Gates Sheds New Light on Obama’s Afghan Dysfunctions
January 15, 2014 7 min. read

My last post noted how the blockbuster memoir by Robert M. Gates reinforces the points many observers have made about the defects of the Obama administration’s national security process.  The revelations also bolster my own argument that President Obama and his team share a good deal of the responsibility for the ongoing crisis in relations between Washington and Hamid Karzai’s government […]

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Obama Should Take Bob Gates’s Criticism to Heart
January 9, 2014 5 min. read

In earlier posts (here, here, and here), I argued that the Obama administration’s national security process is plagued by extreme insularity, centralization and politicization.  This is a widely held criticism, regularly repeated not just by the president’s detractors but also former administration staffers and friendly commentators.  And the new revelations by Robert M. Gates, the much-respected national security […]

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