Robert Gates: Solidly in the Middle of the Afghan Strategy Storm

President Obama's war minister, the man responsible for the day-to-day oversight of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and dozens of other current and future hotspots, would much rather be somewhere else than D.C. and doesn't mind who knows it. In fact, Robert M. Gates blurts it out at every opportunity, as he did this summer during a town hall meeting with 10^th Mountain Division troopers at Fort Drum, N.Y. A staff sergeant was the defense secretary's straight man, prefacing a question with, "How are you doing this morning, sir?'' Gates interrupted. "How'm I doing? Let me tell you! Any time I am outside Washington, D.C., I'm doing great!'' Laughter and cheers ensued as Gates grinned self-consciously.

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PD toolbar!It wasn't just a throwaway line: Before then-President Bush tapped him to lead the Pentagon in 2006, and again before Obama asked him to stay on in 2008, Gates said he wanted nothing more than to live and work far from Washington. What drew him and has kept him there is his conviction that with his decades of senior-level service in Washington's national security circles, he can help protect and support young Americans serving on foreign battlefields. "Our troops are all doing their duty,'' he explained this week. "And I had to do mine.''

Yet for all his professed distaste for Washington, he has excelled there (Gates was the only CIA officer to rise from an entry-level position to become CIA director, and he is the only defense secretary in U.S. history to be asked to stay on by a newly elected president). He has quietly earned the confidence and trust of major players across the capital's political and military communities.

So it is that this short, stocky figure, in his modest uniform of dark suit, white shirt and conservative tie, has become the calm center of the storm over Afghanistan strategy. It's a storm that is engulfing a president who came to office awkwardly unfamiliar with the military, facing a pack of combat-hardened generals increasingly impatient with the White House, and a Congress with 435 conflicting ideas on how to win (or back out) of the war. Gates is the only one who has the confidence of all three, even amid the shouting and hand-wringing, the politically motivated leaks and bureaucratic knife-fighting.

"Here's a defense secretary with two unpopular wars on his hands and I hear nothing bad said about him; that in itself is pretty interesting,'' says T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and experienced Washington hand.

Gates hasn't done it by being mealy-mouthed or indecisive. During his confirmation hearings in December 2006, Gates informed senators that he had not given up the presidency of Texas A&M University and at "considerable personal financial sacrifice . . . to come back to Washington to be a bump on a log and not to say exactly what I think and to speak candidly and frankly, boldly to people about what I believe and what I think needs to be done.'' And in what amounted to a good description of his current role, Gates went on to say, "I intend to listen closely to people. I intend to draw my own conclusions and I'll make my recommendations.

"But I can assure you that I don't owe anybody anything.''

Unlike some presidential appointees tempted to play yes-man to the guy who appointed them, Gates seems to have engineered the reverse situation, winning the gratitude of presidents whom he has agreed to serve. In 2006, he steadied the Pentagon after the turmoil left by the departing defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and brought Congress and the military to support the "surge" of troops into Iraq that Bush proposed in early 2007. After Obama asked him to stay on following last fall's election, Gates again shepherded the White House, the military and Congress through the adoption of a new Afghanistan strategy and the deployment of troop reinforcements last spring. And he is playing that role again today.

One secret of his success: keeping his mouth closed and his options open while he listens to others. Late last week, for example, while everyone else in Washington was broadcasting their opinions about how many troops, if any, should be sent to Afghanistan, Gates hand-delivered to the president the official list of manpower and other resources being requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. Gates passed it over without succumbing to the temptation to pencil in his recommendations in the margins.

Not that Gates lacks self-confidence in his own judgments and abilities. During his 2006 confirmation hearings, a skeptical Sen. John Warner of Virginia noted that Gates would, if confirmed as defense secretary, be responsible for devising a new Iraq strategy and for making it work over a period of time. Was Gates really comfortable with that much responsibility?

"Yes sir, I am,'' Gates answered.

One other tactic has served him well: making sure all voices are heard before a decision is made. In late 2006, as the Bush administration was struggling to define the Iraq strategy, the new defense secretary engineered a formal process in which the top field commander, Gen. David Petraeus, the top regional commander, and each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had an opportunity to brief the president in private on their views of what the new strategy should be. Needless to say, that was not a practice enjoyed under the famously egotistic Rumsfeld.

Gates has worked Capitol Hill in the same fashion. Former Sen. David Boren, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee worked closely with then-CIA director Gates, said, "I watched him effectively work to build a consensus on sensitive issues, Democrats and Republicans at equal seats at the table . . . I came to respect Bob Gates as a realist (who) rejected inflexible, ideological positions and worked hard to fashion practical solutions.''

Today, that hard work is paying off as even some congressional Democrats, skeptical of McChrystal's proposed plan for Afghanistan, are suggesting they wait until they've heard what Gates thinks. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has criticized the McChrystal proposal as too troop-heavy. Congress at some point ought to hear directly from McChrystal and Petraeus, Levin said last Sunday. "But above them all is a secretary of defense. We ought to focus on what will Secretary Gates' recommendation be to the president . . . we ought to listen to the secretary of defense when he makes up his mind.''

Gates' style has won him admiration off the field of political struggle, too. "This is the model of government most of us would like to see, deliberative and analytical,'' said Stephen Biddle, a senior military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Biddle was one of the outside experts who helped McChrystal craft his assessment of the Afghan war and his plan for recovering the initiative there.) For the Obama White House, facing no good options in Afghanistan, declining public support and wildly divergent congressional views, "one would hope that the administration would go into deep study in which they truly have not made up their minds . . . and Gates seems to have paved that way,'' said Biddle.

All this puts considerable pressure on Gates. But he has already indicated that if he feels the burden, he can bear it. He once told the story of a woman who approached him as he ate dinner alone at a hotel, and after making sure he was the defense secretary, telling him that her two sons were serving in Iraq. "For God's sake, bring them home safe,'' she told Gates, as he later recounted the story.

"Now that,'' he added, "is real pressure.''


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