What's up with Mr Gates?/Update: "Adopt-a-stan"

The SecDef seems to be rather opposing the White House line:

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY JET — The Obama administration needs to decide on a war strategy for Afghanistan without waiting for a government there to be widely accepted as legitimate, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday.

Gates' comments put him at odds with top White House and NATO officials who are balking at ordering more troops and other resources to Afghanistan until the disputed election crisis there is resolved...

In separate comments over the last two days, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen each said no decision on the future of the war strategy should be made until the legitimacy of the Afghanistan government is assured.

Gates said Obama was nearing a decision on the strategy.

The Pentagon chief was headed to Japan and South Korea where he planned discuss support for the war in Afghanistan with leaders there. He was to attend a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, later in the week where Afghanistan would be a top topic.

"This is an alliance issue," he said. "It should not be looked upon as exclusively the responsibility of the United States to respond [emphasis added, good luck, see second part of this post]."..

Secretary Gates has been pretty much a proponent of Gen. McChrystal's position. As an acute observer has put it to me: "He’s the one to watch. The troops must be furious with the excuses and delay." Indeed:

As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks

As for Gen. McChrystal, I've heard someone well-informed say he thinks the commander likely to resign [earlier post on that] if the president goes for Vice-President Biden's counter-terrorism approach instead of the COIN one.

Update: Michael Yon comments on the Dexter Filkin's NY Times Magazine article (see second part of this post), and gives his own views:

Adopt-a-stan

...the idea that Afghans are tired of fighting seems off. Afghans often tell me they are tired of fighting but those words are inconsistent with the bitter fact that the war intensifies with every change of season. The idea that Afghans are tired of war seems an illusion. Some Afghans are tired. I spend more time talking with older Afghans than with teenagers, and most of the older Afghans do seem weary. Yet according to the CIA World Factbook, the median age is 17.6 years; meaning half of Afghans are estimated to be this age or below...

We ask Afghans for help in defeating the enemies, yet the Afghans expect us to abandon them. Importantly, Mr. Filkins pointed out that Afghans don’t like to see Americans living in tents. Tents mean nomads. It would be foolish for Afghans in “Talibanastan” to cooperate with nomadic Americans only to be eviscerated by the Taliban when the nomads pack up...

Half-solutions failed in Iraq and are failing in Afghanistan. There will be no cheap, easy or quick compromise that will lead to long-term success in AfPak. Erroneously adopting a paradigm that scales back to a counterterrorism approach would be like dispatching the potent but tiny Delta Force to the Amazon jungles with orders to swat mosquitoes. We can give them every Predator and Reaper in the arsenal, yet twenty years from now they’ll still be shooting Hellfires at mosquitoes...

If Afghanistan is to succeed, we must adopt it. We must adopt an entire country, a troubled child, for many decades to come...The alternative is perpetual war and terrorism radiating from the biggest, possibly richest and most war-prone drug dealers the world has ever seen, and what could eventually reverse and become the swamp that harbors the disease that eventually kills Pakistan, leaving its nuclear weapons on the table...

I'd just note that, with the outbreak of the Korean War, the US effectively adopted Western Europe, Japan and South Korea from the security point of view, stationing large armed forces there and spending Lord knows how much money on them (both reduced since the end of the Cold War) ever since. Fortunately, except for Korea there was no war. That work elsewhere was done in WW II.

Canada also did a bit of adoption in Western Europe until the severe Trudeau cuts in our NATO commitment:

...In August 1969 Canada's NATO contingent of 10 000 was halved and the remaining ground forces were transferred from British to American command. In Parliament, Cadieux announced that Armed Forces strength would fall from 110 000 to 80-85 000 [would not that number be nice now?]. Bonaventure [our only aircraft carrier], newly refitted, was scrapped. Five regular regiments vanished from the active list. Most CF-5 fighters went into storage...