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It's not going to work now. >> what do you make of michael steele's comments saying this is president obama's war? >> oh, i mean, i was astounded to hear it myself. i thought it was america's war. i thought we went over there to get rid of the taliban, and the only reason we got the taliban back there again is as i said we ignored it for seven years. we need to do the job or we don't do the job. i think the president has already stayed he's going to start withdrawing the majority of the direct combat troops next july that. doesn't mean that we're actually going to get out of there. we're going...

And general mcchrystal might advise that they be slower or that we continue to concentrate troops in places like kandahar province and so on. i it this president of the united states is booking his campaign for re-election on the fact that he begins to withdraw in 2011. >> okay. how about the afghan war strategy overall? what are we left with? are we pulling out altogether in afghanistan? >> no. >> what is the criteria to be able to do that? >> i think it's going to be a long while before we pull out altogether, we'll always have troops in the region. i think the plan goes something like this ...

Serious resolve and strategy. >> and so much, colonel jack, so much money and so many lives have been spent on this war. the u.s. started training troops in that country. that country's security forces back in 2002. most of the afghan military and police are still not at the readiness levels to even hold the stalemate. most of that fighting is done by special ops which i think the last number i saw makes it about 7% of afghan defense and security forces. what are you looking for tonight, jack? >> the likelihood is the special operations capability is going to be increased of the -- i've heard ...

Understand it. >> brett: what does that mean, 3,000 troops on the ground after the end of this year? >> we wanted to provide the iraqis to assist them with their operations against the insurgency and some of that is communications, some aviation. in addition to that we want to provide mobile training teams to assist with the training development of iraqi security forces. finally we need some forces to protect our own forces. when you get down to 3,000, it's almost like a fig leaf. it's pretty disappointing to have that level of force they're trying to assist 600,000 man force which is what the...