Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
After a hard day’s work in Afghanistan, Petraeus reads… about Afghanistan
After spending 16-plus hours each day running the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, American General David Petraeus tries to thumb through a few pages of a book each night before his eyes close and it falls to the ground. The most recent topic? Afghanistan of course.
The four-star general told Reuters that currently on his nightstand is a book by a leading expert on the country: Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: a Cultural and Political History, a book ranked 21,047 on Amazon.com (as this blog was being published).
The general, speaking in a telephone interview as part of the Reuters Washington Summit, acknowledged that he probably only gets through a few pages each night.
“When you start at working at 5:30 in the morning, and I mean really start working, and you go down somewhere around 2200-2300 (10 p.m.-11 p.m.), you don’t get more than a couple of pages into whatever book you read before it falls on the floor,” he said.
In the preface of the book, Barfield said he embarked on writing the book during what he described as a “period of neglect” of Afghanistan by the Bush administration. Barfield first visited Afghanistan nearly four decades ago as a student and said he decided to write the new book because of the renewed focus on the country by the Obama administration.
Petraeus, widely hailed by both Democrats and Republicans, was tapped by President Barack Obama to oversee the war effort in Afghanistan after his tour leading the U.S. military in Iraq.
Barfield, an anthropology professor at Boston University and head of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, was just in Afghanistan and visited the general’s office the other day, Petraeus said.
Grassley grades Obama’s performance C to F
We asked Senator Charles Grassley to grade President Barack Obama’s performance (close your ears Sasha and Malia) and the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee was a bit of a tough schoolmaster.
“He’s still learning an awful lot,” Grassley said at a Reuters Washington Summit.
But Obama gets a D on foreign policy, a C on domestic policy, and an F on trade (ouch!)
We asked him to explain the grading.
“If you go to class, college, and you don’t do anything you get an F,” Grassley said on trade. He noted that Obama has put a 35 percent duty on tires from China, which the senator believed was not a good idea, but he would have been willing to overlook that if the president was pushing forward on trade agreements.
And why the D on foreign policy?
“He’s taken a month to decide whether to send more troops to Afghanistan,” Grassley said.
Grassley is a Conservative Republican Senator. What do you expect? He was also the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and is currently the ranking minority member. What grade should we give him in light of the Depression he helped cause?
