Barack Obama bothered by approach of Afghanistan's day of decision

The allied commander wants greater effort, but the war looks ever more likely to poison Barack Obama’s presidency.

Entertaining a group of US historians at the White House this summer, President Barack Obama revealed...

 that he was beginning to worry about Afghanistan and the prospect that his ambitious domestic agenda would come to be overshadowed by an unpopular and unwinnable war.

It was an odd moment for Obama to be preoccupied by foreign policy – he was in the middle of a ferocious congressional battle over healthcare reforms – yet his concern turned out to be prescient.

As he spends his Labor Day holiday weekend at the Camp David retreat in Maryland, Afghanistan is confronting him with what may prove the defining decision of his presidency. “It’s an issue he understands could be a danger to his administration,” said one of the historians who attended the presidential dinner.

The completion of a comprehensive strategy review by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and other Nato forces in Afghanistan, has brought to boiling point a long-simmering stew of military, diplomatic and political conflicts over America’s faltering mission in Kabul.