Obama's leadership problem: He won't talk about the global conflict with radical Islam

It is possible that Obama and his team are ideologically uncomfortable with the war on terror that they are compelled to conduct. They took office trying to deliberately reframe that war as a much-reduced contingency operation against al-Qaeda. They have found, of course, that the threat of Islamist extremism is much broader than al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda itself is often embedded in other movements. So Obama does what is necessary. But a man of the left may find what is necessary to be distasteful and morally tainted.

The most disturbing of possible explanations for Obama’s lack of public leadership in the war on terror concerns Afghanistan. Playing down the strength of al-Qaeda, as well as the ties between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, helps make a precipitous U.S. retreat from Afghanistan easier to swallow. This is what CBS News correspondent Lara Logan recently called “a major lie.”

Whatever the reasons, the results are destructive. The unavoidable disorders of the Arab Spring and the power vacuums of Africa have created an atmosphere hospitable to terrorist threats. But the Obama administration finds this narrative inconvenient — which leaves the American people unprepared. The problem revealed in Libya is not only incompetence or deception. It is also a wartime president who refuses to be a wartime leader.