Gates reveals Obama lacked faith in Afghan war strategy

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In his memoir, former defence secretary Robert Gates has delivered a biting critique of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, US media reported.
In “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War,” Gates recounts how Obama appeared to lack faith in a war strategy he had approved and in the commander he named to lead it, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He said the president also did not like Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates writes of a March 2011 meeting in the White House.
“For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Having approved deploying more than 30,000 forces after an acrimonious White House debate, the US president seemed plagued by doubts and surrounded by civilian aides who sowed distrust with the military, Gates writes in the memoir due to be released on January 14.
Later, a statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden defended Obama.
“It is well known that the president has been committed to achieving the mission of disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al-Qaeda, while also ensuring that we have a clear plan for winding down the war,” she said.
Hayden also hit back at Gates’s assertion that Vice President Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
“The president disagrees with secretary Gates’s assessment… Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world,” she said.
A White House official separately defended Obama’s record on both Afghanistan and Iraq.

2 COMMENTS

  1. It is not a lack of faith on Obama's part., It is simply that Obama, unlike the generals, it seems has read and understood the hard lessons from the history of Afghanistan.

    In his heart he knows that the war is winnable on US terms.

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