they said this is a completely pointless war that we're being used as political poems and we should be negotiating with everyone and this is what it's all about it's about everyone being involved when we refer to the use the expression challah but i think we should drop it it's really an armed opposition the taliban are part of it there's has the islami friend go between who's thoroughly infiltrated the government particularly ministries of interior you have the hakani network the senior he used to live with someone we worked with but was actually a very good commander during the one nine hundred eighty s. but who developed a hatred for the united states because of this perception of invading afghanistan so that the idea. of me i saw as well this i mean i saw as not change i mean i listened to it states interview the other night with the secretary of defense and i i was really wanted which country was talking about because it's certainly not the temple i know and it's i think they're completely in another world and this is not

the reality the reality is that you can talk about improvements being made that you're gaining of the taliban it's a guerrilla war and i've experienced through the wars and goal of mozambique ethiopia. if they don't have an offensive for three months that doesn't matter what is going to happen what is happening to the assassinations will increase the i.e.t.f. will increase that they have been increasing all this has been the worst month for u.s. troops and nato troops in afghanistan so there is no military option and the military who really know afghanistan they know that they know that and the thing is they say well we need security but the fact is when they leave and if they leave it's certain that many areas will be taken over by the opposition groups but it may not matter because there are many hardliners in the government in the karzai government who are corrupt or whatever who are even more hardline than the taleban or the opposition groups i think what it is that you. forget the labels. this is how the

aid groups work the ones with experience they look at an area and the say ok who are the key players here and they will talk to everyone and they'll talk to nato go talk to local elders they'll talk to the government and they basically try and see what is needed the best security your best security is are good relations with local communities now this can backfire i mean in august last year my friends were murdered were executed american aid workers ten of them. by my arms insurgents we don't know who they were they could have been bad it's they probably were insurgents and because there is now confusion between the soldier and the aid worker this is been brought together by the p.r.t. is this mixing of the two and the fact is that they don't have mercenaries they don't have armed guards protecting them they rely on the local

population and we hate being the lead the eighty n.g.o.s the ngos with a lot of experience but they cannot deal and they should deal with massive amounts of money we've given this these contracting companies have no understanding of afghanistan they go in with quick fixes there's no long term approach they take massive overheads i mean i think european and american taxpayers would be hard to see how that money is being misspent in afghanistan and yet we continue to give contracts to these people i mean i think these companies should be kicked out any company that needs that needs to work with arms you know with mercenaries with armed contractors should not be working afghanistan and but they realize ation that it's going to take twenty or thirty years there are no quick fixes but you've only got thirty years after we've stopped for not a little special interest for now let's you know but the thing is. it's not going to work quickly and the focus has got to be on the countryside where they. percent

seventy five eighty percent of the population live they are so resentful that they've seen all this money come in and they keep asking where has it all gone we have seen no improvement i mean they have been improvements kids seven million kids going to school now in africa in ten years and i should you know damn well hope so but the thing is there are still seven million more who are going to school and you know health has improved you know many women there are no people doctors because a lot of the qualified doctors in afghanistan are working as drivers as a target is for nato for the world bank for the u.n. they should be better paid because they're all supporting twenty thirty people in their families is more money doing that exactly i mean they should be paid enough so they can go work in the rural areas and so we i think we have to go back to the basics i revise what we're doing the. by the way you mentioned a number of other conflicts around the world do you ever run across over here you know probably you know sort of here the president's house or down no i've never never never but we might expect in any case. you have never been an

embedded journalist no you know most of what americans and i guess probably the rest of the western world knows about afghanistan and the region in general has come from embedded journalists why is that information so fundamentally flawed. i think there's some very good reporters on the ground but a lot if not the majority of journalists go to afghanistan they are intrigued by the whole military thing and you know reporting for the boys and girls of the front when they go in as an embed it's comfortable you know you travel with the troops eat well you go to bed and those things make a difference but you know shoots at uli you know people who shoot back exactly but you don't see the afghans and even if you're with soldiers who are with you to go into the edges and you interview people they're not going to tell you what they think because after ordinary afghans are caught between the insurgents and the nato forces and you know afghans are survivors they know what i mean they they know that

eventually the nato troops will pull out but the insurgents will be there so there are insurgents are not monolithic no no no no exactly so so that's right and you know it's that so the thing is that when you go in and just report the military situation you really have no idea what's going on in afghanistan and i i went to helmand as with the world with the world bank trip and i was talking to various people and i we did one of these trips into a town and you know i've been to a lot of towns of my own and i felt it was a show and you know we talk to these elders and all i can think of at the time was you know what do they really think i'd like to come back here in my own and in fact in a sense i wouldn't mind where reporters should go back to the days of vietnam where reporters were not embedded they could leave in the morning go out on a plane come back in the evening but they have the opportunity of going somewhere and of course nato argues we have to protect you and so you have to stay with us

and if you sign this contract as well that glove exactly. in the minute we have left what what do you feel in your book killing the koreans is the most important lesson you've learned and like to share with these three decades i think that first of all afghanistan and the afghans are this very diverse country. and you cannot assess i guess and base one region what's happening in helmand does not happen elsewhere there are areas of peace but afghans probably the best thing is that afghans are people who do. and they all know each other in one way or another the tragedy of those that right now we're killing off successfully with it with the drones the very commanders we should be talking to these the thirty thirty five year olds the forty year olds who they're tired of war you know i mean afghans are tired of war for the new ones replacing them are young afghans brought up in pakistan twenty one twenty two years old these are hard liners they have no allegiance anymore with afghanistan no sense of tradition and the older afghans the

above the older you know about thirty complain that they these people do not respect the traditions any more so the more we kill you know what looks good on paper it's actually undermining the whole process structure it would thank you so much for me but it was a great pleasure and for writing this really i think thank you very much to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations of great minds. coming up it's been a dark and very week in washington oh and yeah the weather's been bad i'll debate some of the biggest topics with my panel of guests for tonight's big picture well.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. on the well. we never got the shows for the safe get ready for freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you say. i'm sorry is

a big issue. for . for. are you ready to rumble it's time for friday's big picture rumble where i sit down with three expert political commentators and debate the week's top stories on our panels and i'd rather see conservative strategist and associate at blueskin solutions blogger at heather storm oh dot com. erratic strategist and syndicated

columnist for car first dot com and brian darling almost of human events contributed red state dot com and big government dot com and director of government studies of the herd foundation. let's get right into it the president gave a speech last night and he kicked it off by saying basically it wasn't all politics here's what is. this past week reporters have been asking what will this speech mean for the present. will mean for congress i will affect the polls and the next election. yes how will it affect their polls the next election what's at stake here was doesn't it seems to me this was the opening speech of the two thousand presidential election. i mean president obama is the one who has the very negative cruel rating you know he has a lot to prove a negative approval rating in washington oh yeah but you know he's he's the

incumbent he's the incumbent and he's trying to demonstrate to people that they should continue to support him i mean he's got a long road ahead of him and you know last night was supposed to be about jobs and how to create jobs and we didn't see a plan he said it was a bill we haven't seen your bill so you know the publicans do have a bill and publicans have and the house have passed a levin bills that the senate will not even discuss you know about privatizing medicare and things that i'm talking about job growth bills that have passed. job creators tax cuts for billionaires i'm talking about solutions that would help the average person and help the unemployed i already have that billionaires that are hurting right now. these billionaires have have done so well over the last fifteen years they really need more help because if we give them even more money if we tax them even less they promise to create jobs this time pinky swear they have i mean you could create a two point nine million jobs outside the united states when they were shutting

down two point four million jobs here brian what are your thoughts on the president rolled out his warmed over stimulus stimulus two point zero this is a sort of talking point of a million failure it is more failure i can't imagine congress would be crazy enough to pass a bill similar to the president's failed stimulus and if you think that's going to use the word stimulus anymore because it's so yesterday you know i love you as they go through some sort of because it doesn't stimulate the economy that it is great to hear. colleagues on the right friendly call congress crazy. but let's be honest i mean facts don't lie the congressional. budget office has shown that the stimulus . big enough to do what what we all wanted it to do and what it did do was it saved a couple million jobs and it created a couple million jobs if you look at unemployment in this country we started hitting the skids at the end of the bush administration those last four months is when we really started to ramp up unemployment and that continued for a few more months into the obama administration in fact we have a we have a graphic graphs are great is we can. i don't know it's very it's right behind us

here and full screen and so that here and that dotted line is run the recovery act yeah. you know so i cannae so poor because it was our shape there was a money to put in and i love what i love is this money come from i love my conservative friends. don't you know they talk about these jobs that the president and congress created with the stimulus like they're not real jobs like the nurses that take care of our sick or not real people but the people that pave the roads that we traveled to get here are not real people like the police the protected are real people in jobs and their jobs and term jobs that are going to these are cagers the economy or police or any of their firemen you know it is remarkable how ungrateful people are to these people that our government workers they do a lot of stuff for us you will teachers first of education is not a federal responsibility the federal government should have no business giving

money to states to do education so let somebody is unfortunate enough to be born in poor appalachia screw them you know you live in a state the state takes care of education destroy the outdoor stage and this is for a party that denies evolution it's remarkable how much these people believe in economic darwinism. capitalism how about that it's not castle isn't it isn't a dog the money of the economy. people more to borrow more just for but fakes if this is this is actually you know the perfect segue into the next clip that i have from the president here this is where he basically said this is the end of the raw deal and the beginning of the new deal are being discussed and president obama. these men and women grew up with faith in an america where hard work and responsibility paid off or if you stepped up did your job and were loyal to your company that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits maybe a raise once in

a while if you did the right thing you could make it anybody could make it in america for decades now americans have watched that compact erode they have seen the decks to open stacked against. and they know that washington has not always put their interests first now this is the deal that basically franklin roosevelt in response to the thirty two election in response to the american people demand he made with the american people which was if you graduate from high school and keep your nose clean or in your good citizen and work hard work and work a forty hour week you can actually make enough to buy a house raise your family push kids through school have a vacation retire with a pension have a life with dignity just if you're just a decent average middle class american that deal basically lasted from the from the

forty's when it was really put into place and you know it's really started working through the fifty's through the sixty's through the seventy's and began to come to a screeching end in the eighty's i think the reagan revolution was a genuine revolution where now the deal is you're not actually entitled to a decent job that's not the role of government to make sure that there's a decent job government used to regulate trade policy to make sure that we can't manufacture in here tax policy to make sure the c.e.o.'s generally didn't make more than thirty times what workers did so they keep their money in their factories or their it workers better all that stuff has been blown up and it seems to me like in his speech last night president obama was the first president since ronald reagan or the first president since jimmy carter left to actually talk about the new deal to say you know we're going even clinton said the era big government is over is is it possible that the role of government actually should be what what f.d.r. and truman and eisenhower and nixon and kennedy and johnson all believed should be

which is to build a middle class or is the role of government simply to stand back and let the billionaires run things so i do the same stand back and let the free market work what do we what have we gotten with all these great policies that the liberals advocate we've got fourteen point five trillion. we have is an emerging case or another five trillion in debt we've been borrowing from future generations and this is now what you're describing reaganomics that started with. yes it. was the way it was read office we had seventy seven hundred billion dollars and when he left office we had three trillion dollars and the reason that we have the deficit that we have today is that george w. bush put the right person and you put five yes that's right and when reagan was president all we did was talk about carter so he put five trillion dollars on the books and new spending this president has put one point four trillion dollars on the books new spending and we're blaming him for spending this is ridiculous the president has put us out of balance by one point six trillion this year i want one

point three billion next year to stop it i think this is where fundamental moral and political issue is what is the is is government here to make sure that we have a middle class or is government not here to make sure that we have a i think i think that's a good why and i think what reagan did was he exposed to the new deal was not actually supporting long term middle class because he was one in one nine hundred sixty four i believe he said so security was being sold to us as insurance when really it was welfare he's the one who said that he's the one who exposed as a ponzi and he was so he wasn't he was so she was under several years it's never failed was understandable to be at the top of the starting unsustainable at that point you just lose this will really be right now a solvent for the next twenty seven years and really eighty percent about if it's really a trust fund can you show it to me across the years and go into. my recession and younger you not believe at all the social security not believe it but it's there no i mean it's not the time i think that's a good thing i think that there should be

a paradigm shift that we shouldn't be relying on government that we should see are we going i later do you know your bootstraps not if you don't have any boots you know what i'm saying is it's going to require a paradigm shift and we have years to do that you know what it's like to be had here is to say now place this years we've had this paradigm shift is this reaganomics which is like. instead of waiting for social security get a four hundred one k. you know sort of having a pension get a set and ira i mean we didn't we have had way right it's been happening gradually and now republicans are coming out actually kind of bragging about it you know everybody wants because you know what we haven't seen as many we all know it's very easy to establish a government program or anything it's easier to build and i mean these are the story that has to build in most cases except when it comes to government so you just you know you can build a government program you have to just like to spend as much hard as you do you agree with brian. that if the people of the united states say we want our governments operate in a way that guarantees that there's a middle class and if you graduate from high school or college you actually can

have a job that the government shouldn't do that any of you coming out here is going to get the mandates of americans they have no other solution they are as i already have near people have they have been given a mandate and say the right of a better solution that's called libertarian magic dust and they just sprinkle it over the country and everything's going to be oh you're leaving they're going to should establish or so i do of course in my family when i was really little question about. unions that were there were given the right to organize and make sure that my father was able to have a living that supported a family he could afford a house in los angeles which he would not be able to do today as a starting out sheriff in los angeles. this is the compact that we had in this country and that we're losing because we would rather hand over the retirements to social to to wall street what happened to my four one k. when the economy hit the skids because of george w. bush i lost almost three quarters of the value contract we have now we have medicare medicaid social security and we're stealing from future generations to pay

for these unsustainable programs right now we have massive yes everybody if you're sitting here right actually save i started a war just my way through fundamentally our country was established we were not guaranteed happiness we were guaranteed the right to pursue you are guaranteed anything. less what you know as a woman. i'm saying i'm not saying that what i'm saying is that the country as a whole was not stablished to say ok let's take care of everybody and let's make sure that every is guaranteed doesn't have any other options i would like a skating front it was called we the people what they were escaping from was the domination of the british east india company which ever said that it was you know it wasn't a government was actually a corporation which was basically running america jamestown was a corporate town virginia was owned by the east india company the very first settlement was these an indian company the team on the ships in the boston harbor that was thrown into the it was the east you know it was a river a she knew right along was a rule of or against a corporate job amish corporation handing out green projects to his pals and trying

to use a better government to bundle money to to his his buddies it's called crony capitalism and he's using the federal government to do that and that's that's wrong i hope you would agree with that i find this whole notion of. and you know there's no winner or loser i think in this debate other than maybe american people and and and but when you're american people and i am an american person i'm talking about you have to say i am both sides will claim that i just i mean both let's talk about the republican debate if we can for a second it looks like this is pretty much down to a two man race perry versus romney is this an invention of the media or is genuinely is this the best the republican party has to offer and i think that the media off that invents stories like this we are months and months from the first votes being cast it does not take much for one person to shake up a primary we've seen that cycle after cycle after cycle i'm not sure who won the debate but i can tell you who lost the debate ronald reagan lost the debate he wouldn't he would have laughed off that stage if he was alive healthy and able to

run for the presidency ago this republican party would not have stood for his tax increases they wouldn't have stood for his standing in his government his hiring of fake workers in the government they wouldn't stand for him greatly amnesty to undocumented immigrants or dealing with negotiating with terrorists and to row. in iran they wouldn't go they would not have accepted the fact that the side choice legislation allowing women to have more free access to abortion in california because you could say the same thing about president obama i mean he basically has established this. obama health care plan that funnels money to help the health care industry that i would think that liberal democrats would like he's expanded all these wars we open up fronts in libya we may be opening up another iran already already there's not a litmus test on these issues every single candidate on that stage with the exception of john huntsman who did not sign did not sign

a pledge to never raise taxes ever ever except ever even in times of war what's funny about that is that grover norquist who has had all these people signed this pledge he's like the economic model of the republican party. in this he also runs the reagan legacy foundation and i've never seen something that is so positively hilariously juxtaposition between a party that would laugh at reagan today based on his tax increases we have just as you say though i don't i don't see. the left loves to try to paint the republican candidates as being all out there and you know that there's no one electable and i think that's so wrong i think that there one thing whoever is the nominee i don't know it's going to be anything can change whoever is going to be the nominee people are going to be united behind that person because i don't want obama. and i get out of the race obama is what's motivating the republican party you know i'm with mitch mcconnell said the goal of republican the senate was to make obama one for president and they help to cripple the economy so that we can't recover. so that no

that's not true look i'll look it will be a lot of me if i were having health care down our throats which you know talk about creating new jobs and supporting job growth it's all going to undermine in three years when our health care bill comes into effect and businesses could be crushed by a prison because if the republicans are sixty billion dollars out of the little. i mean not only that but we have to sock puppet money when we have to quit for the last question the next republican debate is monday night on c.n.n. and so if you could ask any of the question any of the candidates one candidate one question what would it be. i would ask michele bachmann which hits or fake eyelashes. i don't know you've been asked but i would also ask michele bachmann during the speech the other night sort of how to ask question i said no presidential question so i would have asked her again question because you can ask those when she's on the presidential campaign trail so i thought about as well just ask your doctor. right how many guns do you know name do you have a hunting license if any of the candidates don't have

a hunting license i don't know if i can support them. and my question would be apropos of that does rick perry have the heads of the people he's executed you know or just the pictures on his mother was. any. yeah i know the eyelash executing you know. thank you very much you just. have to break i'll highlight the most important takeaway message from president obama's speech last night and i deal with . what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it through people who can you trust no one who is you know in view with a global mission where we had a state controlled capitalism school sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

just for a moment i want to put aside the politics and economics of president obama's speech and talk about what i think is the most important takeaway message from thursday night and that is for the first time in more than thirty years we have a president standing up to fight against ronald reagan's raw deal and pushing for

a return to the new deal in america and used to be a time in this country where the deal between us and our government was pretty straightforward and that was if you worked hard kept you nose clean you could achieve the american dream you get the car the home the vacation all the trappings of a comfortable american middle class lifestyle the president spoke to the steel this compact right off the bat. these men and women grew up with faith in an america where hard work and responsibility paid off were if you stepped up did your job and were loyal to your company that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits maybe a raise once in a while if you did the right thing you could make anybody could make it in america but that deal the fundamental contact contract between americans and our government has been broken.