nbc news tom aspell is in kabul, afghanistan. give me a sense of the perspective on the ground there, as we enter this tenth year of the war there. well, ten years, i think, contessa, speaks of itself. people are tired of the fighting, they wondering when it s going to end. and they re also wary that next summer the united states has set what could be an exit strategy, what could be a drawdown of troops starting next summer. so how much longer will the war go on? will there be a peace reconciliation effort before then or will they keep fighting right until they start drawing troops down? right now there s a division in nato, the european countries would like to see talks about the taliban. the united states seems interested only in having the taliban surrender their weapons, renounce ties to al qaeda and pledge allegiance to the karzai government so really there s no bright horizon, as it were, as the war enters its tenth year. and ordinary afghans are saying, actually they were bett
they clearly are looking for an exit strategy. it is offensive to a lot of people who have sacrificed to defeat the taliban. we have viewed them as the enemy. differentiated between certain taliban and mullah omar. this is apparently mullah omar, the guy we ran out of kabul. the question is reconciliation. if mullah omar is this is going to be a hard sell to a lot of americans. if mullah omar is willing to accept what we have agreed is the constitution of afghanistan, who are we to say we re going to keep fighting because they re not ready to concede defet. this is what we did in iraq. the same iraqis and sunnis killing americans in 03, 04, 05 and 06 became our allies in 07 and beyond. this is how we know his name. the anbar awakening was a
think about it. aig wants this to happen really fast. it wants to get out from underneath the government at this point. it wants to be an independent company. once the conversion of these preferred shares happen to common shares, these aren t going to be sold on the open market all at once. this will all take time. also, the stock sale is going to really depend on a lot of external factors like aig s performance and market conditions as well. hopefully this exit strategy that s going to be happening now could also wind up drawing in some private investors, put some money into aig. this could only boost aig s balance sheet and make this whole process happen faster as well. this whole deal we heard about since last night definitely giving aig stocks a nice boost. they were up almost 6% earlier. now they backed down a bit. now they re up about 3%. t.j.? allison, thank you so much. coming up, here s what we have coming for you in the next hour of the cnn newsroom. two u.s. manufactur
slightly lower but meantime gold prices continue to be on a tear. hitting another record high this morning. $1,314 an ounce. the problem is, that wall street doesn t know where the economy is headed at this point so investors, they re gravitated toward investments with more safety, a little more certainty like gold or bonds. gold prices are up more than 30% compared to last year. two years after the government handed out billions of dollars in bailouts, officials are now trying to figure out an exit strategy. government and aig officials are reportedly meeting today. the focus, how the treasury can gradually reduce the stake in the insurer. taxpayers own almost 80% of aig. all right. we are a couple of minutes into the trading day. the dow industrials down about 31. nasdaq off about 8. kyra, this is your favorite topic, maybe. twitter. it seems everybody s on it these days and new numbers prove it. twitter surpassed myspace for the number three social
and president obama the ability to go know into pakistan to some degree and without much pushbacks and now standees understand what a threat it is to pakistan and the pakistani a year and a half ago sort of looked as if it might be teetering against the threat of the fundamentalists of the taliban and i think they may have some people at least in pakistan may have second thoughts being cute and playing games too much with the taliban, but look, general petraeus went over there and i think when he went over there he was assured by president obama he would get to try to win the war and wasn t going there to hang on for a year and find a fancy exit strategy, they ve been working hard there in kabul and they have planned this offensive in kandahar where they re going to in kandahar city and i think by next door in the hellman province and doing damage to the counterterrorism streaks by using the drones so you know, i remember in june of 2007 with the general under