remember, george bush, dick cheney, rumsfeld set a date in iraq. it changed people s calculations. it s what we need to do. if we simply keep an american dependency of our troops being there to do everything for the afghans, we are never going to get out of there. senator and donny deutsche, what is the argument against instead of this year and 20,000 next year, we are out by 2014. why not 30,000 this year. why not speed it up, save lives and save money? part of the calculation is not who is waiting out whom. what is the long term prospect here of the koost the everybody. with the 2014 date, it s always been there now. it s sitting out there. i think the president honored
i understand ya. given who the taliban are. the idea you can concoct the power sharing scheme goes adpans the threads of history. it s something we ought to have learned from these things. joe. i have to say, howard dean, let me go to you. the governor that had to deal with budget concerns. david gregory was talking of putting it in its proper complex. this summer, over the next month, the big challenge is raising the debt limit. everything is going to be on the tablg. i think it s going ob an intention value so this is costing us $3 billion, $4 billion a week. how is the president going to defend the fact his speech last
there doesn t seem to be one. when you look at yemen and somalia and pakistan and the other places around the world that are becoming safe havens for radical terrorists whose aim is to attack america in the west, that s where we should be focusing our efforts. that s my point as well. if you richard haass, if you look around the globe, i could name a lot of places where there are the harboring of terrorists, a lot more terrorists being harbored than in afghanistan. as we said yesterday, senator john mccain has more staff members on capitol hill than our cia directors says there are members of al qaeda in afghanistan, so americans keep asking why are we spending so much money in afghanistan and not rebuilding america? the president talked about it last night. you brought it up early on. let s take a listen to the president. then richard, get your response. over the last decade, we have
on the border land and the safe havens for the taliban. at times, it s a balanced approach. the president is going to feel it from the left and the right in this decision. richard haass, the president is trying to strike the right balance. of course, we saw john mccain last night on sean hannity s show criticizing the president. i m sure many will be criticizing the president from the left on cable news shows. at the end of the day, the american people in the middle want to know why we are spending so much money rebuilding afghanistan while we are cutting budgets here in america. you brought it up earlier this morning that the president was trying to strike the right town, but if you are only cutting 10% of the troops, are you sending that message to america that we are pulling out and going to
argued for a greater drawdown more rapidly. it s not clear we will save the money he wants to save or by doing what he wants to do, we will ultimately change the situation enough on the ground to show results for several more years at fairly high levels of troops. i think the criticism is, in some ways stronger from the president didn t do enough to the criticism from the wall street journal that the president is doing too much. can i ask you a question? yeah. sometimes we talk about numbers in abstract terms. say $120 billion a year. if it were a more dramatic pull out, we save a quarter trillion dollars. what could this country do with that money? all of a sudden, now we have the money. you are in congress. i don t think americans understand what we could do with that money.