The biggest and the worst legacy that Secretary of Defense Gates will leave behind will be the legacy of Afghan mess that he engineered with other Bush officials by mollycoddling Pakistan at the expense of Afghanistan.
Of all the people in administrations of Bush and Obama, Gates knew that Taliban’s Pakistani connections are fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/10, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/10 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/10 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

Yet Gates has continued to justify Pakistani government’s (Pakistani Army as well as civilian government) terrorist connections by always evading to answer most fundamental question - why didn’t he order drone attacks on Mullah Omar’s QST in Baluchistan?

General McChrystal had warned about Pakistan’s sheltering of Taliban terrorists in his August 2009 report to Obama: Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) based in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, is the No. 1 threat to US/NATO mission in Afghanistan. At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Mohammed Omar (Afghan Taliban Chief) announces his guidance and intent for the coming year‘.

All American officers in southern Afghanistan know that they can not prevail in the ongoing military operations, unless Taliban strongholds across the Durand Line in North Waziristan and Baluchistan are neutralized. Adm Mullen and Gen Patraeus evidently do not want to acknowledge that hard options have to be considered if their soldiers are not to die at the hands of radicals, armed and trained across the Durand Line.

As Matt Waldman reported, “support for the Afghan Taliban is ‘official Pakistani ISI policy’ and is backed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s civilian administration. Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign in Afghanistan.”

The ISI is said to compensate families of suicide bombers to the tune of 200,000 Pakistani rupees, claims the report. Thus US aid to bankrupt Pakistan finances the death of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. So in a way, US is financing the death of its own troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistani government issued its usual denials just as it had denied umpteen times the existence of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s ‘Quetta Shura Taliban (QST)’ in the provincial capital Quetta of Baluchistan. But General Stanley McChrystal called QST as the biggest threat to US Afghan mission in his report to President Obama in August, 2009.

Pakistan has denied presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil umpteen times and just recently Adm Mike Mullen repeated in Islamabad that Osama is hiding in a very secure place in Pakistan.

But US can not even use its drones to destroy QST that is causing daily deaths of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan since 2002! That shows Obama’s continuance of Bush’s mollycoddling of Pakistan.

As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/10 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

With the trio of Pakistan apologists - Gates, Mullen and Petraeus - guiding US Afghan policy, no wonder US Afghan mission is headed for failure.

In her book, "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision," the women I like to call the grand dame of analysts, Roberta Wohistetter stated the failure to discover the attack came not for a lack of pertinent information, but because of the over abundance of irrelevant information - she described it as signals and noise.

Additionally, I might further add that in studying the time-line of events that lead-up to the attacks on 11 Sep 2001, it certainly wasn't for lack of funding that the CIA or any domestic agency's intelligence collection failed to uncover and thwart the event - it was a lack of putting the pertinent pieces together each agency held, and sharing them within the community as actionable intelligence.

The Agency would do well to master sifting through the noise to find the signals, instead and get back to being practitioners of the words central and intelligence and stop being enablers for White House and other policy wonks that control their budgeting.

...If you want to see the results of an expanded CIA (and Pentagon) budget and mission, visit Iraq or Afghanistan or Bethesda or Walter Reed (or Pakistan or Yemen or...).

As they say in Team America, "It could be 9/11 X 1,000."

Mr. Ricks, why do you post one of the biggest lies about our national defense?. Gates wants to continue to increase military spending 2% a year above inflation! He has said that several times. His proposed "cuts" are meant to shift money elsewhere. So why doesn't anyone challenge this plan? Where is the threat! Is the terror threat growing by 2% in 2011, and another 2% in 2012?

I'm sure you will issue a correction, perhaps with a new article "Why Does Gates Want to Boost Military Spending?"

That is inflation adjusted too! This is why recruiting and retention are so high, and GIs love the military and Uncle Sugar. Lets see Gates address that "threat" to national defense, and propose a two year pay freeze. GIs earn up to $40,000 their first year (more than the average college grad in the USA). The average GI earns over $70,000 a year, while a LTC earns around $140,000 a year (twice as much as the average MBA). And this pay does not include medical and retirement benefits, which are far more generous than the private sector, which often has none.

This is why we spend much more for 1.4 million troops today that we spent on 2.1 million troops in 1983 (even after adjusting for inflation)

Here is part of a recent article from USA Today:: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/09/gannett-marine-military-communities-among-most-affluent-090510w/

"Marines and other service members received an average compensation of $122,263 per person in 2009, up from $58,545 in 2000. Military compensation — an average of $70,168 in pay and $52,095 in benefits — includes the value of housing, medical care, pensions, hazardous-duty incentives, enlistment bonuses and combat pay in war zones."

As a former GI, I know there would be screams of outrage if they are asked to sacrifice with a pay freeze, much less a pay cut.

Will Mr. Ricks address this key issue, or post more fluff about cute war dogs?

There are hundred of examples for this banter. The guy wants a job in the next heir to Bush administration. Trivia for neocon feed.

....that caused 9/11. It was CIA's unwillingness to share information with the FBI. What TYRTAIOS said is absolutely true. "Need to know" is a useful concept in clandestine operations in hostile territory, but strangles actionable intelligence everywhere else. The Agency knew about two al-Q operatives who had entry visas for the US, and had they passed that information to the FBI counterintelligence staff those operatives could have been tracked, communications monitored, and very likely the whole plot would have unraveled.

Of course, what SIR_MIXXALOT1 said is also "a truth universally acknowledged." We're far too prone to see vital US interests at stake in that part of the world.