Woodward's book, "Obama's War", actually did a great job of explaining the thought processes of all our military commanders and the White House's thoughts and conclusions about Afghanistan and Pakistan. Conclusions are that up till 2003, we could have won and beaten the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but neglecting it for 6 years allowed them too large a foothold. Now the best we can do is to make them ineffective and to provide enough training to the Afghan government and police to keep them under control.