WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama eventually lost faith in the troop increase he ordered in Afghanistan, his doubts fed by top White House civilian advisers opposed to the strategy, who continually took him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, said his former defense secretary, Robert Gates.

In a new memoir, Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Obama, praised the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Gates said that by 2011, Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Gates said, Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy - expressing doubts about Gen. David Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War is the first book describing those years written from inside the Cabinet. Gates offers more than 600 pages of detailed history of his personal wars with Congress, the Pentagon bureaucracy and, in particular, Obama’s White House staff over the 4½ years he sought to salvage victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “controlling nature” of the Obama White House and the national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” Gates wrote.

Under Obama, the national security staff was “filled primarily by former Hill staffers, academics and political operatives” with little experience in managing large organizations. The national security staff became “increasingly operational,” which resulted in “micromanagement of military matters - a combination that had proven disastrous in the past.”

A former CIA director who served eight presidents in all, Gates was most critical of what he viewed as inappropriate growth in the size and power of the National Security Council staff.

Gates described his running policy battles within Obama’s inner circle, among them Vice President Joe Biden; Tom Donilon, who served as national security adviser; and Douglas Lute, the Army lieutenant general who managed Afghan policy issues at the time.

He disclosed that he almost quit after a dispute-filled meeting with those advisers over Afghan policy in September 2009.

“I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation - from the top down - of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war,” he recalls. “I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.”

Gates, 70, is a critic of the two presidents he served as defense secretary, George W. Bush and Obama. He holds the Bush administration responsible for misguided policy that squandered the early victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, although he credits Bush for ordering a troop buildup in Iraq that contributed to averting collapse of the mission.

Gates did not spare himself from criticism, describing how he came to feel “an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility” for the troops he ordered into combat, which left him misty-eyed when discussing their sacrifices - and perhaps clouded his judgment when cold hearted national security interests were at stake.

In opposing military action in Libya, for example, he told participants in a White House meeting that the United States should end its current wars before sending U.S. men and women in uniform off to start a new one. He was overruled.

He initially opposed sending special-operations forces to attack a housing compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was believed to be hiding. Gates wrote that Obama’s approval for the Navy SEAL mission, despite strong doubts that bin Laden even was there, was “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.”

Gates offered a catalog of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. … The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

But stinging assessments were aimed at Capitol Hill. In private, members of Congress could be calm, thoughtful and insightful.

“But when they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf,” he added.

Information for this article was contributed by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 01/08/2014