completely pointless war 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 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 been as lonnie or a friend who been in who's thoroughly infiltrated the government particularly ministries of interior you have the hakani network the senior how connie is still alive 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 and so. i mean i saw as well this i mean i saw as not change i mean i listen to the 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 kind of 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 guerrilla wars in angola and mozambique. 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 it will increase the i e d's will increase that they have been increasing august has been the worst month for u.s. troops 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 position 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 and the taleban or the opposition groups i think what it is is that you have to forget the. label's you

this is how the aid groups work the ones with experience they look at an area and they say ok who are the key players here and they will talk to everyone and they'll talk to nato they'll 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 two of my friends were murdered were executed american aid workers ten of them european f.b.i. and by and by armed 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 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 eighty n.g.o.s the ngos with

a lot of experience but they cannot deal and they shouldn't 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 will be hard to see how their 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 armed you know with mercenaries with armed contractors should not be working afghanistan and but they realize nation that it's going to take twenty thirty years that there are no quick fixes but you want thirty years after we've stopped for now though let's be generous for now let's say you know but the thing is. it's not going to work quickly and the focus has got to be on the countryside where eighty percent seventy. 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 after 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 interpreters for nato for the world bank for the un they should be better paid because they're all supporting twenty thirty people and their families more money doing that exactly i think they should be paid enough so they can go work in the rural areas 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. have you ever run across here you know you know solve it here the president of south sudan no i never never thought

we might see any case. you have never been an embedded journalist you know 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 are 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 you 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 that ordinary afghans are caught between the insurgents and the nato forces and you know afghans are survivors they know what i mean that 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 you know 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 the world bank trip and i was talking to various people and i we did one of these trips into 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 could 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 had the opportunity of going somewhere and of course the nato argues we have to protect you and so you have to stay with us and if you saw in this context as well that glove exactly. in the minute we have

love. what what do you feel in your book killing the cranes is the most important lesson you've learned you'd like to share with us of these three decades and i think that first of all. afghanistan and the afghans are this very diverse country and you cannot assess up at the same 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 is though is 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 trying to work with 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 hope there is a strategy it would thank you so much for being such as a great pleasure for writing this brilliant book 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 dot com. coming up it's been a dark and furry week in washington oh and yeah the weather's been bad too i'll debate some of biggest topics with my panel of guests and tonight's big issue of. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions it's time to break through it through it if you hadn't made who can you trust no one who is you and you who with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sackfuls when nobody dares to

ask we do our tea question more. are you ready to rumble it's time for friday's big picture on the wall where i sit down with three expert political commentators to debate the week's top stories on our panel tonight heather sir mark conservative strategist and associate at blueskin solutions blogger and heather stormont out karl fresh democratic

strategist and syndicated columnist a car first dot com and brian darling columnist of human events contributor to red state dot com and big government dot com and director of government studies at the heritage foundation and well. let's get right into it the president gave a speech last night and he kicked it off by saying basically it was about politics his williams. this past week reporters have been asking what will this speech mean for the president will mean for congress how will it affect the polls and the next election. so how will it affect their polls the next election what's at stake here was wasn't it seems to me this was the opening speech of the two thousand and twelve presidential election. i mean president obama is the one who has the very negative crewel 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 you bill so you know the republicans do have a bill publicans and the house have passed and eleven 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 for. job creators oh you mean tax cuts for billionaires i'm talking about. solutions that would help the average person and help the unemployed i know a lot of the 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 can create two point nine million jobs outside the united states when they were shutting down two point four million jobs

here brian what thoughts on the president rolled out his warmed over stimulus stimulus two point zero now this. doesn't mean failure bismuth failure i can't imagine congress would be crazy enough to pass a bill similar to the president's failed stimulus to do that's going to use the word stimulus anymore because it's so yeah they love to have to go through some sort of because it doesn't stimulate the economy of it is great to hear. colleagues on the right from the call congress crazy. but let's be honest i mean facts don't lie the congressional. budget office has shown that the stimulus. not big enough to do what what we all wanted it to do and that 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 fact we have a we have a graphic that's

a great as we can bring this up i don't know if the answer is right behind us here . full screen and so the over here and that dotted line is when the recovery act and again. you know so why did our congress are so poor because it was or say there wasn't enough money to put in and i love this from what i love is this money come from i love my conservative friends that go 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 are not real people like the people the pave the roads that we travel to get here are not real people like that at least that pretty represent real people jobs and are just going term jobs that are going to these are cagers the cost of the least of these are 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 all education is not a federal responsibility the federal government should have no business giving

money to states to do education also there so that 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 just all the yeah by force of nature 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 dog money into the economy did to those tax people more or to borrow more just for 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 and. discuss this is 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 anybody could make it in america for decades now americans have watched that compact erode they have seen the decks too often stacked against. and they know that washington has not always put barry interest first now this is the deal that basically franklin roosevelt in response to the thirty two election in response to the american people demanding it made with the american people which was if you graduate from high school and keep your nose cleaner in your good citizen and work hard work work a forty hour week you can actually make enough to buy a house raise your family which 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 world of government to make sure that there's a decent job government used to regularly trade policy to make sure that we can't manufacture in here greg a 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 but f.d.r. and truman and eisenhower and nixon and kennedy and johnson all believed it 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 think 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. it is an emerging arcades or another one point five trillion in debt we've been borrowing from future generations and this is now we're going to be economics that started with yesterday liberals and conservatives are a lot of office we had seventy seven hundred billion dollars and when he left office we had three trillion dollars in debt and the reason that we have the deficit that we have today is that george w. bush put dr grossman he put five yet but it's right and when reagan was president we didn't just talk about carter so he put five trillion dollars on the books a 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 to one point

three trillion next year just because i think this is more 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 and i think i think that's a good point and i think what reagan did was he exposed to the new deal was not actually supporting long term middle class because he was the one in one nine hundred sixty four i believe who 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 scheme he was so he wasn't he was she was uncomfortable years it's never filled with understandable that the at that he started unsustainable that when you just alluded to it not only parties all purity right now is 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 trust you know. why because i don't you recession and youngers you not believe that all the security don't believe it but it's there no i mean it's not about time it's not i think that's

a good thing i think that there should be a paradigm shift but we should be are lining up on government that we should see are and i believe you know you're a bootstrap you know 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 we had here is obviously not waste this years we've had this paradigm shift this this reaganomics which is like. instead of waiting for social security get a for a one k. you know instead of having a pension get a second and ira i mean it's we did it we did she have a right it's been happening slowly and gradually and now republicans are coming out and actually kind of bragging about it you know everybody that's because. we all know it's very easy to establish a government program or anything it's easier to build and i mean these are destroyed that is to build in most cases except when it comes to government so you can really if you can build a government program you got to just let me ask you you agree with brian that that if the people of the united states say we want our government to operate in a way that beer and cheese there's a middle class and if you graduate from high school or college you actually can

have a job the government shouldn't do that any way you can i'm coming up to the mandates of americans they are going to lose you they are just i don't know which american people have they haven't given a mandate it's raising the rate of a good solution that's called libertarian magic dust and they just sprinkle it over the country and everything is going to you know you believe it they're going to shoot a selfish course i do of course that my family was going to get out. without 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 compact 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 oh yes everything if you're sitting at a rate it's always a price cuts and war that's not always true fundamentally our country was established we were not guaranteed happiness we were guaranteed the right to pursue you were guaranteed anything but well you have 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 this and that you know what i was a skating for it was called we the people that they were escaping from was the domination of the british east india company which others 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 and t. in the ships in the boston harbor that was thrown into the into the it was the east yeah it was a real break in the little guy who was a real or against a corporate job on his corporation handing out green projects to his pals and

trying to use the federal government to funnel 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 this this whole notion of . and you know there's no winner or loser i think in this debate the american people and american people but i am an american person and i'm talking about it was i and both sides will claim that i just i mean 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 i think that the media often 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 the 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 would know that he would have laughed off that stage if he was alive healthy and

able to run for the presidency this republican party would not have stood for his tax increases they wouldn't have stood for spending in his government his hiring of fake workers in the government they wouldn't stand for him great to amnesty to undocumented immigrants or dealing with negotiating with terrorists and to row. and iran they wouldn't they would not accept the fact that he signed 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 open exactly now they're going to ready already there's not a litmus test on these issues every single candidate on that stage with the exception of jon 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 side the flood he's like the the economic level of the republican party. who's had all the cyclists he also runs the reagan legacy foundation and i've never seen something that is so positively hilariously positioned between a party that would laugh at reagan today based on his tax increases we have we have we're just going i can't say that i don't i don't see i look to the left 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 and i don't know it's going to be who ever is going to be the nominee people are going to unite behind that person because i don't want to promise. you that i believe either way. obama is what's motivating the republican party you know on what mitch mcconnell said the liberal goal of republican the said it was to make about a one term president and they felt to cripple the economy so that we can't work. so

that no matter what was on the table the on. branding health care down our throats which you know small talk about creating new jobs and supporting job growth is all going to undermine in two years when our health care bill comes into effect and businesses that are being crushed diapers you know i think the republican base the sixty million dollars or the little. but we have sock puppet money when we have to provide it with our last question the next republican debate is monday night right on c.n.n. and so if you could ask any of the question any other candidate one candidate one question would be. i would ask michele bachmann which gets her fake eyelashes. if it were i don't know you've been asked but i would also ask michele bachmann during the speech the other night senator to ask rush they said no presidential questions so i would have asked her a great question because you can ask those when she's on the presidential campaign trail so i thought about it well just ask her but i'm going to guns do you own and you have a hunting license if any of it candid it's one of the hunting license i don't know

if i can support it ok and my question would be apropos that is rick perry have the heads of the people he's executed on you know or just the pictures on his bedroom or. and. yeah i know why rush execution thank you. thank you very much for giving us the great deal after the break i'll highlight the most important takeaway message from president obama's speech last night and ideally. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right.

i think. on the well. we have the government says we're going to keep you safe get ready for the freedom . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry is a big issue. for

. just a moment i want to put aside the politics and the 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 i 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 and get the car the home that occasion all the trappings of a comfortable american middle class lifestyle the president spoke to the steel this compact right off about. 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 and if you raise once in a while if you did the right thing you could make anybody could make it in america but that deal fundamental contat contract between americans and our government has been broken thanks to.