bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have a 30-year, unique history of trust and collaboration with the Pashtun Islamist networks located in North Waziristan, Bajaur, and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. It is not surprising, given this distinctive history, that al Qaeda's presumed protectors -- perhaps the Haqqani network, which provided the territory in which al Qaeda constructed its first training camps in the summer of 1988 -- have never betrayed their Arab guests.

These networks have fought alongside al Qaeda since the mid-1980s and have raised vast sums of money in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states through their connections. They possess infrastructure -- religious institutions, trucking firms, criminal networks, preaching networks, housing networks -- from Kandahar and Khost Province, and from Quetta to Karachi's exurban Pashtun neighborhoods, that is either impervious to penetration by the Pakistani state or has coopted those in the Pakistani security services who might prove disruptive. It is mistaken to assume that Bin Laden, Zawahiri, or other Arab leaders would enjoy similar sanctuary anywhere else. In Somalia they would almost certainly be betrayed for money; in Yemen, they would be much more susceptible to detection by the country's police network. The United States should welcome the migration of al Qaeda's leadership to such countries.

Accepting Coll's argument -- and I'm sure that there are informed parties to the debate who don't -- narrows the main counterterrorism focus to Aghanistan and Pakistan. But it does not follow that the logic of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan suggests tat the U.S. should "invade and occupy" Pakistan, as Hoh claims. Pakistan is a different country, and requires a different approach. As Rory Stewart points out, Pakistan is a more dangerous habitat for al Qaeda precisely because it's a stronger state than Afghanistan, and at least a nominal ally, and we don't have license or capacity to "invade and occupy" it (thank God).

The fact that a strategy we're currently engaged in in Afghanistan won't work in Pakistan and can't be tried there doesn't suggest either that it can't work in Afghanistan or that some other strategy might not work in Pakistan. Coll sees the key to happier outcomes for the region, and more effective counterterrorism, to be economic development in Pakistan on a par with, say, India's.* Pakistan can't get there without going a long way toward peace with India -- a goal that the U.S. can only help further with a very light touch, if at all -- as Hillary's highly contentious recent visit indicates.

There is no question that designing and implementing a U.S. strategy that would help establish modicum of peace and prosperity in Afghanistan and Pakistan is devilishly complex and difficult. But that doesn't mean that the U.S. can abjure trying -- whatever level of military engagement in Afghanistan might help further that end. Nor does it mean that adding troops in Afghanistan entails "invading and occupying" Pakistan, let alone Somalia etc.

In my view the "logical core of Hoh's letter" -- and its strongest challenge to U.S. policy -- lies elsewhere. It's in his claim that US military engagement stimulates the insurgency -- the more U.S. engagement, the more the more stimulus, and the stronger the Taliban. This argument has several parts: 1) Pashtun identity requires resisting control by "urban, secular, educated and modern Afghanistan"; 2) foreign troops joined to a government representing that internal enemy further stimulate resistance; 3) the government to which the U.S. has yoked itself is hopelessly corrupt and predatory; and 4) the U.S. presence in Afghanistan destabilizes Pakistan.

That is a fearsome indictment -- especially since few would dispute that the dynamic Hoh outlines has been at work in recent years. McChrystal himself acknowledges these realities. From McChrystal's 8/30 assessment:

GiRoA [the Afghan government] and ISAF [the international force led by the US] have both failed to focus on this objective [understanding the choices the Afghan people make between government and insurgents]. The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government....A foreign army alone cannot beat an insurgency; the insurgency in Afghanistan requires an Afghan solution...All ethnicities, particularly the Pashtuns, have traditionally sought a degree of independence from the central government.

Where McChrystal differs from Hoh is in his conviction that the US military can change the dynamic by changing its own practice, strategy, and culture. That's where the road forks. He asserts that "the popular myth that Afghans do not want governance is overplayed," and that the U.S. military can win allegiance by making "protecting the population" its primary goal; by changing its "operating culture" to one "that puts the Afghan people first"; and by "building personal relationship with its Afghan partners and the protected population."

That's an oddly utopian program for a ferociously tough commander. Cheney would have had a field day with McChrystal's language four or five years ago, e.g., "All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan." This from a man whose chief responsibility in Iraq was running assassination squads against al Qaeda. If he can sell this strategy, it's through a kind of Nixon to China authority.

We're in unchartered territory. McChrystal is calling for a counterinsurgency effort more nuanced, more sensitive, more self-sacrificing and more multifaceted than any in history. He and Petraeus et al are pivoting from a remarkable, if partial and perhaps even temporary, military success in Iraq. But that precedent is no more complete an analogy than those of Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan.

*India has its own dangerous insurgencies to cope with, but these days the US doesn't get so exercised about Maoists. That's a strange irony of history. I sometimes wonder, while we're so preoccupied with Islamic jihad, what new malign ideology will burst out of nowhere to exploit the horrific tools of terror developed over the last 20 years, and seek to develop worse. UPDATE 11/1: today's Times has a front page story about India's Maoist insurgency -- and a pending 70,000-troop counterinsurgency effort.

Team Powell and "the Gestapo"

From Vanity Fair's massive and often astonishing, if one-sided, Oral History of the Bush White House: contemplate this double-edge assessment of Colin Powell's legacy by Lawrence Wilkerson, first Powell's top aide and later his chief of staff:

I’m not sure even to this day that he’s willing to admit to himself that he was rolled to the extent that he was. And he’s got plenty of defense to marshal because, as I told [former defense secretary] Bill Perry one time when Bill asked me to defend my boss—I said, Well, let me tell you, you wouldn’t have wanted to have seen the first Bush administration without Colin Powell. I wrote Powell a memo about six months before we were leaving, and I said, This is your legacy, Mr. Secretary: damage control. He didn’t like it much. In fact, he kind of handed it back to me and told me I could put it in the burn basket.

But I knew he understood what I was saying. You saved the China relationship. You saved the transatlantic relationship and each component thereof—France, Germany. I mean, he held Joschka Fischer’s hand under the table on occasions when Joschka would say something like, You know, your president called my boss a fucking asshole. His task became essentially cleaning the dogshit off the carpet in the Oval Office. And he did that rather well. But it became all-consuming.

I think the clearest indication I got that Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.

The Gestapo? This is not Daily Kos. This is Daily Colin -- or team Colin, anyway, after four years of working in this Administration. And yet he stayed on - they all stayed on. They countenanced the founding of Guantanamo, the torture memos, the interrogation techniques, the shift of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, the cooked intelligence. Imagine the impact if Colin Powell had resigned in protest rather than make that speech before the U.N. And yet, and yet... as Wilkerson says, imagine the Cheney-Rumsfeld White House without Powell. Would it have been the Gestapo for real?

On the same page: Gates, Mullen, Powell, Obama

One thread that can be teased out of the runup and reaction to the Petraeus-Crocker Senate briefing on Iraq is the strategic congruence between Obama and the country's best military minds - e.g., Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, and former Secretary of State/Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell. Beyond the implicit consensus that current troop levels in Iraq are unsustainable, all three have also joined Obama in stressing the need to concentrate more force on the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Gates, moreover, notwithstanding his recent protestations to be on the same page as Bush and Petraeus with regard to troop levels, seems basically on the same page as Obama when it comes to defining realistic goals for 'success' in Iraq -- goals that will enable the inevitable drawdown.

Obama is far from unique in arguing that Iraq is a 'huge strategic blunder' that has diverted the U.S. from neutralizing al Qaeda and securing peace in Afghanistan. But he has been more clear and comprehensive than other national figures in detailing the consequences of our enmeshment in Iraq and the need to refocus on Afghanistan, In his landmark speech laying out his foreign policy vision in Fayetteville, NC on March 19, after a series of hammer blows detailing the malign consequences of the Iraq War, he made the core point:

The central front in the war against terror is not Iraq, and it never was. What more could America's enemies ask for than an endless war where they recruit new followers and try out new tactics on a battlefield so far from their base of operations? That is why my presidency will shift our focus. Rather than fight a war that does not need to be fought, we need to start fighting the battles that need to be won on the central front of the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is the area where the 9/11 attacks were planned. This is where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants still hide. This is where extremism poses its greatest threat. Yet in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, we have pursued flawed strategies that are too distant from the needs of the people, and too timid in pursuit of our common enemies....

It is not too late to prevail in Afghanistan. But we cannot prevail until we reduce our commitment in Iraq, which will allow us to do what I called for last August – providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our efforts in Afghanistan.

Now compare Gates, Mullen and Powell on the need to concentrate more force in Afghanistan and at the same time relieve overall strain on the military.

All three, it must be said first, are wary of precipitous troop withdrawals in Iraq and probably concerned that both Democratic candidates have committed themselves too rigidly to a swift drawdown. But they support the goal; they recognize the greater core strategic importance of success in Afghanistan; and they are more cognizant than anyone of the unsustainable strain on the military caused by the continued huge troop presence in Iraq.

Gates has for the most part, with a few carefully calibrated exceptions, stayed on the same page with the Administration with regard to troop levels in Iraq. But he has also highlighted in public comments the long-term damage to the military of maintaining 100,000+ troops there year after year. At the same time, he has been jawboning NATO allies for months to get them to pony up more troops in Afghanistan. In that effort, he's been at pains to differentiate the Europeans' clear and present interest in success in Afghanistan from their lack of support for the U.S. adventure in Iraq. In the process, he implicitly acknowledged that their rejection of U.S. leadership in Iraq was justified.

Following Petraeus' testimony this week, Gates, at a Defense Dept. news briefing on Friday (April 11), was asked whether his earlier statements projecting troop withdrawals had committed the next President to drawing down troops in Iraq in 2009. His response:

Well, that was clearly an issue that came up before Bucharest, when we were talking about this. And it seems to me -- the two things led to my recommendation along those lines, to make that kind of commitment in principle -- the president was very careful not to say how many troops or when in 2009 they would be forthcoming -- but I made it on two grounds: First, I am confident that we will have a lower number of troops in 2009. Again, I'm not saying when in 2009, but I believe we will have a lower number of troops in Iraq in 2009.

That is: the armed forces simply can't sustain current troop levels any longer. Then this - echoing his earlier comments addressed to the Europeans:

Second, unlike Iraq, there truly is, I think, very broad bipartisan support for being successful in Afghanistan. We were attacked out of Afghanistan. People recognize the consequences of not being successful. And I believe very strongly that whoever is elected president is going to want to be successful in Afghanistan. And just as the French made an additional commitment, it seemed to me, in principle, that it would be important for the president to signal that the United States was going to stay in the fight in Afghanistan as well and do more, assuming we could.

Mullen also suggested the need for a shift in military asset allocation:

Well, I think the available forces that we have in Iraq are the ones that offer -- should reductions continue -- potential to put forces in Afghanistan and also to build dwell time back here for our ground forces. And so there's risk associated very specifically with that. And that's probably in the three pieces that we try to pay a lot of attention to -- our force levels in Iraq, our requirements in Afghanistan which are unmet, as well as balancing the health of the force -- that if we stay at these levels for a significant period of time, which we can do -- I mean, we have the forces to do that, but we continue to press our forces at the levels we have and we would be unable to fill the requirements that we've got in Afghanistan.

Colin Powell, talking to ABC News, April 9, similarly stressed the unsustainable strain on the military and the need for more troops in Afghanistan:

Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the first Gulf War, expressed concern over the burden an extended stay in Iraq would put on the troops and the country's military forces.
"It's going to be far more than the 100,000 that Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates was hoping for. It's going to be like 130,000 or 140,000. That is an extremely difficult burden for the United States Army, the United States Marine Corps, to keep up," Powell told "Good Morning America."
Powell also expressed reservations about the two-front combat in which the United States finds itself: surging in Iraq while trying to maintain control in Afghanistan.
"We have responsibilities in Afghanistan. And in some ways, Afghanistan is more difficult than Iraq. You have the tribal problems. You had drug lords running around ... and al Qaeda and the Taliban are making a resurgence," Powell said.
[snip]
I'll tell you what they're all going to face -- whichever one of them becomes president on Jan. 21 of 2009 -- they will face a military force, a United States military force, that cannot sustain, continue to sustain, 140,000 people deployed in Iraq, and the 20 (to) 25,000 people we have deployed in Afghanistan, and our other deployments," Powell said.

Something's got to give. And what's got to give are troop levels in Iraq. That, as Obama said at the April 8 Petraeus-Crocker hearing, is a matter of consensus. But how to phase a withdrawal that does not trigger a descent to civil war and anarchy? The first step is to define an acceptable outcome that will not require decades of occupation. Here's where Obama added something new, pushing Crocker toward his own definition of an endgame:

OBAMA: And so my final -- and I'll even pose this as a question and I won't -- you don't necessarily have to answer it -- maybe it's a rhetorical question -- if we were able to have the status quo in Iraq right now without U.S. troops, would that be a sufficient definition of success?
It's obviously not perfect. There's still violence, there's still some traces of Al Qaida, Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo, and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success? Would that meet our criteria, or would that not be good enough and we'd have to devote even more resources to it?
CROCKER: Senator, I can't imagine the current status quo being sustainable with that kind of precipitous drawdown.
BIDEN: That wasn't the question.
OBAMA: No, no, that wasn't the question. I'm not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I'm trying to get to an endpoint. That's what all of us have been trying to get to.
And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi- sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.
If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven't been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.
CROCKER: And that's because, Senator, is a -- I mean, I don't like to sound like a broken record, but this is hard and this is complicated.
I think that when Iraq gets to the point that it can carry forward its further development without a major commitment of U.S. forces, with still a lot of problems out there but where they and we would have a fair certitude that, again, they can drive it forward themselves without significant danger of having the whole thing slip away from them again, then, clearly, our profile, our presence diminishes markedly.
But that's not where we are now.

OBAMA: Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chairman.

Compare Gates in the April 11 news conference:

It was my hope 16 months ago that I could help forge a bipartisan path forward in our Iraq policy that would sustain a steadily lower, but still adequate and necessary, level of commitment for the years needed to yield an Iraq that is an ally against extremists and can govern and defend itself,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
I continue to harbor this hope for a bipartisan path and will continue to work for it.

Speaking of bipartisan paths, Andrew Sullivan has voiced the hope that if Obama is elected, Gates would stay on. That seems highly unlikely, based on what Gates has said in published interviews. But it would be great for the country if Obama asked him and persuaded him.

Back from the Shadows: Can Gates Steer the Surge?

Fred Kaplan's Times Magazine profile of Robert Gates includes a fascinating moment in which Gates, that veteran of Cold War consensus coursing, takes satisfaction from working his middle course magic on the Democratic presidential candidates:

At last summer's debate on Iraq, Cheney urged the president to resist the Democrats' call for troop withdrawals and to prolong the surge indefinitely. But the Join Chiefs argued that they didn't have the troops to sustain the surge beyond the summer of 2008. Gates made a more political point: that if there were no prospects for gradual but substantial troop withdrawals, popular support for the war would evaporate, and the next president would probably pull out all the troops as quickly as possible, resulting in Iraq's potential collapse. On the plane from Fort Hood, Gates spelled out his position. "We need bipartisan support for a prolonged presence in Iraq," he said. "But to do that, we need to demonstrate that we're drawing down to lower levels." He recalled watching one of the early Democratic presidential debates. The moderator asked the candidates if they would promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, the end of the first term. The three candidates with the highest poll ratings all declined to make that pledge. Gates remembered saying to himself, 'My work here is done."

That satisfaction is sure to drive proponents of a quick withdrawal bats. But those appalled by McCain's talk of a 100-year presence and by Bush's attempt to lock in the infrastructure of a long-term occupation should look closely at Gates' more qualified and nuanced support for the surge, and the long experience that brought him to it. Points to consider:

1) If Gates seeks to steer a Democratic Congress and likely future Democratic President away from a quick troop withdrawal, he also seeks to channel Democratic pressure to help force political action on the Iraqis. Very early in his tenure, when Bush partisans were crying treason at Democrats pushing for a quick withdrawal, Gates said that Congressional debate on war financing put useful pressure on the Iraqi government.

2) Gates is a master at deploying countervailing pressures in this manner. In Afghanistan, he is working on both the Europeans and the Pakistanis to win more effective support for war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Frustrated by the unwillingness of NATO countries including Germany to place troops at risk, Gates has been uncharacteristically confrontational, charging that some countries are not willing to fight and die, and he is now is appealing directly to the European public not to lump the war in Afghanistan together with the war in Iraq as an American misadventure, but rather to recognize that conditions in Afghanistan directly affect their security. "'I think they combine the two,'" he said, according the AP(2/8). "'Many of them I think have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan and don't understand the very different — for them — very different kind of threat' posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as opposed to the militant group in Iraq that goes by the same name and is thought to be led by foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaida." There is a remarkable implicit admission here that Europeans are justified in considering Iraq an American debacle but that they should differentiate and recognize Afghanistan as a core NATO mission. When Gates is confrontational, the pressure is highly calculated and tempered by recognition of opposing perspectives.

On the other side of the Afghan border, January 25, the FT reported Gates saying that the U.S. would consider joint military operations with the Pakistanis inside Pakistan if asked - notwithstanding that we haven't been asked. “We remain ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so.”

Gates does not want to lose in Iraq -- to see it revert to full-scale civil war. But his primary focus is al Qaeda. So he understands the imperative to reduce our presence in Iraq as quickly as possible. The future viability of the military also requires a drawdown. Kaplan reports that Gates told a Texas Chamber of Commerce meeting, "The people who encourage young people to go into the military are less positive than they used to be...Until we reach the point where joining the Army doesn't mean an automatic assignment to Iraq, we'll have a challenge."

3) Gates has also played point-counterpoint with regard Iran. According to Kaplan, Gates was a major force in getting the NIE on Iran released. But having used that bludgeon to avert the catastrophe of a preemptive strike on Iran, he is now tacking back quite sensibly and "has since publicly stressed the less assuring aspects of the estimate -- that Iran is still enriching uranium and may resume the weapons program at any time" (see Gates Validates, 12/5/07 ).

4) Triangulation, Gates style, is rooted in his experience in five prior administrations, particularly his role as Deputy National Security Advisor under Brent Scowcroft in George W. Bush's Administration. Gates is not particularly modest in portraying Scowcroft and himself as masters of orchestrating debate between national security principals, honest brokers effectively controlling presidential access, and forgers of administration consensus. While Gates emphasizes trust and open debate, Scowcroft, in Kaplan's article, characterizes his own role and Gates' as one of, shall we say, steerage: "Before his meetings, Bob would come in and ask, 'How do we want this meeting to end up?' He and I would figure out what we wanted. And sure enough, it would end up exactly that way. And everybody loved him. They all came out of the meeting thinking that they'd come up with the solution." (One of the happy campers in the N.S.C. Deputies Committee that Gates chaired was a certain Paul Wolfowitz. And one of the "strong individuals who ran State, Defense, CIA, and the other key institutions of national security" who, according to Gates, "trusted Scowcroft as no other National Security Adviser has been trusted -- to represent them and their views to the President fairly, to report to him on meetings accurately, to facilitate rather than block their access to the President" was Dick Cheney.)

5) More broadly, Gates' approach to policymaking is rooted in his view of the breakup of the Soviet Union as a bipartisan success spanning several decades. In his book, he portrays each of the five presidents he worked under as tacking a course between hawks and doves among their senior advisors, to varying degrees maintaining military pressure while seizing any negotiating opportunities available. He gives Carter ample credit for beginning the Soviet unraveling process - by his emphasis on human rights, and by his late beginning of a military buildup and support for Afghan resistance. He also recognizes the role of Congress: "The obstructionism and complicating role of Congress...did have a useful function. I sat in the Situation Room in secret meetings for nearly twenty years under five Presidents, and all I can say is that some awfully crazy schemes might well have been approved had everyone present not known and expect hard questions, debate, and criticism from the Hill. And when, on a few occasions, Congress was kept in the dark, and such schemes did proceed, it was nearly always to the lasting regret of the Presidents involved. Working with the Congress was never easy for Presidents, but then, under the Constitution, it wasn't supposed to be."

6) Gates bolsters his credibility by taking stances that don't boost his institutional interests. Time reports this week that he is "putting a damper on pressure from his own Air Force for Congress to buy more F-22 fighters ." The F-22 is a high-tech fighter "principally for use in 'near-peer' combat,'" i.e., for eventual combat with China, which has replaced the Soviet Union as a prospective major league foe. Gates wants to buy half the number his generals recommend. Late last year, in a speech at Kansas State University, he astonished Pentagon observers by telling students that the U.S. needed to boost the State Department's budget -- that is, redress the balance between hard power and soft power.

For all Gates' skillful piloting, Kaplan rightly notes that there may be no middle course in Iraq:

[Gates] added that it's 'important to send the Iraqis a message: that we're going to be coming home, and it's time for them to step up to the plate.' But on his trip to Baghdad, he was confronted with the gnawing question: If the Iraqis don't, or can't, 'step up to the plate,' should we come home anyway? And if the troops don't start coming home at a faster clip, if they stay embroiled in sectarian conflicts that the Iraqis do nothing to settle, what happens to the bipartisan support that Gates has sought as his highest priority? Gates is very skillful at controlling a bureaucracy, but a war is something else. As Gates himself said on the plan from Fort Hood, once a conflict starts, the statesmen -- people like him -- lose control.

In other words, to Powell's pottery barn rule -- if you break it you own it -- add the Humpty Dumpty rule -- if you break it, you may not be able to fix it. One irony that may thwart Gates is that his book, published in 1995, describes in detail a foreign policy practice that worked across five administrations -- contentiously and creakily, but effectively -- and that, in his telling, worked most effectively under George H. W. Bush. It also frames perfectly, by negation (years before the fact), how that practice broke down under W., as the Cheney lauded as a team player by Gates hijacked the decision-making process. Gates may have done much to repair that process. But as Kaplan suggests, he may not be able to control the outcome of decisions made while the process was broken.