Gates Dissembles on Afghan History

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Gates Dissembles on Afghan History

By Robert Parry
December 8, 2009

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who last week was hailed in the Washington Post as someone “incapable of dissembling,” dissembled to a gullible press corps about the history of U.S. dealings with Afghanistan while en route to that country on Monday.

The headline from Gates’s in-air briefing of reporters was that “we are in this thing to win,” a statement which undercut President Barack Obama’s more nuanced explanation of U.S. goals as blocking the Taliban from restoring Afghanistan as a safe haven for al-Qaeda terrorists.

But Gates went further, declaring "that we are not going to repeat the situation in 1989" when the United States supposedly abandoned Afghanistan once the Soviet Union had withdrawn its last military units on Feb. 15, 1989.

However, while that story of the 1989 abandonment may be a powerful conventional wisdom in Washington – popularized by the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” – it is substantially untrue, and former CIA Director Gates knows it to be a myth.

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So, in telling reporters that the United States had abandoned the Afghan cause in 1989, Gates was at best dissembling, playing to a popular conventional wisdom that he knew to be false but that buttresses his current case that the United States must escalate the Afghan War to “win.”

In truth, Gates seems to have learned nothing from the real lesson of 1989 – that a misguided determination for total victory in Afghanistan only prolongs the violence, makes matters worse, and harms U.S. national security.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/120809.html