joining me now, stephen hadley, who serves as national security advisor for george w. bush and john podesta, bill clinton's chief of staff from 1998 until 2001, and 2011, they chaired a bipartisan committee to review policy towards afghanistan and pakista they have published their findings as an essay in foreign affairs magazine, under the title the right way out of afghanistan, i am pleased to have them both at this table. welcome. >> good to have you here. this is important work. so tell me what your marching orders were to yourself, how you wanted to accomplish that objective. >> well, we wanted to have a broad gauge group of people to help in this effort, republicans and democrats, left, right and center and we did. and secondly we said, this is just going to be a internal, and it is an effort to get some new ideas to the administration, but mostly, it was to focus on the political strategy, to the military strategy pretty well developed, the political strategy, not so well developed and that was what the opportunity we thought we could do to do some thinking among

joining me now, stephen hadley, who serves as national security advisor for george w. bush and john podesta, bill clinton's chief of staff from 1998 until 2001, and 2011, they chaired a bipartisan committee to review policy towards afghanistan and pakistan, they have published their findings as an essay in foreign affairs magazine, under the title the right way out of afghanistan, i am pleased to have them both at this table. welcome. >> good to have you here. this is important work. so tell me what your marching orders were to yourself, how you wanted to accomplish that objective. >> well, we wanted to have a broad gauge group of people to help in this effort, republicans and democrats, left, right and center and we did. and secondly we said, this is just going to be all internal, and it is an effort to get some new ideas to the administration, but mostly, it was to focus on the political strategy, to the military strategy pretty well developed, the political strategy, not so well developed and that was what the opportunity we thought we could do to do some thinking a

so i point out that bush's outgoing national security adviser and secretary of state, stephen hadley and condoleezza rice, and their successors, james jones and hillary clinton, that it would be hard to say that there was a profound difference in views of the world among them. hadley and clinton had known each other for years, they'd gone to law school together and so on. in short, the people obama appointed and the assumptions that they carried with them into office were far less conducive to far-reaching change than the rhetoric of the obama presidential campaign had led people to anticipate. nevertheless, on some issues -- particularly multilateralism -- there is a change since the bush years, and we do find, for example, that one reason that the obama administration is able to get support for economic sanctions against iran now is that, um, he has managed to restore relations with allies, um, from where they were certainly in 2004, but also in 2008. so it's not, it's not to say that the obama administration is completely the same as the bush administration. i don't buy that at al