and so on to try to continue that administration s policy of drawing down the u.s. presence in afghanistan. mike pompeo, the former secretary of state, he was pushing back on what biden was saying yesterday. let s take a listen to that, talk about it. every president confronts challenges. this president confronted a challenge in afghanistan he has utterly failed to protect the people from this challenge. i wouldn t have let my 10-year-old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting. what do you think of that, peter? there s a lot of blame to go around, and it was the trump administration, secretary pompeo s staff that negotiated with the taliban beginning in 2018, and they did a rather crucial thing that i think has been part of the failure here, which is they excluded the afghan government from the negotiations. but, you know, who lost afghanistan is going to be also blame, and obama started saying we re going to withdraw back on december 1st, 2009.
and still, the same problems seem to exist year after year after year. well, yeah, the afghan commandos, which are about 20,000 in number, are doing disproportionate amount of the fighting and dying. to add what general hurtling said, another thing coming out of the speech is a line i ve heard from inside the trump administration is their biggest criticism of the obama administration in this regard was the fact that when president obama announced a surge of troops into afghanistan december 1st, 2009, a significant surge of 30,000 troops, he also announced the withdrawal date. you and i were at cnn reporting on this at the time. and the crawl on cnn even before the speech was delivered was the withdrawal date. so the news became the withdrawal date, not the surge. of course, that affected the taliban calculation, the regional players calculation. what i would expect out of tonight is that president trump
bill: some of these troops will be coming homenly months before america votes in 2012. is this the start of the president s re-election campaign? steve haze senior writer for the weekly standard. a great panel here, good morning to both of you. 30 fund-raisers so far and more expected in new york city. this is the aets room of the white house, a prime-time address, a focus on the home front at a time when the economy continues to batter people right and left. is this the beginning of the campaign for 2012? i think his campaign began quite a longtime ago. this might be the most decisive foreign policy speech he s given leading into the campaign. this was something that he had promised his base when he gave the speech december 1st 2009 when he surged troops into afghanistan.
there s always been an isolation strain in the republican party. the pat buchanan wing of our party. but now it seems to have moved more center stage. from my republican point of view the president needs to step up his game with libya but congress should sort of shut up. at the end of the first year of his presidency, president obama did something not many presidents have done or are willing to do. he allowed it to be known that he was mulling over a decision. he allowed it to be known that he was mulling over decision that was a hard decision. and he let us know he was taking his time to make that decision. the war he inherited was a publicly and admittedly drawn out process. that culminated on december 1st, 2009, at a speech in west point where mr. obama an nowed he
the war he inherited was a publicly and admittedly drawn out process. that culminated on december 1st, 2009, at a speech in west point where mr. obama an nowed he would be spending more troops. more troops to afghanistan but with a deadline. counter insurgents to get 18 months, defined as defeating al qaeda. i set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling and defeating al qaeda and its extremist allies. as commander in chief i have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 u.s. troops to afghanistan. after 18 months our troops will begin to come home. so in 18 months was up, the surge would be, too. today late in the day with nothing like the weeks and months of advance warning we had in 2009 we got word that the