dee dee myers. thank you. i want to start with the interview with the vice president. he did make some news in various areas. george, the vice president said we're not engaging in nation building in afghanistan. if you look at the cover of this week's "newsweek" we thinking afghanistan. nation building, is it working? are we doing nation building in afghanistan or not? >> we are. nation building is what counterinsurgency is as defined by david petraeus. it's to protect the people, make them loyal. by giving them local services. investing in the government, in effect. that's nation-building. which means the obama policy in afghanistan is much more ambitious than the bush policy. the vice president said we're making considerable progress against al qaeda, which is our primary target. we're taking out significant numbers of the leadership in al qaeda. the latter is true. but they're doing it in pakistan. because, as you established three weeks ago on the program, you asked leon pannetta, how many al qaeda do you think are in afghanistan? he said, 50 to 100, maybe less. >> one thing i found interesting. that i thought might be of interest to you. toward the end of the interview when he was talking about how great it would be to have iraq this shining example of democracy in the middle of the middle east. does that resonate? at all? >> imagine that. imagine making that case. these are the kinds of arguments that you make when public support starts to wane. as the commander in chief, and obama still gets decent marks in his capacity as commander in chief. republicans actually are encouraged that general petraeus is headed to afghanistan. to replace stan mcchrystal. where i think this will get complicated, where you already see his numbers in afghanistan sliding, is when he starts talking about timetables. when they promise to pull troops out. it deflates the morale of the military. public is very smart. voters are very smart. when they hear them talk out of both sides of their mouth, it's difficult. >> let's talk about the timetable. clarence, on the roundtable. for the first time, we have the vice president saying when he told jon alter in that book, a lot of troops leaving in 2011, he said it could be as few as 2,000. >> we're hearing these little rollbacks in the rhetoric as far as how much of a pullout we're going to have next year. and as the administration has said again and again, it's only the beginning of the drawdown that they're shooting for. the president says it's contingent on conditions. but nevertheless, any effort you make to establish stability and to build internal security in afghanistan and unify that country is nation building. because of the state of afghanistan. it's been a collection of thousands of tribes and various homelands. general petraeus is trying, valiantly, to organize that. that's nation building. i agree with george. the problem for obama is his own base remembers that this was the good war we were not supposed to get bogged down in. and he's become more ambitious in his goals. >> and dee july 2011, it turns out only 2,000 troops leave after dpan stan, i can't imagine that liberals and progressives are going to be happy about that? >> right. last summer and fall, the president went through a process of thinking through the strategy in afghanistan. he spent hours and hours and hours on it. he came out pretty close to where the military and general petraeus were. he sold it to congress by pairing it with a deadline. i thought it was interesting to hear the vice president talk about it as the beginning of transition. when the time comes, and in the discussion leading up to that, if the administration continues to try to finesse that, which i think they have been doing, i think you'll see angry liberals. we have already seen it. people again signed on to this plan on the notion that it would be a specific period of time, not a long period of time, that we wouldn't be there for ten years, 20 years, nation building. and i think the language is leaving wiggle room. things on