A day after one of the president’s top national security aides gently criticized Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s decision to air his views on the Afghanistan war in a public forum in London, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a military audience that officers should provide their recommendations to the president in private.
Declaring that military leaders should counsel the president “candidly but privately,” Gates told a conference of the Association of the U.S. Army that President Obama faced a pivotal choice on how best to resource the war in Afghanistan.
“I believe the decisions the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important to his presidency. So it’s important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” he said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates blamed the Taliban’s revival on a past failure to deploy enough troops to Afghanistan and said U.S. forces would not withdraw whatever the result of President Barack Obama’s strategy review.
“We are not leaving Afghanistan. This discussion is about next steps forward and the president has some momentous decisions to make,” Gates said in a TV program taped at George Washington University on Monday and being aired by CNN on Tuesday.
Obama faces pivotal decisions after the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, presented a grim assessment of the eight-year war.
The Taliban insurgency currently has the momentum in Afghanistan, Gates said, adding that a Taliban takeover of the country would empower the al Qaeda terrorist network.
“Because of our inability and the inability, frankly, of our allies to put enough troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban do have the momentum right now,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and former CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno in the panel discussion that included Clinton.
The White House has begun promoting the missile strikes and raids that have killed Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Mr. Obama will visit the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday to call attention to the operations. While aides said the public focus was not related to the Afghanistan review, it could give Mr. Obama political room if he rejected or pared back the request for 40,000 more troops from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan.
The Faster Read: More American troops or more Predator drones? An unpleasant set of options.
Image from The U.S. Army photostream.
