Robert GatesWASHINGTON – Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserts in a new memoir that President Barack Obama grew frustrated with U.S. policy in Afghanistan and that Vice President Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue. He also accuses members of Congress of inquisition-like treatment of administration officials.
“I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes in the book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” which was set for release next week by Knopf.
Obama approved the strategy of putting 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan and placing Gen. David Petraeus in charge, even though some top advisers opposed the so-called surge he announced in December 2009.
In recalling a meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Gates writes: “As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand (Afghan 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.”
Gates also writes that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” though he also says Biden is “a man of integrity” – and applies the same assessment to Obama even though he is critical at times of the president’s own leadership.