i'm joined by fareed zakaria of cnn.st interview just weeks ago with ambassador holbrooke. his view of that area of the world, the afghanistan/pakistan area something you know a great deal about. was it realistic? >> oh, sure. he had a brutally realistic understanding of what was going on. he understood just how complicated the problem was, because you have a civil war in afghanistan that is being fueled by groups in pakistan with the tacit support -- sometime tacit support of the pakistani military, a civilian government in pakistan that's weak. he got all that. but richard holbrooke was also a diplomat and a patriot. and he understood that the united states couldn't just say, well, this is all too complicated and we're going to walk away from it. instead he felt that you had to apply as much diplomatic power, skill you could to the situation and cut the best deal you could for the united states out of all this. and that was what he was trying to do when he died. >> fareed, ed henry was saying earlier on when someone pa

. >> fareed zakaria has a column to tell us how to get out from under our economic woes. >> you said we're hurting ourselves by practicing manana economics. >> one more time we've been told this is not the right time to raise taxes or cut the debt or get the fiscal house in order. of course when the economy was better, we said this isn't the right time to do it. somehow, no matter what time it is in washington, it's never time to put our fiscal house in order. i just worry that there's a theory here that congress will, at some point in the future, have the political courage it now lacks. i don't see anything to suggest that that's going to happen. >> wasn't this simply the path of least resistance? this perpetuates the need to restructure our economic future? >> it's the santa claus compromise. each side got what they wanted. each side talks about how hard it was. the republicans got the tax cuts. the democrats got the unemployment. the hard choice is saying no. >> fareed, everybody knows that we have to raise more money in order to provide the services that we seem to want and yet a