other for power and any kind of political solution is an unstable one. this needn't have come to this place. i will say two years ago there were lots of groups in the fight that were secular is not the right word, but that were liberal, should we say, and that were not linked to al qaeda. but those groups were essentially pushed out of the night. al qaeda-connected groups were the only ones getting active outside help at the time and they took to -- they also, of course, many of them are experienced fighters from other conflicts so they were taking the sort of forward position. they led the fight. >> i understand. >> and eventually they came to dominate it. right now there are relatively few groups available there for whom we can say these guys are reliable and we can own them. >> let me ask you about this problem we have. military logistics and military strategy. if we start flying over the country, they apparently have a tremendously state of the art soviet system, russian-backed