thank you! and of course the travel pool, the reporters with him trying to get him to answer questions but none answered. richard, pick it up where that leaves off. meeting with morrison from australia with whom they did the deal. $60 billion or something. the french are furious and the brits and french and others not happy with the withdrawal timetable. we know that. tony blinken called to say to the president we have to stretch this out. we think it. the president was not willing to do that. boris johnson trying to smooth that over with savannah but it was clear that he was kind of covering the tracks and being a good ally. look. it is hard to imagine a worse
would look long and hard befoat syria. who withdraw sould you say t president about this withdrawal timetable? it s fair to say isis exists and they re going to exist for a while. liberating the caliphate is important and we ve done that in big way. but the group doesn t go away because you ve taken their territory. it s a mindset that has to be defeated both militarily, by finding people who exist and killing them and capturing them. but it also has to be won in the mosques of the muslim faith where they have to have that next generation come along and reject this kind of ideology. it s similar to the cold war. you know, it took decades to win the cold war. there was a military component, but there was a component where the people behind the iron curtain rejected the philosophy of communism and that s what ultimately overthrou througthre.
this is a significant development. on one hand, the obama administration is trying to say don t read too much into this. this is not in response to the terrorist attacks. they re trying to say that the additional troops are being added because we re having trouble getting commitments from some other coalition nations which in and of itself is a problem. but when i look at this, i m wondering is this the beginning of significant rethinking of obama policy on afghanistan and the withdrawal timetable? possibly in response to what they may perceive were mistakes they made in syria and iraq. clearly what the with the advent of isis and the islamic state and that debacle, not having the status of forces agreement in iraq, do you think they learned those lessons here and don t want the same thing to happen in afghanistan? well, at a minimum, i don t buy the argument that the administration officials are saying this is not related to the significant upsurge in violence. especially over t
and all the hot spots that pop up around the world, how do you think governor romney can make that case? i think he can make a reasonable argument there. i ve read the excerpts of the speech made available and they seem to be effective language to criticize the administration on a number of points and create a contrast, not only on things like the response in benghazi, and the attitude toward the larger middle east, but also toward the relationship with israel and so forth. as i was looking at it and trying to think of governor romney trying to defend these points in a debate, say, when we ve got one of those coming up next week. bill: that s right. look what he said on afghanistan, not to change the subject on you, bill, but he talked about retaining basically the withdrawal timetable of 2014, then he went onto criticize the president implicitly by saying that he, romney, would listen to the generals. well the generals did recommend that, but he appears at this
these young men have been at war for 30 years in some cases or at least their country has. so it s all of those things which makes it complex. general dempsey told me that even with this rise in insider attacks there is no plan to change the withdrawal timetable which will have u.s. troops down to 68,000 at the end of september and out of afghanistan for the most part at the end of 2014. shepard? shepard: jennifer griffin live at bag gram air base in afghanistan. denied claims from wikileaks founder julian assange that he is the victim of an american-backed witch-hunt. that accusation comes in assange s first comment since june when he began hiding out in ecuador s embassy in london. is he trying to avoid extradition in sweden to avoid sex assault accusations. last week ecuador grantd him asylum. steps off embassyed to arrest