“The bottom line is that 10,000 troops is not enough to deny al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan,” one U.S. intelligence officer told The Daily Beast. “As a result, they will come back. We have decided as a political leadership that we can live with this.”

Gen. Joe Dunford, the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, announced his preference for 10,000 U.S. troops during congressional testimony in March. (An additional 2,000 troops would be supplied by other NATO countries.) But top military and intelligence officials say they worry Obama may be going even lower than that.

One senior U.S. military official told The Daily Beast that every time his office offered assessments to the National Security Council on how to deploy the 10,000 troops requested by Dunford for post-2014 operations in Afghanistan, they were asked to whittle down the overall number. (The White House declined to comment for this story.)