Afstan: The Gates' mandate

So Western-style freedom may not ring after all:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates set forth modest goals for Afghanistan on Tuesday [Jan. 27], saying that success should be defined as an Afghanistan that is not a safe haven for Al Qaeda, whose people reject the rule of Taliban insurgents and support a legitimate government.

In his first congressional testimony as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, Gates cautioned that success in Afghanistan also requires security progress in neighboring Pakistan, given the porous and violent frontier between the two nations.

Gates was pressed for details on a recent strike across the border in Pakistan in which a remotely piloted vehicle attacked a suspected insurgent target. The defense secretary said Obama, like President George W. Bush before him, was committed to going after Al Qaeda targets "wherever Al Qaeda is."

He said that the Obama administration's decision to continue a policy of pursuing Al Qaeda had been communicated to the government of Pakistan.

In recent public comments, including this testimony, Gates has sought to lower expectations for the mission in Afghanistan, setting standards far below the sweeping desires of regional democratization that were a foundation of Bush administration national security policy [emphasis added].

"There is little doubt that our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "President Obama has made it clear that the Afghanistan theater should be our top overseas military priority."

Gates repeated the new administration's pledge to substantially increase the American troop levels there – a near doubling to more than 60,000 U.S. troops is expected – but he said the coordination with allies, development agencies and aid groups needed improvement.

"Coordination of these international efforts has been difficult, to say the least," Gates stated.

"While this will undoubtedly be a long and difficult fight, we can attain what I believe should be among our strategic objectives: above all an Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for Al Qaeda, reject the rule of the Taliban and support the legitimate government that they have elected and in which they have a stake," Gates added...

...He added that the strategy now should be to define "more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas [emphasis added], providing security for the population, going after Al Qaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people, some very concrete things."..

I wonder if any of our media will ask our government for their reaction to this less than uplifting, sadly realistic I suspect, assessment.