of the united states. and it comes as he returns from a working vacation that was mostly work and during which he struggled with a tragic day in charlottesville that reignited the racial divide. so, in just a moment, we will be joined by retired four star general jack keane but first we go to chief white house correspondent john roberts who is live in fort meyers, virginia tonight a few hours from here where the president will speak in a couple hours. good evening to you. martha, good evening to you. you can see behind me a few hundred yards away filing in for the president s speech to occur in just under two hours now. what the president will say tonight is far different from than what he was saying just a couple years ago. maybe back as far as 2013. in regards to afghanistan. where he thought that the united states should not be there. that we should pull out and we should focus on efforts on rebuilding the united states and spending the money that we re spending in afghanistan h
i m not happy about it. i will tell you. but i would leave the troops there begrudgingly. you have to stay in afghanistan for a while for the fact you are right next to pakistan which has nuke already weapons. we have to protect that. martha: when you look at that and here s the tweet that he said back in 2013. we should leave afghanistan immediately no. more wasted lives. if we have to go back in, we go in hard and quick. rebuild the u.s. first. there is a lot in there, obviously. and you can see the process that he has been going through here. and you can see that the president is very torn on this issue. it s a tremendous expense a trillion dollars in by some estimates so far. and he has things he wants to do here at home that he feels, you know, may not be throwing good money after bad. yeah, absolutely. i think we re probably going to have a modest troop increase providing more divorce than at the fighting level. i hope that s a good thing.
surreptitiously. you can t go on pause either. we have a lot of active scenarios going on around the world. we don t have time for a pause. martha: let me turn your attention to what we are waiting to hear from the president this evening. the announcement that 4,000 more troops will be committed to afghanistan. it s an interesting place for this president to come, given debate that s gone on over this and what he said in the past. that s right. i think i m looking for to hearing his remarks tonight there is a couple things i m looking for. first, why the evolution? what is the compelling case for this? he went from as a private citizen to being for immediate withdraw to as a candidate being for our not immediate withdraw and now it appears as president to want to put more troops in to the region and so i want to hear a very compelling argument for that. secondly, what is the
groups. so that they can see a wide array of everything that s moving towards that carrier group. so, it really is pretty it s just flat out embarrassing and inexplainable. there are people from admiral harris on down that are going to have to do a lot of explaining about this. martha: we have heard from the president, move, his concerns about our capability, our readiness in the u.s. military. and you look at this situation, and 10 sailors missing. keviseven were lost just a few short weeks ago in june. you know, the president has been criticized for wanting to put more money and more resources into our defenses. this would appear to show that there is definitely some need for some evaluation at the very least. i think that s right. there definitely needs to be evaluation. it s a tragedy, i feel heart-sick over the sailors who are lost here. or unaccounted for. and the fact that this has
president simply wouldn t go that far at this point. but justify sessions said something along the lines according to reports this is not what we were elected by the american people to do. he appeared to have been very much against this plan. well, there was a great deal of skepticism. and i m one of them. i think the president needs to define what success and victory is. we have the biggest, baddest military on the fails of the planet. if we unleash them and let them do their job without the handcuffs of the politically correct war that has been going on for the last 16 years. so what is that victory? but i worry that in afghanistan, where have you parts of the country, i will literacy rates are near 90%. where have you corruption that is just off the charts. i don t know that you can go in and train these people. that s what we have been doing for 16 years. martha: that s ongoing problem. we spent nearly a trillion dollars. why t. hasn t worked. why is this different? martha: