"We ought to recognize that we have an offensive responsibility to take the war to the terrorists where they are. That responsibility has waned in the last year as military and intelligence resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be used in Iraq."

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Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W.Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

— Michael Hastings