larry: do you think your brother was killed? larry: joan rivers here tomorrow night. jermaine jackson on friday. go to facebook.com/cnn. larry king live. for behind the scene photos of jermaine and me honoring the memory of michael on his first anniversary of his death. michael half tstings is with usm afghanistan. he s the author of the article in rolling stone. anything you left out? anything you re sorry about? no, i think i did my job to the best of my ability. obviously, in the magazine story, there s always tons you leave out. so but in terms of regret, certainly no regrets. larry: all right, we have us a couple of excerpts from the
click on the charity buzz auction to bid on some great items with proceeds going to the people and the wildlife who need it the most. all right, john soltz, where s all this going in afghanistan? well, we re not going in the right direction. look, larry, we were on the segment together after the president s initial speech at west point. the time line makes no sense at all. when you want to put all these troops in there. the question is what are our objectives on the ground? we need to have a limited objective which is deny al qaeda the ability to train terrorists to attack our country. what happens when we put force throughout, you know, any of these countries? it happened in kosovo. they went into macedonia. it happened in iraq. in my unit. we put a lot of ground power on the ground to free up our logistics lines. as soon as we put troops on the ground, we put the enemy somewhere else. we can put hundreds of thousands of troops in afghanistan, push people around, but in the end the
you either have to be a real counterinsurgency person in which you say we re going to do it for as long as it take, as much as it s going to cost and it s going to take a long time and cost a lot, or you have to recognize we need to we have to radically reduce our goals in afghanistan. there s no middle path there. obama is looking to split the baby. and you just can t do it. larry: michael, you re there. what do you see? well, i mean, this morning i witnessed a i was down in kandahar and witnessed a nasty firefight between taliban and americans. i was in a helicopter when it happened. then later in the afternoon, the base i was on was rocketed. which and we all had to get into the bunker and dive under our desk. these are daily occurrences. the fighting in kandahar specifically which is going to intensify over the next few months, it s going to be bloody and it s going to be rough. the afghan government officials are very nervous about the july
road on that. petraeus will put his input at the end of this year. we may see that deadline pushed. if that happens, then we can create the conditions in afghanistan where an afghani government can stand up. but that will not happen with a time line. it is a much tougher problem set than iraq. we ll see. we need to learn the lessons of the iraq insurgency. larry: michael, we re running out of time. first, i salute you, as everyone agrees, it s a brilliantly written article, very well done. how long you going to stay there? i m probably going to be heading out pretty soon after this trip. but thanks very much for your kind words. larry: what s your next article about? i have an article coming up about helicopter pilots and i also have an article that will be upcoming about what we won or didn t win in iraq. i spent a number of months in iraq as well recently. larry: thank you so much. michael hastings. the article will be out friday. and ari fleisher, pete hegseth,
anyway. will it change the relationship between no, i don t know who the first journalist is who s going to profile general petraeus in his new job as commander in afghanistan. but i can probably guess it s not going to be me, though i d be happy to if they talk to me. larry: we ll take a break. when we come back, ari fleisher will join us. the impact of the departure on the troops, the taliban, the war. michael s going to hang around too. don t go away. on a second. come on up here, where your brothers sit. wow! chevy traverse. a consumers digest best buy, with a 100,000 mile, powertrain warranty. it seats eight comfortably - not that it always has to. now, get 0% apr for 60 months on a 2010 traverse with an average finance savings of around fifty four hundred dollars. see your local chevy dealer.