More on Gates the Swing Voter
The official readout from yesterday’s White House meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy was predictably uninformative. (When it come to decisions as
Jul 31, 2020271.6K Shares3.8M Views
The official readout from yesterday’s White House meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy was predictably uninformative. (“When it come to decisions as important as keeping this country safe and putting our troops into harm’s way, the President has made it clear that he will rigorously assess our progress,” etc.) But remember how I called Defense Secretary Robert Gates the key swing vote on Afghanistan, and how he’s achieved that position by remaining a persuadable skepticon an Afghanistan escalation? Yochi Dreazen at The Wall Street Journal has more:
“„In an interview Wednesday, a senior defense official said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates now worries that counterinsurgency might no longer be a viable approach for countering the Taliban violence roiling once-stable parts of north and west Afghanistan.
I’m not sure I buy that Gates is actually backing off counterinsurgency, but I certainly buy that he’s setting a high-but-not-unclearable bar for some of the COIN crowd’s favored prescriptions; and definitely that he reiterated longstanding skepticism that a warheads-on-foreheads counterterrorism strategy will work.
Paolo Reyna
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Paolo Reyna is a writer and storyteller with a wide range of interests. He graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Media Studies.
Paolo enjoys writing about celebrity culture, gaming, visual arts, and events. He has a keen eye for trends in popular culture and an enthusiasm for exploring new ideas. Paolo's writing aims to inform and entertain while providing fresh perspectives on the topics that interest him most.
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