Biden: Obama Didn’t Believe in His Own Afghanistan Strategy

Local Editor

Former US Secretary of War Robert Gates stressed Tuesday that President Barack Obama didn't have sufficient faith in the troop-surge strategy he ordered in Afghanistan.

After months of debate with Gates and top advisers, Obama ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan in late 2009. Around 30,000 soldiers were to be the final push for stabilizing the war-torn country before a phased withdrawal starting in mid-2011.
"I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Gates wrote in "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War."

Gates added that after Gen. David Petraeus, then the central commander for both major wars, made public remarks suggesting he was not comfortable to setting a fixed date for the US military's withdrawal from Afghanistan, Obama openly chided his military leadership for "popping off in the press" during a major National Security Council meeting.

According to Gates, Obama said, "‘If I believe I am being gamed ...' and left the sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire."
Gates added: "I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing" Petraeus, and possibly Chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and Gates himself, "of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn't trust his commander, can't stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out."

In addition, Gates said that during a contentious September 2009 meeting with White House staff on Afghanistan policy, he nearly stepped down.

"I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House's lack of appreciation - from the top down - of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war," he recalls. "I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it."
Gates was the lone holdover from Republican President George W. Bush's Cabinet to serve in President Obama's White House after the Democrat entered office in January 2009. He oversaw crucial moments of at least two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the helm of the Pentagon, from December 2006 to July 2011.
Gates praised Bush's order for a troop surge in Iraq, which, with the help of cash incentives, tampered down insurgent violence.

He notes that he and Bush's second Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were the only voices urging the President to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, with no success.
Gates said Obama's decision to send Navy SEALs to attack a housing compound in Pakistan targeting Osama bin Laden was "one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House."

His memoir goes to great lengths to convey how much he was concerned for US troops' safety amid so much conflict, saying he has "an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility" for the troops he ordered into combat.
Gates said both Obama and Hillary Clinton admitted to him that their opposition to the Iraq war during their heated 2008 presidential primary campaign hinged on political calculations.

"Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. ... The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team