This document provides a lengthy critique of Barack Obama's memoir about his presidency. The reviewer believes Obama lacked strategic vision and resolution, especially regarding the wars in Afghanistan and policies towards Pakistan. They criticize Obama for exaggerating the threat from al-Qaeda and for failing to acknowledge or address Pakistan's support for the Taliban. The reviewer also faults Obama and his advisers like Gates for lacking a clear strategy in Afghanistan and making poor decisions like deploying troops to Helmand province. Overall, the reviewer finds Obama's memoir to be intellectually dishonest and lacking in substantive analysis of his foreign policy decisions.

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ISBN: 9798573820804
Obama's Strategic Naiveté
Reading Obamas Memoirs Volume 1
Reading Obamas memoirs reinforced my belief that the man is
mediocre par excellence.
Much of the first half of the book lacks substance and even
style.
This review will only address Obamas foreign policy perceptions
and descriptions.
The below few lines about wars on page-319 really shook my
belief in this character who served as US president for two
terms !

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To call Afghanistan a war would be a rather ludicrous statement
keeping in view the odds involved .
Obamas description of so called war against al Qaeda was also
highly exaggerated as well as inflated !
After all where can anyone quantify and state , how many
casualties the al Qaeda inflicted on the US military ?
As one who is based in Afghanistan and one who has seen US
Afghan war closely , I can state with confidence that so called al
Qaeda cannot be held responsible for even 0.001 % of US
military deaths !

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As we saw closely , some 99 % of US military casualties were
inflicted by Pakistani state supported Taliban proxies in the US
Afghan war.
And here I read about how a man sadly president of USA for 8
years is writing such pure and unadulterated nonsense?
But this was only the beginning of reading utter nonsense as
readers of this review will see in the subsequent pages.
On page 323 Obama introduces a character who was to prove a
fatal disaster to USAs Afghan war:--
How on earth was a pedantic CIA bureaucrat shape USA’s
Afghan strategy ? These statements well illustrate extreme

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naievette of this Chicago lawyer who was to play havoc with US
Army in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2012 !
Obama starts make absolute nonsense statements on page-
325:--
This scribe was based in Afghanistan in 2006 and the country
was not at all sliding into a sink hole as Mr Obama fallaciously
and misleading proclaims !
Contrary to Obamas false claims the US military was pursuing a
careful military strategy in Afghanistan designed to expose
minimum US soldiers to risk and all through President Bush’s

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eight years tenure the US military had suffered less than 400
fatal casualties due to actual fighting in Afghanistan.
In Obamas disastrous (for US Army) tenure, US military was to
suffer over 1400 fatal battle casualties and nothing worthwhile
or substantial was achieved.
US fatal military casualties in actual fighting in 2007 were 83
while as we will see Obamas badly planned and “direction less”
so called surged doubled and trebled these fatal casualties.

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As far as I clearly recollect , there was no operational or
strategic crisis in Afghanistan in 2008 early on the eve of
Obama presidency.
On page-326 our naive lawyer from Chicago comes up with an
absolute nonsense apology of strategy as below: --

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As far as this scribe saw there was no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Or Pakistan !
USA captured Afghanistan in 2001 with zero military casualties
in actual fighting ! So much for Obamas nonsense assertions
regarding Al Qaeda !
As far as this scribe closely saw while serving as a contractor in
Helmand and Kunduz 99.99 % of fatal casualties on US troops in
Afghanistan were inflicted by so called Afghan Taliban who
were clearly Pakistani state proxies.

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Obamas analysis are a sorry proof of his intellectual bankruptcy
and lack of strategic resolution in analyzing facts forthrightly
and bluntly.
Instead all we find in this apology of a book by a former US
president are dumb twists, petty hair splitting and supremely
non committal statements like as below:--

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Sadly I expected serious and substantial analysis from a former
US president but Obamas shallow analysis was deeply
disappointing.
Like all throughout this book Obama analyses no solid
mechanism instituted by the USA to monitor Pakistan’s actions
against hostile infiltration in Afghanistan?
In a consultancy assignment in 2012-14 this scribe was shocked
to learn that the US state department, Pentagon, CIA and DIA
were so badly led and ham handedly run that no such
mechanism was instituted by the USA at all?

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This was the position all along in both Bush and Obama era , so
Obamas claims about all he did to regulate Pakistan are nothing
else but white lies !
Obama states that Riedel report stated that unless Pakistan
stopped sheltering Taliban, US efforts in Afghanistan would not
succeed.

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However all along this lengthy book , much of it a sheer waste
of stationery, Obama makes no serious efforts to tell the
reader, what efforts his administration made and more
seriously how miserably he failed !
Every page of this book was a recurring and painful
disappointment!
Like Obama has nothing to state about how clueless and
confused Gates was about the conduct of Afghan war?
Like Gates treatment about why US lives were wasted in
barren wastes like Helmand’s are evasive and ambiguous
and an insult to the memory of 800 or so US lives
pointlessly lost in Helmand. On page 340 Gates offers a
lame duck excuse that Marines were sent to be

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sacrificed for no strategic purpose in Helmand as Marine
general Conway wanted them deployed as a
marine only show!
Helmand as I worked there on USAID projects in 2004-5
contained nothing strategic except sand and drugs and
morphia paste labs and there was nothing strategic in
Helmand. Why Gates allowed US lives to be sacrificed for no
strategic purpose will always remain an inexcusable blot on
Gates shoulders as well as Mc Chrystal and Bruce Reidels
shoulders .
Obama praises Gates all along but fails to see any of Gates
major strategic sins !

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Like Gates totally missed the fact that the real insurgents’
bases and havens in Pakistan were never attacked as the
USA as a state did not possess the strategic resolution to
attack .
Obama is intellectual dishonest while discussing sacking of
General Mc Kiernan and totally hoodwinks and hides the
fact that the real reason for removal of Mc Kiernan
Saw the real issue as destroying insurgent safe havens in
Pakistan.
Obama, Riedel and Gates, all three lacked the guts to deal
with this central issue and Mc Kiernan guts were too much
for them to handle!
Michael Hastings also singled out Mc Kiernan’s inability to
suck as his major disqualification!

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Gates was no clueless that he actually confessed in his
memoirs that he had no idea why the US Army launched its
major operations in Helmand ?

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Obama praises Mc Chrystals strategy and conduct of
operations in Afghanistan but what we saw with our own
eyes was distribution of US soldiers in penny packets and
presenting them on a platter for the Taliban to ambush at
will and whim !
Excerpts from this scribes book “Presented on a platter”
illustrate specific US Army strategic and operational failures,
specifically in Obama presidency :--

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Obama fails to justify his Libyan faux pas and every word and
line regarding the Libyan affair was a shocking proof of how US
leadership had qualitatively deteriorated.
That such highly mediocre characters like Obama could rise to
the office of US president was simply stranger than fiction!
And the total intellectual dishonesty of the Nobel prize
organization in awarding Nobel prize to a monster who
destroyed Syria and Libya and launched the highest number of
drone strikes who had little to do with 99 % US deaths in
Afghanistan?
Reading Chapter 27 of this book convinced me that Obama
deserves a Nobel Prize for “SUPREME INTELLECTUAL
DISHONESTY AND MASTERLY LIES” !
His whole narrative about OBL can be termed as sheer lies !

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Two of Pakistan’s ISI chiefs publicly stated that Pakistani state
knew about OBL location all along but Obama weaved masterly
lies in this narrative.
As we saw it in Pakistan OBL was presented to Obama by the
Pakistani state as an election gift to win 2012 elections and the
whole affair was staged by state actors, both USA and Pakistan.
Quoted by Jeff Stein in Newsweek –OBL Abbottabad Raid -2011
Agha A
THE PAKISTANI STATE WILL CHECK NATIONAL ID DOCUMENTS OF ALL
PAKISTANI CITIZENS ON HILARIOUS PRETEXT THAT MULLA MANSUR WAS

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ISSUED PAKISTANI NATIONAL ID BY CORRUPT PAKISTANI OFFICIALS
WITHOUT KNOW LEDGE OF PAKISTAN STATE !
In SIM card verification 10 to 20 Rs per card were charged and huge bucks made
for sweet _____ all , in NIC verification again citizens will be harassed and money
charged while as per reliable multiple sources MULLA AKHTAR Mansur was a
PAKISTANI intel asset and his NIC and passport were issued with PAKISTANI
state agreement and precise knowledge
In OBL raid a Pakistan Army infantry battalion was brought to surround OBL
residence so that US raiding force securely raids the compound and a Pakistan
Army liaison officer accompanied raiding US force
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/hersh-furor-pakistan-perfidy-332674.html
The details of Bin Laden’s whereabouts over the following decade have remained
buried. He is thought to have spent the first five years in a cave in Pakistan’s tribal
area, hidden away in a virtual witness protection program. Hersh was hardly the
first to charge that the Pakistanis eventually squirreled away Bin Laden in
Abbottabad, home to the nation’s West Point and many of its top military and
intelligence officials. Or that, confronted with the Americans’ discovery of him

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there (thanks to a Pakistani turncoat), the Pakistanis facilitated the May 2011
SEAL raid. Indeed, former Pakistani and American intelligence officials were
saying as much within hours of the operation.
On May 7, 2011, a well connected former Pakistani tank officer, Agha H. Amin,
noted that no local security forces showed up during the entire 40 minutes that the
SEALs were mucking around in Bin Laden’s prominent compound, which began
with a very loud helicopter crash and ended with a very noisy exit.
“How do you rationalise the fact that two Pakistani battalions had cordoned [off]
the areas 15 minutes before the raid and when the raid started Pakistani troops
warned the area’s residents to switch off their lights!” Amin wrote in the Lahore
edition of The Nation. “When I said it on 7 May 2011 it was a conspiracy theory,”
Amin wrote on his Linkedin page this week. “But when Hersh stated it [in] May
2015 it’s investigative journalism.”
Now, Pakistani journalism is a cesspool of rumors and conspiracy theories.
But The New York Times’s veteran foreign correspondent in the region, Carlotta
Gall, also reminded us this week that Hersh “is following up on a story that many
of us assembled parts of” years ago. In 2013, she said, “I learned from a high-
level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin
Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After

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[my] book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army
brigadier—all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military—who told the CIA
where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the
knowledge and protection of the ISI.”
Reading Obamas memoirs convinced this reviewer that western
leaderships quality had sunk to the lowest level and Obama was
one clear proof of this sad fact !
Since Obama is a highly intellectually dishonest person he
totally white washes USAs Syrian failure ! One of the greatest
strategic failures of USA where USA despite doling 2 to 5 billion
USD per year to Syrian insurgents for some 6 years failed to
dislodge the Syrian Assad regime.
Why the USA was trying to remove the most secular and anti
Islamic extremist regime in the world remains a supreme
mystery.

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Obama also totally hoodwinks USAs massive drone strikes in
two small districts in Pakistan which had absolutely nothing to
do with US Afghan war ?
Map below from this scribes book analyzing US drone strikes
illustrates Obamas totally ill conceived drone strikes , much
trumpeted and falsely proclaimed as USAs great strategic
success:--

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All along Obama showed a remarkbale strategic irresolution on
confronting the Pakistani state .Just like his predecessor Bush
regime.
All along US had no strategy in Afghanistan but was only fooling
its own public with political gimmicks and meaningless jargon.
Obamas surge had no strategic design and Bruce Riedel was last
person to be asked to frame a military strategy about which he
knew less than a philosophically frigid and barren spinster.
Lastly the chart below illustrates Obamas strategic barrenness:-
-

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By Major Agha H Amin (Retired)
AUTHOR HISTORY OF PAKISTAN ARMY FROM 1757 TILL 1971,PAKISTAN ARMY TILL 1965 ,PAKISTAN
ARMY SEEN THROUGH EYES OF PAKISTANI GENERALS, SEPOY REBELLION OF 1857-59
REINTERPRETED,DEVELOPMENT OF TALIBAN FACTIONS IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN-A
GEOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT (ALONG WITH OSINSKI AND DEGEORGES)
EX EDITOR MONTHLY BLOBE KARACHI,EX ASSISTANT EDITOR MONTHLY DEFENCE JOURNAL
KARACHI,EX EDITOR JOURNAL OF AFGHANISTAN STUDIES KABUL.

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