our military capacity, it was a glancing blow. mr. vice president, hamid karzai is presented in the book as being a diagnosed manic depressive. general petraeus refers to him in one meeting as running basically a criminal syndicate in his government. ambassador eikenberry is quoted as telling you he s off his meds. how can we have a successful exit strategy as the obama plan calls for in july 2011 if the strategy involves leaving afghanistan to the whims of hamid karzai? hamid karzai has long since then decided that his interest and the interest of his country lie in cooperating with us and sort of righting his ship. the fact of the matter is whether it s corruption or training of afghan security forces or integration of and
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
president meant by saying we were stronger for it. they tried to deal us a body below. it was horrible for the 3,000 people that lost loved ones. my heart goes out to them. the fact of the matter is, in terms of our national stability, our economic power and strength, our military capacity, it was a glancing blow. mr. vice president, hamid karzai is presented in the book as being a diagnosed manic depressive. general petraeus refers to him in one meeting as running basically a criminal syndicate in his government. ambassador eikenberry is quoted as telling you he s off his meds. how can we have a successful exit strategy as the obama plan calls for in july 2011 if the strategy involves leaving afghanistan to the whims of hamid karzai? hamid karzai has long since then decided that his interest and the interest of his country lie in cooperating with us and
response to mahmoud ahmadinejad anyplace else comments about the possibility with an inside job at 9/11 didn t say, we re note ones who slaughter our own people in the streets, it is your regime, sir, you there is an opening. chris: but they don t take our advice! legendary reporter bob woodward has a new book obama s wars in which he quotes the president as saying this: we can absorb a terrorist attack and he says, mr. obama was pressing for an exit strategy at the same time that he was deciding to send 30,000 more u.s. men and women to afghanistan. what do you make of what seems to be in this book and i don t know you if read it. i have only seen the accounts of it, the president s apparently ambivalence. there is no doubt he had ambivalence, about afghanistan and didn t want to be there forever and stuck in a quagmire but when we lent up through the
estimates each hearing costs $120,000, $125,000. last topic quickly, bob woodward book fallout. charles? the real story is not what he said about absorbing another 9/11 attack or insults of one member of the circle against another. it s what the ambivalence he portrays in private about the war he himself escalated. questionable how commander-in-chief can endanger number of troops and put them in harm s way in a war he seems only to want an exit. bret: erin, quickly. i think on that he obviously was heeding the call of the base when he, you know, this was shortly after being elected in 2008. i think the most interesting thing is we know definitively now that hamid karzai is a manic depressive and on medicine. bret: fred? you know, reading what we know about woodward s book shows the president as weak, incredibly weak. he wanted the military to give him an exit strategy, so he didn t have to send in 40,000 troops, or 30,000 more troops. and prolong the american intervention t