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Obama didn’t believe his own war strategy: Gates

US President Barack Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to outgoing defense secretary Robert Gates, June 30, 2011, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC/AFP

US President Barack Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to outgoing defense secretary Robert Gates, June 30, 2011, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC/AFP

WASHINGTON, Jan 8 – Former defence secretary Robert Gates has delivered a scathing critique of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan in a revealing new memoir, US media reported Tuesday.

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.

Obama was “sceptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in the memoir, which is due to be released on January 14.

In contrast to his subdued, even-keeled public demeanour as Pentagon chief, Gates strikes a sometimes bitter tone in his memoir.

The former CIA director whose career dates back to the Nixon administration voices frustration at the “controlling nature” of Obama’s White House, which he says constantly interfered in Pentagon affairs, even though civilian aides lacked an understanding of military operations.

The White House national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” he writes, comparing the approach to the 1970s Nixon era.

“All too early in the administration,” Gates writes, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials – including the president and vice president – became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander-in-chief and his military leaders.”

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After a tense meeting on Afghanistan in September 2009, Gates says he came close to resigning because he was “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation – from the top down – of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war.”

A statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden later defended Obama’s record on Afghanistan.

“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.

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