Washington
By early 2011, writes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he had concluded that President Barack Obama "doesn't believe in his own Afghanistan strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his."
Not his? America is at war and he's America's commander in chief. For a soldier being shot at, it makes no difference under who the fighting began. Three out of four Americans killed in Afghanistan have died under Obama's command. That's ownership enough.
Gates' doubts about Obama had begun long before. A year earlier, trying to understand how two senior officials could be openly working against expressed policy, Gates concluded that "the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work." This, just four months after Obama ordered his 30,000 troop "surge" into Afghanistan, warning the nation that "our security is at stake ... the security of our allies, and the common security of the world."
The odd thing about Gates' insider revelation of Obama's lack of faith in his own policy is that we knew it all along. In the West Point "surge" speech itself, the very sentence after that announcement consisted of the further announcement that the additional troops would be withdrawn in 18 months.
How can any commander be so precise about an enterprise so unpredictable? It was a signal he wasn't serious. And as if to amplify that signal, Obama added that "the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own," thus undermining the importance of the war to which he was committing troops.
Such stunning ambivalence, I wrote at the time, had produced the most uncertain trumpet ever sounded by a president. One could sense that Obama's heart was never in it.
This became clear to Obama's defense secretary within months — before the majority of the troops had arrived, before the strategy had been tested.
How can a commander send troops on a mission he doesn't believe in? Even worse, Obama ordered an escalation, expending blood but not an ounce of his own political capital. Over the next four years, notes Gates, Obama ignored the obligation of any commander to explain and try to rally the nation to the cause.
And when he finally terminated the surge, he did so in the middle of the 2012 fighting season. Militarily incoherent, but politically convenient. It allowed Obama to campaign for re-election proclaiming that "the tide of war is receding."
One question remains. Why did Obama throw soldiers into battle ?
Because for years the Democrats had used Afghanistan as a talking point to rail against the Iraq War. As consultant Bob Shrum later admitted, "I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom. This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."
Translation: They were never really serious about Afghanistan. The Democratic mantra — Iraq War, bad; Afghan War, good — was simply a partisan device to ride anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War feeling without appearing squishy.
Look, they could say: We're just being tough and discriminating.
Iraq is a dumb war, said Obama repeatedly. It's a war of choice. Afghanistan is a war of necessity, the central front in the war on terror. Having run on that, Obama had to at least make a show of trying to win the good war.
"If I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it," writes Gates. "I could not have continued signing the deployment orders." The commander in chief, Gates' book makes clear, had no such scruples.
Krauthammer's email address is letterscharleskrauthammer.com.