Robert Gates says Barack Obama lost faith in US strategy in Afghanistan Mr Gates also levels criticisms at both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the leading Democrat contenders to succeed Mr Obama in 2016. Although praising Mrs Clinton as "indefatigable, funny, [and] a very valuable colleague" he said she admitted that she opposed plans to send more troops to Iraq in 2007 for electoral reasons. He said the admission was "as surprising as it was dismaying." Mr Gates is harsher about Mr Biden, saying the vice president had been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." He described a poisonous relationship between the White House and US generals and said he was often "seething" as Mr Obama's aides engaged "in condescending and insulting questioning of our military leaders." Mr Gates highlights a meeting in March 2010 when Mr Obama was weighing whether to send more troops to reinforce the war effort in Afghanistan. The president opened the meeting by implicitly accusing General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, of leaking to the media in an effort to force the White House to send additional forces, according to Mr Gates. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn't trust his commander, can't stand [Afghanistan 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," Mr Gates wrote, according to an excerpt in the Washington Post. The former cabinet secretary said the White House became involved in every aspect of national security policy, including the detail of military operations. Mr Obama's White House was "was by far the most centralised and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost," he said. In an illustration of how strained relations were between the White House and the Pentagon, Mr Gates ordered his aides to limit how much information was given to Mr Obama's advisors because "they don't understand it." He also disclosed that Mr Obama's aggressive approach to unauthorised leaking began almost as soon as the former constitutional law professor entered the White House. Within a month of taking office, Mr Obama said he wanted a criminal investigation to be carried out to see who was leaking details of his Iran policy to the media, according to the New York Times.