Barack Obama's Afghan Leadership Blasted By His Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates

Newsmax.com:

President Barack Obama lacked belief in his administration's policy toward the war in Afghanistan and was skeptical it would even succeed, his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, writes in a memoir to be published next week.

Gates, who served as Pentagon chief from 2006 to 2011 under Obama and his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, is critical of Obama's leadership on several defense-related issues, especially Afghanistan, according to a review of "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" in the Washington Post on Tuesday.

According to the Post, Gates wrote that he concluded by early 2010 that Obama, who had ordered his own troop "surge" in Afghanistan like Bush's in the Iraq war, "doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out."

Gates adds that Obama was "skeptical if not outright convinced it (the administration strategy) would fail," according to the Post.

"I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Gates writes.

After Obama was elected in 2008 to succeed Bush, Gates agreed to the new president's request that he remain as defense secretary, becoming the first Pentagon chief to serve presidents of different parties.

Gates describes Obama as "a man of personal integrity" and says later in his memoir that "Obama was right" in his decisions regarding Afghanistan.

But Obama was uncomfortable with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he inherited from the Bush administration and distrustful of the military that was providing him options, Gates writes.

According to the Post's account of the book, the different worldviews of Obama and Gates "produced a rift, that at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair."

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Al-Qaeda Joins Those Questioning Legality of U.S. Killing of Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki

No matter how much you might dislike Barack Obama, you gotta laugh at the absolute and gall and irony of Al-Qaeda putting on this front:

Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has confirmed the deaths of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, the young American propagandist killed alongside him in a U.S. drone strike late last month.


Al-Qaeda has also criticized the Obama administration for killing U.S. citizens, saying doing so “contradicts” American law.


“Where are what they keep talking about regarding freedom, justice, human rights and respect of freedoms?!” the statement says, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist Web sites.


The Obama administration has spoken in broad terms about its authority to use military and paramilitary force against al-Qaeda and associated forces, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would find itself hard-pressed to claim the moral high ground in the debate over the killing of Awlaki and Khan.


But the killing of two U.S. citizens has prompted outrage among civil liberties groups, as well as a debate in legal circles about the basis for the administration's position.


The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported after the strike that Awlaki’s killing had been authorized in a secret Justice Department memo, a revelation that later prompted senior Democratic senators and scholars to call for its release. Over the weekend, The New York Times quoted people who have read the document as saying that the memo found it would be lawful to kill the cleric only if it were not possible to take him alive. The memo, the Times said, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Awlaki’s case.


Among those who have raised legal objections to the strike: Samir Khan’s family in Charlotte, N.C.


In a statement, the family said that, Khan was a “law-abiding citizen of the United States” and “was never implicated of any crime.”