Well, gee, I wonder why I haven't heard anything about this

in all the hoohah over McChrystal?
Hastings was asked if McChrystal had perhaps gotten the whole strategy wrong, but Hastings explained it was the President that didn't know what he was really getting into.

"I think that ship had sailed last year," Hastings said. "I think once the decision was made to do a counterinsurgency strategy, they had a pretty clear idea in mind what they wanted to do and I think this is quite interesting. I think this is one of the issues Obama didn't really understand what counter-insurgency meant and when the military said they wanted to do a counterinsurgency strategy that that actually meant 150,000 troops. Obama thought he could get away with just sending 21,000 over and getting a new general."

And as Hastings explained, Obama wasn't prepared due to this miscalculation.

"That clearly - anyone who has spent anytime around the military over the past few years you know, you know how many troops they wanted in Afghanistan all along, but I think Obama was clearly caught off guard by that," Hastings said.

Later in the interview, Hastings accused Obama of not dedicating a lot of his time into putting the counterinsurgency strategy (or COIN) in place. Instead the Rolling Stone reporter said Obama was looking for a quick way to fill a campaign promise with roughly a seventh of the troops needed to successfully implement the strategy.