forces in Afghanistan, for a status report on the deteriorating situation on the ground, he let Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. The president later admitted privately that his administration had handled the assigning of the report "stupidly." Instead of simply asking Gen.
The AfPak sessions led to an explosion of unauthorized disclosures, spin, and cutthroat bureaucratic gamesmanship, including the leak of the McChrystal Report to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. The war in Afghanistan was destined soon to pass Vietnam (11 years) as the longest war in American history. The United States had been in Afghanistan for eight years, and doing more of the same wasn't going to cut it. He was, according to one participant, "clear-eyed, hardheaded, and demanding." More than once the president felt obliged to remind those briefing him that it wasn't 2001 anymore.
Obama's approach in the meetings was the same as always. "But as long as I wasn't shaken by the political chatter, I had the time to work through all these issues and ask a bunch of tough questions and force people to sharpen their pencils until we arrived at the best possible solution." "I had to put up with the 'dithering' arguments from Dick Cheney or others," Obama said. "My job was to slow things down." The president had something precious in modern crisis management: time. "For the past eight years, whatever the military asked for, they got," Obama explained later. The Obama administration was determined to change that. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch. Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. This was to be the most methodical national-security decision in a generation. 13, when the president gathered 16 advisers in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. The first of 10 "AFPAK" meetings came on Sept. To be published on May 18 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. From The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter.
0 kommentar(er)
