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They want to see it abolished and have those cases handed over to the supreme court, so still waiting for some sort of resolution on that, randi, but there is one thing that everyone is agreeing on, and that is that this current political impact is really serving to deepen the ethnic tensions that exist here, and that is only playing straight into the hands of the taliban. >> and why is this situation so critical to americans here at home? >> reporter: well, randi, it's critical for a number of reasons, remember, 2011 this, year is the same year that the u.s. plans on beginning what is calling...

It was a tough decision made by president bush and, oh, by the way, it served as a model for our strategy in afghanistan for president obama's strategy in afghanistan. was there ever a serious discussion in the white house about going a little bit farther in pointing to the success of this new straj that president bush had initiated? >> well, it's an interesting point. certainly one folks on the right make in particular, as you say. love the surge strategy so much they bought it for afghanistan with the exact same guy, general petraeus now presiding over it. this line from the white house has ...

But we need a political resolution. of course, the fact that gets a little bit forgotten around here is part of the reason for the surge was to provide security gains in order to provide political space for the leaders to try to come to a settlement to have elections, so on and so forth. so this all kind of intermingled. and for whatever reason, the white house just does not want to go there in terms of saying we were wrong, the surge worked. i mean, i think you don't have to be a political genius to understand why they might come to that. but this was an occasion where the president tried to ...

>> david, we have a very good cooperation with the government of afghanistan to work at the challenges we have here of helping to build a capable government. this is a hard task and my role here as united states ambassador is to take forward the president's strategy here. we've got a very clear strategy, david. we've got for the first time -- we've got the proper resources. we've got an array of good programs here in working with the afghan government and law enforcement, their judicial sector and we remain cautiously optimistic about our ability to make progress. >> during our visit with gene...

Havens and reduce their freedom of action, they will fight back. in the face of the tough fighting, however, we must remember that progress is possible in afghanistan because we have already seen a fair amount of it in a variety of different forms beyond the recent security gains. for example, nearly 7 million afghan children are now in school as opposed to less than 1 million a decade ago. immunization rates for children have gone up substantially and are now in the 70 to 90% range nationwide. cell phones are everywhere in a country that had none during the taliban days, though the taliban do...