In a New York Times article on August 12, 2007, “Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s counterintelligence center, noted that from late 2002 to early 2003, ‘the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,’ including counterterrorism specialists and paramilitary operatives. This had such second-order effects as diminishing U.S. influence over Afghan warlords.”
– Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Bin Laden’s Legacy, Page 105