Former Secretary of Defense Gates reveals what has been obvious--that President Obama had no real interest in winning the Afghanistan War.
When added to the stated intention of our president to get out of Iraq, the disinterest in winning in Afghanistan makes it clear that the President's loud pivot to Asia and the Pacific was only about disguising a retreat from the Middle East and Central Asia where we've been fighting Islamist fanatics.
The announced pivot has alarmed China and encouraged our friends to resist China.
The latter is good, as long as they don't start a war with China that we have to finish.
I'd have preferred a quiet pivot--speak softly and pivot a bigger stick, and all that--but if the real purpose of the loud announcement was to disguise a retreat? Well, mission accomplished.
But if this pivot was, as I suspect, just about disguising a retreat from the Middle East, where the president has no interest in fighting, President Obama's clever domestic-oriented military pivot is going to cause us real problems in Asia if our pivot is rhetorical only and we end up antagonizing China by publicly challenging them with a paper build-up while wrongly encouraging our allies to believe we are seriously beefing up our military in Asia and the Pacific to help contain Chinese ambitions to control or dominate the region.
And this is called smart diplomacy. They plan on giving it to us for three more years.
UPDATE: It isn't just me:
The Obama administration says the pivot, first announced in 2011, is happening on three fronts. First, the U.S. military is building up its presence in the region. Second, on the economic front, the United States is seeking new trade partnerships with Asian nations. Finally, in a diplomatic effort, the United States is increasing cooperation with Asian governments.
But there’s one problem with the Asian pivot; it’s a carefully constructed myth.
The author notes that shifts to the Pacific were going on before the pivot announcement, as were economic efforts highlighted now. And diplomatically there isn't any "there" there.
So it was an announcement.
Again, not that there is anything wrong about shifting to the Pacific. That is our biggest--if not most active, hello CENTCOM--front. And we've been weighting our forces away from Europe since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Yet the most visible parts of the pivot have been a single Army battalion recently deployed to South Korea; a single littoral combat ship deployed to Singapore (to rise to 4, we say); and the gradual deployment of what will be a reinforced Marine battalion in Australia. And the Air-Sea Battle doctrine that essentially promises we won't use ground forces any more.
Sure, we say our most modern equipment is earmarked for the Pacific. But with a shrinking military, putting a higher proportion of less in the Pacific isn't quite the message we should want to say, is it?
The purpose of the pivot is, as I've noted before, obviously just an effort to disguise from the American people a retreat from CENTCOM's area of responsibility in the Middle East region. China's aggressive stance of late after early alarms over the announcement perhaps indicates that China figured this out, too.
