I thought Gen. McChrystal was unfireable, that his position was secure.

An information operations team was sent to Afghanistan to conduct various psychological operations on the Afghans and Taliban. The team was then asked not to focus on the Taliban but on manipulating senators into giving more funds and troops [to the war].

I think when war becomes your life, I think its very difficult to have the proper perspective to be able to create a fully balanced policy.

I've always said that if you want to find out what's going on in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, I'll give you a choice. You can either read The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, or you can go to the NATO, ISAF, multi-national force websites where they have their own news releases. Who will give you a more accurate picture? I'll take the mainstream media.

The way the Pentagon and its defenders have pushed back against this story is to say: "They weren't doing psychological operations, they were doing information operations and public affairs. They were just helping us spin senators like we normally do."

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.

The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.