Krauthammer: Not His War - Our Ambivalent Commander

  

Charles Krauthammer's column in National Review Online looks at President Obama's leadership of the war in Afghanistan.

 

By early 2011, writes former defense secretary Robert Gates, he had concluded that President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own [Afghanistan] strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.”
Not his? America is at war and he’s America’s commander-in-chief. For the soldier being shot at in the field, it makes no difference under whose administration the fighting began. In fact, three out of four Americans killed in Afghanistan have died under Barack Obama’s command. That’s ownership enough.

Moreover, Gates’s doubts about Obama had begun long before. A year earlier, trying to understand how two senior officials could be openly working against expressed policy, Gates concluded that “the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.” This, just four months after Obama ordered his 30,000-troop “surge” into Afghanistan, warning the nation that “our security is at stake . . . the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

 

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368668/not-his-war-charles-krauthammer

 

Note: The above U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Bertha A. Flores shows U.S. Special Forces soldiers fire a mortar round toward an identified enemy fighting position while assisting Afghan forces clear Bahlozi village in the Maiwand district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province, Jan. 1, 2014. Forces conducted the clearance mission to disrupt insurgents who hide in the village. The U.S. Special Forces soldiers are assigned to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan.