Editor’s Note: Kimberly Dozier has been a CBS News correspondent since 2003. A Wellesley graduate, she started her career at CBS radio in Cairo in 1992. She moved to Israel, where she has had a home outside Jerusalem since 2003. Her new book, Breathing the Fire, is about her surviving — and what it took to recover from — a car-bomb attack while she was on assignment in Iraq.

"We are going to have some difficult decisions," about Iraq and Afghanistan, said Mr. Obama, proving himself the master of the cool and collected understatement, after being closeted with the top leaders at the Pentagon for almost two hours Wednesday.

That’s the sound of Mr. Obama prepping the American public for some less-than-glowing results on the warfront — just as he has on the U.S. economy — especially when it comes to Afghanistan.

He and Veep Joe Biden met with everyone from the defense secretary to all the joint chiefs in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon, known as "The Tank." (It’s just a conference room, but you’ve got to have a lot of rank sitting on your shoulder to get in there. I’m told the name is evocative of what that windowless room feels like if you’re stuck in there with a certain degree of hot air for several hours.) A small pool of reporters got to trail him as he greeted troops in the hallways after the meeting — the rest of us got only a glimpse of a phalanx of Secret Service guys, blocking our view.

The chiefs are warning their new  commander in chief that Afghanistan is NOT Iraq … which is exactly why it could become a quagmire for Mr. Obama, just as Iraq became for his predecessor. That’s what I’ve been hearing from a host of White House, Pentagon and think-tank types who’ve been in on — or near — this process.

Not that they’ve been saying anything in private that they haven’t said in some form in public. Secretary Robert Gates was blunt on Capitol Hill this week: "Afghanistan is the fourth or fifth poorest country in the world," he told senators. "And if we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience or money, to be honest."

Every other defense official I’ve spoken to over the last couple months has simply chimed in, in agreement.

"It’s a money pit," one told me. "It’s twice as big as Iraq, with less than a tenth of the infrastructure in roads, electricity or water systems." Iraq only needed "a bit of a push from us" to go in the right direction, said one surge veteran. "In Afghanistan, we’d be building it from scratch," he said. "We could be there 20 to 40 years, and get nowhere," said another.

And the much-vaunted success of counter-insurgency techniques in Iraq, that have aimed first and foremost to keep Iraqis safe, thereby winning their loyalty to U.S. troops to a certain degree? "We can try to keep some of them safe — those we can reach," said one commander who’d worked with them, and fought against them in recent years. "But the Afghans will turn on us on a dime." I certainly saw that when I first reported there, during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001. My Afghan escort carried a Pashtun rolled-wool hat and a Taliban-style black turban, which he would change at will, depending on where we were headed. That’s how Afghans have always survived — switching loyalties in a matter of hours, to go with whoever the strongman is at the time — or whichever strongman is closest at the time.