Extracts from Obama's Wars portray president anxious to pull US troops out of Afghanistan and at odds with senior advisers

The Obama presidency is hobbled by discord and mutual contempt among its senior policy-makers and top generals according to a new book which is likely to damage the administration in November's congressional elections and undermine its efforts in Afghanistan.

The book, Obama's Wars, by the veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward, is out on Monday, but extracts published overnight by the Washington Post and the New York Times make it clear that it will hurt the administration in the runup to mid-term elections, in which Democrats are already struggling and in which they are expected to lose control of the House of Representatives.

The book also portrays a president anxious to pull US troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, and at odds with his military commanders and some senior advisers, who openly question whether his strategy will work. It is likely to be read as evidence that the attempt to divide the Taliban is having more success dividing Washington.

Woodward appears to have had access to secret memos and accounts of sensitive discussions within the administration as it tried to decide on its Afghanistan strategy a year ago. It is already known that the generals asked for more troops than the 30,000 finally agreed by Obama, and that vice-president Joe Biden argued for a more limited war effort aimed principally at targeting al-Qaida. Woodward reveals that Obama resolved the dispute by designing his blueprint, a six-page document which he presented to his White House staff on 29 November. It approved the extra troops but laid down sharp restrictions on what the military could and could not do in Afghanistan.

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is reported to have said. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."

He is also quoted as telling the defence secretary, Robert Gates, and the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in late October last year: "I'm not doing 10 years … I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

The book reveals that senior officials harboured doubts over whether the "hybrid" plan would work. Biden warned that escalation would mean "we're locked into Vietnam". Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the president's Afghanistan adviser, is described as believing that the strategy review carried out by the administration did not "add up" to the decision ultimately made. Richard Holbrooke, the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is quoted as saying that the strategy "can't work".

Among the other revelations made by Obama's Wars:

• US intelligence reported to the White House that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was suffering from manic depression, and was taking medication.

• Obama believes that the US can "absorb" another terrorist attack. He told Woodward: "We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever … we absorbed it and we are stronger".

• The CIA has set up a 3,000-man Afghan paramilitary unit, known as the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, used for covert cross-border operations against al-Qaida and Taliban havens.

• US intelligence told Obama that Pakistan was not a reliable partner in the Afghan conflict, either unwilling or unable to stop elements in its own intelligence service from supporting the Afghan insurgents. Obama is quoted as saying: "We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan."

One of the most striking elements of Woodward's account is the ferocious backbiting among senior members of Obama's team.

During disputes over the Afghanistan strategy, General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, told his aides that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy". Petraeus describes David Axelrod, the president's top political adviser, as "a complete spin doctor". The national security adviser, James Jones, refers to the White House political team as "the water bugs," the "politburo," the "mafia," or the "campaign set".