>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." i believe that by next

summer, you will see significant improvements in security. begin to flow. by this time one year from now i believe i will be able to tell you that this strategy is clearly working. >> general mcchrystal is here. a key role in iraq and afghanistan. he was instrumental in the capture of saddam hussein and the killing of abu mossad said cowie. his memoir has just been released in paperback. it comes iraq and when afghanistan are both facing renewed insurgencies. we want to talk about many things including where you are today and where you are going forward, but also look back at

where you have some advantage of experience and insight. afghanistan. where are we, in your judgment, on the ground there as they troops by leave most 2014, and maybe all? >> i think that militarily or security wise there have been a lot of gains made, and those gains are shown on the ground in the relative life of the people. i think in terms of government, .here have then big problems internal to the afghan government, there has been a real difficulty in getting local governments adequate, local, competent administration, technocrats down to low levels, which builds the confidence of the people. at the national level, there has been a real problem with them being a credible government. it is not an impossible, but it

has been a real challenge. i think the afghan people have moved to a different place. i think particularly young people, not just those in school we talk so much about, but those who maybe have graduated from , afghan females and a lot of other afghans are not ready to go back in time. they are not ready to go back to pre-1978.pre-1990, when people talk about afghanistan and what will happen in the future, they immediately pull out a history book and say this is what will happen. i think it is a different afghanistan. it is still fraught with dangers because political weakness could break into violence. i don't think the taliban could take over. i don't think they are strong enough, but i think there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and the afghan people are plagued by the what happens next question. >> what kind of mistakes did the

allies make in afghanistan? >> a number. i am going to include afghans in our allies. we go back just to 9/11 and say we went in unexpectedly after the al qaeda elements that were there, we suddenly found ourselves having toppled the taliban government without having really thought what next. now we have a country that had been through about 20 years of war at that point. it was badly damaged and very little infrastructure or into humanpital, capital in terms of government or whatnot, and we thought we could do things more cheaply than we did. we thought the germans would do the police, the italians would do the courts, the americans would do the army and a few other things and we would slide out. that was not realistic. it was going to take a huge effort. in our haste and sometimes our ignorance, we allowed a number

of nontraditional leaders, warlords in many cases, to gather economic, political, and sometimes military power. we allowed them to get into places, sometimes where they had been before, and what that signal to the afghan population was that, here we go again. we are going back to the bad old days that really are what preceded the taliban. said if we arele just leaving the taliban, we are going to go back to what we hated pre-taliban. we lost confidence among many afghans during the 2001-2004 period. the taliban's opportunity. they came back in and said look at what is happening. you're going back to the bad old days and americans are not going to solve the problem. they started to find fertile ground, not in huge places, but slowly. they were able to grow their political power, and some cases, military.

of not seeingake that soon enough and not reacting to it enough when we did. resourced in many ways. the problems were being under resourced and understanding. we did learn the language enough. we didn't take a long-term, consistent approach to it. >> we did not leave a force there. do you believe if there had been a residual force of perhaps 10,000 people or more soldiers that we would not see the conflict we see today? >> there is no way to guarantee but the chances are we would have a better situation than we have now. i think it could've been a factor that would have given the sunnis more confidence that they would have the ability to be more fairly -- >> and perhaps persuade the

prime minister of that as well. >> we certainly lost a tremendous amount of our leverage with the prime minister when we were gone. i understand the desire to be gone, but it also signaled to the region that we had touched the stove and it was too hot and we were going to withdraw our hands. we do not want to stay places with huge numbers of people, we must stay engaged. >> if we had left a residual force, what would they have done? >> i think they largely would have done training of iraqi forces, logistical support and things, but to a certain degree, they also would have then a demonstrated commitment, a demonstrated partnership. >> the president prepared to negotiate to keep residual forces there. it wasn't like we did not want to have them. it was that the negotiations, as i understand it, were

unsuccessful. >> that is my understanding as well. >> and they may be under successful in afghanistan. >> they may be indeed. and the iraqi foreign minister is saying to afghanistan, do not make the mistake we did. keep some forces there. but they may. which brings me to this question. were one of the people who had a relationship with hamid karzai. i don't understand why after all this he still seems -- either he is just purely political and perhaps corrupt -- likely corrupt, and yet, after all america has done -- he would not be in power without america. he seems so resentful. there is a saying, give somebody something in the first person they hate us year. paper during the

vietnam war that said the paradox of counterinsurgency is the client state that you are helping is soon finds itself less committed to it than you. the donor cares more than the recipient. in the case of afghanistan, there are a number of things that were -- at work. they are trying to come to grips with emmett and -- imminent abandonment. they're trying to steel themselves to be emotionally and physically prepared. >> because that happened before. >> correct. >> i think president karzai and -- i certainly would not presume to do a psychological study, but he does not want to be portrayed as a puppet. >> as washington's man. >> that's right. >> he also thinks that in the future of afghanistan, he is

going to have to be very independent and not dance to our federal. on the other hand, he has also had enough of a painful what is now over many years. from 2001 -- that is the long out of therate palace. it is very difficult for him to travel. it is a long time for him to be secretaries of state, generals, ambassadors, and to find that in many cases he thinks that he hasn't been listened to or respected. >> respect is a big thing. >> it's a huge thing, and if you look at that and over time he gets increasingly frustrated is human. and he the hamid karzai i knew was a good man. he was a rational man. but he was a human. and he had all the frustrations and responses that other people

-- >> so how did you, as the general who came to see him, give us the secret, or at least your own sense of how you should engage him by showing him respect, by trying to gain his confidence, by trying to disavow him of his worst instincts? >> i have no secret. it is just dealing with people. the first thing was view him as a nation, leader of not as a client of the united states who was dependent on us. he is the sovereign leader of a nation. when i went to see him the first time, it was not tradition for americans to be in anything but our regular close.

green uniform to show him respect. i also tried to communicate to him that not only was this his nation, this was his war. commander of american troops, but i supported the afghan fight. he never viewed it as his war. he viewed it as something they were reluctantly allowing the west to fight on their territory. i tried to convince him that this is a war for national survival. this is your war. you have to play a role as commander-in-chief in doing that. establish that. there were times that i am sure he would like me to do , but i believe that by working as hard as we did on the relationship, there were also times when we each did

differently than our instincts thet have been to maintain relationship. the goal was to strengthen that to the point where he trusted me as a person and trusted me as a military commander, and i could be a good support for our ambassador, our secretary of state, our president and whatnot. never been ahas strong central government in afghanistan ever. that makes a central governments task that much more challenging. >> that's right. if you are president karzai, you don't have a political party. you don't have an automatic base of support. you are trying to triangulate between a number of different interest and foreigners, western interest, and the taliban. you are trying to balance between all of these, not going so far to one that the others enemies.

>> what are the three or four things you think are essential to annapolis and the air force academy, and to say the same thing to future air force -- future military leaders? >> the first is we tend to think war, and we tend to think we piece of to conquer a ground. war is about people. the army that wins is the one that thinks it has one. the one that is losing is the one that thinks it has lost. and the population decides which one wins. and that is very try tointuitive when you take them. go look at war. so that's the first thing. it's about people. you're not just moving stuff. you're influencing people.

say the general must have a great strategy. i have come to believe you could do strategy pretty quickly. you and i could sit here in an hour and come up with a workable strategy. the geniuses implementing it. to implement it, you have to do a number of things. first, you have to articulate it clearly and constantly. and have it understood. people have to absolutely believe that you are committed to it and that you will provide the kind of focus -- if you stay here strategy differently every day, they wait until the next day to hear the one they like. they withhold action. they have to believe it is consistent. they have to believe they are part of it. convince people, your soldiers, your civilians and people that this is a strategy that they not only will benefit from but that they must contribute to. they don't want to see general

mcchrystal's strategy. they want to see our strategy, and they have to accept that. exercise at people every level. say is it isuld about building trust. comeere is anything i have to believe -- and i go back and i look at the 2004 dream team. you say i am going to build a great team and so you say go get great talent. that does not equal a great team. a great team does have a component of talent, but the other component is what i call shared consciousness, which is a combination of trust, common ,urpose, and informed contextual understanding, so together this entity believes in the same thing and understands -- is informed enough to do that well. then you put this together and suddenly you have the necessary trulyients to have a

effective team. if you build a great team and reinforce that, you can do just about anything. if you don't focus on the team part, no matter how brave the strategy is, you're likely not to do well. >> as we saw with the first dream team. and they changed to a second dream team because of a different coach. this, theyour take on idea that the president, who supported the surge, and that you had recommended from the field some different levels of ,roops that might be necessary 70,000, whatever the numbers were, and you know them. and then there had been much debate and the president talked and listened to a lot of people, and then there was the leak of a memo. some people thought it came from you or people around you because "make the case

publicly" for what they felt was needed to do the job. who leaked the memo, and do you think it had a devastating impact or a significant impact on the relationship between the president and his generals in the field, especially you? >> i know that i didn't leak it, and i am almost 100% sure nobody on my staff did. we had started work on that in june. in early august. then it was back in d.c. for about three weeks. reason to leak it because in fact once it was leaked it made my job and our job much harder. much better to have the president and his team at the chance to digest it. i absolutely think the speculation is completely correct. i don't know who did it.

>> would you want to know or not very much? >> not very much at this point. these leaks are so damaging do is undercutey trust. they changed -- the debate should've been about what was in the assessment. the discussion should've been about -- it does i gave the assessment into pieces. the first piece was here is the assessment of the situation. here is what we have to do if we want to succeed. i didn't put anything about troops in there. i said you must change the way we fight this war or we will fail. if you accept this assessment, if you accept these conclusions, partlook apart to -- at two, and part two said these are the resources required, but don't do the resourcing if you don't believe the first part, because it will be good money

after bad. so, as we did this, we were very careful to try to make sure that -- that people understood that we were not giving a judgment on the war. i said to my staff, think of us as auto mechanics. we don't own the car, but we know what it will take to get the car in working order. try to be dispassionate. i think we did an effective job of that. that thetes has said president sent men and women into battle without supporting the mission. it seems the president had questions and was skeptical. is this working? if it is working, how do you explain this? i would hope the commander-in- chief -- i would hope the general would say that to his lieutenants, would you not? thet really did force

discussion. not all parts of it were comfortable are done perfectly, but i thought that level of focus on what are we trying to do and what is it going to take to do it was very healthy. supportedes says he all the president's decisions with respect to afghanistan. did you? >> yes. i was asked whether i recommended announcing a july 11 beginning of pulling forces out, but i told him, he asked me point-blank, can you accept that, and i said i could. i couldn't have. >> everyone is trying to understand the president and leadership on a whole range of foreign and domestic issues. give me your sense of him as a leader and as a commander in chief. >> i have a very limited aperture on the president. he hadhave found was sought very analytically about

afghanistan from the beginning. -- thought very analytically about afghanistan from the beginning. i think he was frustrated because as he was trying to understand that he was being given a drumbeat of decisions that had to be made before he had time to completely internalize what the situation was. being asked to make another commitment almost the day he took over. i think that caused frustration caused him to be skeptical that people were trying to push him too fast. the problem was events in the battlefield pushed that. i think he had a natural familiarity with how the military works. anyone would. that is not a criticism. anyone who deals with a different culture or group of

people, it takes a while to get that. doing that really, sort of for the first time as the president, you are not only trying to feel more comfortable with the culture, but you are doing it as their commander. i think he was trying very hard to balance the fact that he had responsibilities as the commander, his loyalty and leadership, military having a demeanor that has been developed over years -- we have uniforms that overtly describe where we have been, what we have done, what our rank is and what not. in some ways we benefit from the fact that it looks impressive. you enter a room and in some ways get more respect than you as an individual have earned. we use that persona. we feel comfortable in it. but at the same time it creates a divide between us and other people, and we pay a price for that, and we are partly to blame

for the fact that we benefit on the one hand but don't pay as much respect to the negative sides of that as we could. >> navy seals. i am going to talk about that later in the hours well. tell me how you see the navy seals, what they represent, and what kind of person comes out of that training. quick sure, and i'm going to expand it to the special operations units i have worked with. they're pretty unique. the first is, they have decided to volunteer for a more difficult but a more elite type of service, and they think in many cases it is because what they are really looking for is to belong to something that challenges them as individuals but allows them to sit at a table with people they admire and be considered an equal. that is a very addictive feeling if you are suddenly around people that otherwise would be

your heroes and they look at you as somebody they respect. to be in that. cs lewis wrote a wonderful about the inner ring. it is a little bit of a desire to be in the innermost ring. they're willing to pay a price in terms of how hard it is, how much time away and whatnot because being part of that very, very elite organization fulfills and them some needs. they are headstrong, often. you cannot lead them the same way you lead conventional troops. you have to engage them. the best way i have found to engage special operators is not to tell them what to do but to describe the problem. say i've got this problem. do you think it can be solved? they say a good. how would you do that? they describe it. would you be willing to do that? even though it might be a very

dangerous mission. and they make the call. >> what are you training? is a toughness of mind? >> its problem-solving, and it is problem solving not just from a logical sense, but from an emotional sense. i had a boss, back in mogadishu, in anful guy, we sat interaction one time. the communications in an aircraft had not worked. listen, whatever equipment you have to buy, i will buy for you. whatever experts you have to come in and train, do. whatever other exercises you need to do, i will schedule, no

excuses, no constraints, no excuses. suddenly you take away from people the idea that they have a ready reason why they can't be great. >> you take away the but. >> exactly. questions, too, because of what you are doing now. you have something called a mcchrystal book. you are writing another book that will capture the essence of some of these ideas. tell me what this is about. >> they are all related. i am fascinated by leadership in the current environment. , my i would tell you is experience in iraq and reinforced in afghanistan is for many, many years, really since taylor came up with scientific management, we have worshiped at the altar of efficiency. we break everything down to an individual task and if we do those tasks we are very efficient. and if we are very efficient, we are very effective.

what i think happened is, you can only get the most efficient solution -- you can solve for wife or how much xe you need only if you really know what -- muchan solve for y for how x you need only if you really know what y is. the new holy grail in my view is adaptability, building an organization that is organically, automatically designed to be adaptable. tois by necessity designed look at moving targets and develop new solutions constantly to do that. in that vein, two former seals who work for me and a young yale student who was a very bright guy, we are cowriting a book about this system. it is going to show the history of it, but it is also going to show not just military examples,

but business examples and government examples we have been researching, and some that our firm, the mcchrystal group, has been partnering with companies to do. we don't do what a lot of people expect ex military to do. we are partnered with a very different part of the environment and enjoying it. >> i think you are also part of the franklin project, which is what. >> the franklin project has me very excited. i believe citizenship in america has eroded. i think people tend to think of citizenship as my rights, my entitlements. i think citizenship is more than voting and paying taxes. it is a commitment to the nation and the commitment to other americans. i think muchd, comes when you have to commit to something, when you have to sacrifice, when you have to contribute. the franklin project is designed to create the opportunity for every young american between 18- 20 eight to do a year of fully conservation,,

health care, education, because only military -- military only needs a certain number, but to give every american that kind of experience for a year, serving with people from brooklyn, san diego, you name it, in areas that allow them to work together, force them to work together, but also, in that year, they will have sacrificed. they will have contributed. they will have helped build something. i think that will ultimately change how they view themselves as citizens. we are well into our effort. we have a bigs emmett plant in june landttysburg -- big summit in june in gettysburg. i'm very excited about that. >> it's great to have you here. general mcchrystal's book is called "my share of the task." it is now in paperback.

back in a moment.

>> we are in contact with tribal leaders from antwerp -- from and anbarovince who are -- province who are showing great courage and resistance. this is a fight for the iraqis. that is what the president and the world decided some time ago when we left iraq. >> the second battle of falluja in 2004 was the biggest battle involving american troops since the korean war. close to 100 troops were killed and 1000 wounded, but the mission was successful. cleared about data. this week, most of it has fallen back into cash cleared of al qaeda. fallujak, most of it -- was cleared of al qaeda. this week, most of it has fallen

back into their hands. that has come as a disappointment to many veterans. i am pleased and honored to have my guests at this table. welcome, all of you. i want to share with this audience a sense of -- take me to 2004 and why this battle was significant. i will read to you what was written at the time in "the new york times." proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity which brought soldiers close enough to look their enemies in the eye. for a correspondent who has covered a half dozen conflicts including the war in iraq in march 2003, the fighting team at the front lines in falluja was a qualitatively different

experience, a leap into a different kind of battle. tell me about it. >> fallujah at the time was the most violent part of the rack. the city was held by al qaeda and al qaeda affiliated forces. were in the third battalion first marines. we were operating outside the city for the first five months. it was rough. constant ied's. kidnappings in the surrounding areas. mortar attacks, rocket attacks, ambushes. we knew at some point we would have to go into the city to clear it out. >> it was off limits. u.s. forces, coalition forces could not enter the city. it was so bad that we were subject to indirect fire attacks on a regular basis. a 100 22ent was hit by millimeter rocket that killed our communication officer and severely wounded my predecessor.

the enemy had free will on the roads of ied attacks and small arm attacks. we could not enter the city. as i was doing my first battle tour of the area, it was sir, you have to run because if you walk we are going to be under fire. this was a thorn in all of her rack. the enemy was using the stronghold to launch attacks either west into ramadi or east into baghdad, so it had to be addressed. >> fallujah was close enough to a daily basis.on to put it in perspective, it was about the size of jacksonville, florida. this was not a small town. this is a large place where an organized insurgency and the forces of al qaeda could operate at the time. they could attack the surrounding area and then go

back, plan, have communications in all the resources they needed, and it was easy to defend. as went falluja, so went the rest of the rack. similarly, my regimen was operating outside falluja prior to the battle. after the first battle of falluja in april, 2000 four. we encountered a lot of the problems, the ied attacks, the indirect fire that we knew was stemming from the base in falluja. we knew that ever since the first battle of falluja, it was festering. we knew sooner or later we were going to have to go in there and clean it out, and that every day we waited there would be more fighters in the city, more heavily fortified with that or weapons and better plans. -- better preference weapons and better plans. it was our preference to go in a soon as possible. ofyou had the awful killing the quattro. the four.- of

>> march-april of 2004. the coalition wanted the iraqis to try to address the problem, but the iraqi forces inside the city were all being coerced by enemy fighters that were within the city. we would later find when we captured enemy strongholds that they had personal records of the police, the national guard, and the enemy was brutal enough to take it out on their family, whether it be their parents or their children, to make the police and the military do what they wanted them to do. but the iraqis that came to fight with us later on came from baghdad. there was more of a national spirit. i think one thing it is very important to remember is that inside the city, as the city was cleared, we found over 560 cachet of ammunition and arms inside the city. it was not like one or two ak- 47s. it was hundreds of pieces of artillery rounds, surface to air missiles, weapons that could

on anyen used battlefield. it was a very dangerous place. >> and when it was over, what were your thoughts? did you assume this was as fierce of fighting as you would see, but you have one and we of done something important in terms of this larger war? the fiercesttainly fighting we had seen up until that point and i certainly did not think it could get worse. i thought it was as bad as as it could get. >> and was it? >> i have not seen anything worse to this point. we have eliminated so many fighters and we had eliminated a safe haven. also lost your own. >> certainly, but i think the casualties were so overwhelmingly in our favor, like i said, we thought it was

going to have a significant impact on improving her rack. fallujah immediately became improving iraq. >> fallujah immediately became peaceful. you also had a lot of stories in the news, and we came home in january. you had the iraqi elections, the arab spring, the first arab spring. there is even a great jon stewart quote where he asks in the winter of 2005 if bush was elections had taken place in a rack and because of some of the changes taking -- in iraq and because of some of the changes taking place in the middle east. there was a time after the battle of falluja where it looked like we had really achieved something bigger than just clearing out the city. once the city was taken, we marina lose another

until the regimen rotated back. i cannot tell you what happened to the regiment that took our position. brought back to talk about the battle, i could hear theosions going off in distance. i joked that the commanders needed to come to falluja because now it was a safe area. we made a large gated community out of falluja. then we spread out into the countryside. we had local leaders asking us to do the same thing. clean out our area of the country. we attacked the enemy and continued to hunt them down into surrounding community so they would not have a chance to come back. >> the point is, falluja had meaning and sacrifice and meaning. >> absolutely. think one thing we often forget is how did falluja become a battle in the first place. that is often part of the story that is missing. it did not start with the blackwater contractors that were

killed. it started in 2003 when the 86th airborne -- there was a group of iraqis protesting outside of a school. shotswere fired or weren't fired. -she saidhe said situation, but a number of iraqis were winded and killed, iraqi civilians killed in the waser of 2003, and that really one falluja started to become bad. and then things got progressively worse through the remainder of 2003-2004. a victory -- i would not necessarily call it a victory. i would say that the operation itself was a success, but perhaps if we had operated differently from the get go, aere never would have been

need for that operation. >> has that story been told? >> at the time cnn covered it. but it is not a parof t narrative of falluja that you often hear. >> fallujah, if you look at the iraq, has a rack -- history of human trafficking, arms trafficking, drugs, prostitution. we would find out later that saddam hussein during his time would go through on a regular basis and clear the city of theinal activity, and military would actually occupy the city for times, and then they would pull the military forces out. we ran into the hotbed of criminal and enemy activity. it was an easy transit route for explore met -- for islamic extremists coming from the west. there were also criminal gangs that operated freely inside

falluja because there was no legitimate law enforcement from the ministry of the interior and the military presence was completely lost inside falluja. >> i don't want to add more to this than you do, for sure, but time andme to today's what you saw has happened and what is going on in a rack -- ---- in iraq >> we talk about this a lot. we get a chance to see each other a lot. place we invested a lot. we lost friends. we thought. and you want to see , and you want to see a workout for the best. when i thinkally, about the friends and comrades who gave their life in the city of falluja, i try not to think that they gave their life or anything we were doing in the

that they gave, their life for the man on the left and the man on the right, and that has meaning for what we do each day and for the rest of our lives. tory not to get tied anything political in nature or to the future of a country we really have no control over. >> i agree. these 18-20-year-old kid, when they join the marine corps, their patriotism is community- based. they think about their high school friends, their favorite .occo shop it is not unnatural -- it is not a national, macro sense, the way it is talked about. when they get into the marine corps, it is the sense of community that they cherish. when you talk about falluja, success for them is returning and maintaining the

respect of the man on the left and the man on the right. everyone i fought with in falluja did just that. from a tactical sense, the battle had to be fought in november of 2004. five days after, president bush was reelected. this was just a few years after 9/11. it allowed a little bit of momentum to happen there. success, the locals taking back over power. and everything that has happened since then, really, whether we eave an agreement and art

training the iraqi army or not, hindsight is blind. witnessing is arab democracy at work. we are still working on it here after 236 years. country thatnot a asked for democracy. there was not a revolution that started it. i think what we are seeing here is the iraqi version of democracy that all of us are going to kind of become isfortable with, and it similar to stories around the middle east. to ask theuraged me question, is it worth that? there has been a lot of press recently about whether or not people should ask that question and whether or not people who have not served can ask the question. my personal feeling is that

citizens of this country have an thatation to asked question, because otherwise, what are we doing in these places if we do not have a citizenship asking the hard questions. when you read that it has been recaptured and there is a new flag over the city of falluja, does that change the answer to the question was it worth it? >> it is a great question and i think it depends on how you measure was it worth it. , a friend ofkid mine who was like an older brother died in a car accident. he was five years older. i remember going to his funeral and the rabbi told all of the , he said, you all now have an obligation to live

your life for john's licensure. whenever we lost someone in -- 's lessons are. whenever we lost someone in a iraq, i would say that to my guys. they gave their lives so that we could live full lives, so that we could have families and have productive lives. was it worth it? i don't know yet. i think that depends on what we do with our lives. >> i think the question is is there a changing mindset from what we saw in iraq? went in, about 7000 iraqis joined us. when those soldiers who were with us every day would see locals come up to u.s. soldiers first because they trusted us, that would start things changing. they saw how we protected and serve the people and we were starting to see small changes in

the iraqi military. taking out five or six in the crowd are firing into the sky, now they were going back and pushing in slowly. >> after we cleared out all of activity, a lot changed. the subsequent fall does not change whether or not it was worth it because the 18 or 19- year-old marine who went into make iraqnot go into a better place. he wasn't that concerned at the high level, like ryan said. he went into the military to fight for his friends, his loved ones and his family. fought for there, he the brothers beside him. that is who he thought for. that is who he sacrificed for. wasong as he did that, it worth it. we do have an obligation to fight on for them. i feel like their sacrifice is

worth it no matter what he cause i am here. because we are all here and because those men made it so that we are here. >> there is a great scene at the end of saving private ryan where ryan is now an 80-year-old man and he is at the gravesite of who gave hisys life so that he could return to , didamily and he asks them i live a good life? he did not ask them is europe a .etter place he asks did i give a good life. >> i said this a couple of days ago. we the people are the ones who need to answer this question. since world war ii, looking at definitelyietnam, iraq and afghanistan, there were

elections held. the one whot was made these decisions. we the citizens of the republic gave them the power. we all need to look at ourselves and say when we enter these conflicts, is it worth it he for before we go in. going forward from here, we have to maintain that in our head. i recently compared this to caisson, and it is very similar. american blood was spilled to take this piece of ground. every military action has a timestamp on it. these things go when they come. and like we said, we fight for each other, but us as a nation -- when you look at the repercussions of this war, as we go forward, we really need to

concentrate before we commit our troops again. is it worth it? is for every single person to decide ahead of time instead of thinking about it and living with regret later. >> i think much more important is what happens to us as a country. do we have a citizen rate the becomes -- citizenry the becomes more involved because of the lessons of iraq and afghanistan. >> thank you for your service and thank you for being at this table. thank you for having this conversation. >> we will see you next time. ♪

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>> this is "taking stock" for thursday, january 23, 2014. i'm pimm fox. today we're going to quench your thirst for earnings. coffee and water. starbucks and microsoft report their earnings as of the close of trading today. we'll tell you what those numbers mean for shareholders and customers. i'll introduce to you two local coffee shop owners and find out how they are faring against the java giant. plus aquafina. the latest ad campaign set to debut during the grammy awards. all that and t