taliban. candy, the point i wanted to bring up is why is obama in afghanistan right now, and obviously we re not privy to exactly what is taking place with hamid karzai. but clearly the big issue this year is over kandahar, the major southern city that is the former de facto capital of the taliban. that is really the prize for the war, the battle of kandahar. who controls kandahar to a large degree is the taliban but also hamid karzai s brother. but taking kandahar is as much a political mission as it is a military mission. and surely that s one of the main areas of discussion that will be taking place between the two presidents, candy. peter bergen, our cnn senior national security analyst. i want you to stand by and i want to go back to atia abawi, who is our correspondent in kabul. picking up on what peter just said, atia, looking at it from a
supported them because they saw them as less corrupt than the afghan security forces as well as the afghan government. so in some areas of afghanistan, obviously the afghan people trusting the taliban more than their own government because the government has been a big, big problem for the last eight to nine years. atia, hang on a minute. i want to bring in our barbara starr, who has been to this region reporting so many times and who knows it so well. she s on the phone with me now. you know, we re talking, barbara, about the offensive in helmond and the problems that the u.s. has and one is its the ability to mill tearily control the country and the other is the ability to win the hearts and minds of its own population which really doesn t trust the government that s viewed as corrupt. so when you look at it, is this all part and parcel of the same package or is there one challenge that s bigger than the
we do have atia aabawi. atia, tell me what you can about what you think this mission is about, the state of the u.s. relationship with hamid karzai. we certainly have not felt here that there was total confidence in president karzai s ability to bring his country together. what does it look like from your angle? reporter: candy, what s really important here is that president obama has made it to afghanistan but we also have to look at how long it took him to come back to afghanistan. his campaign was surrounded his foreign policy campaign about moving the war on terror from iraq back to here, back to where it started, but yet this is his first time actually coming to the country, meeting with president karzai in his own palace. they did meet back in june at the white house. but what s important here is it seemed as though president obama
president obama noted that in his statement saying that he wanted to see more progress on energy production, good governance, anti-corruption and all he said will result in helping afghan people be more prosperous and more secure. he then invited hamid karzai to washington in may to have a discussion on long-term strategic institutions. i believe that s exactly what it says. so we re getting some more information on this report but you can see that the conversation is happening and you can only i wish we could be behind those closed doors in those one-on-one discussions to hear exactly how hard president obama pushed for such progress and meeting such benchmarks as we ve been talking about. probably pushed a lot harder than he pushes in public. kate baldwin, i want to bring back in atia abawi who is our correspondent in kabul. atia, kate has been talking to us about some of what s been said in this joint statement. it seems like a little bit of tough love from the president. here s
it, some of them not so happy about it because some see it as a change coming to afghanistan. others see it as more civilian casualties. atia, what can you tell us about the feel on the ground there for the prospects for success for president karzai? obviously the terms of success, if you are an afghan, are totally different than what the u.s. citizenry would see as the term for success. what u.s. citizens are looking for is, of course, a good outcome for afghanistan but also the withdrawal of u.s. troops. what is the term for success on the ground in afghanistan, and is there a feeling among afghans that president karzai is up to the task? reporter: right now afghans are very, very skeptical. they have been for the past few years. they saw a turning point in 2005 and 2006 and it was actually a turning point for the worse. right now the afghan people are not as hopeful as they were