The Diane Rehm Show , May 11, 2012
MS. DIANE REHM
Thanks for joining us. I'm Diane Rehm. Twin
suicide bombings in Syria kill at least 55 and injure hundreds. Voters in
France and Greece oust incumbent leaders and Russia clamps down on protests of
Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. Joining me to talk about the week's
top international stories on the Friday News Roundup, David Sanger of The New
York Times, Susan Glass of Foreign Policy magazine and Matt Frei of the UK's
Channel 4 News
SANGER
.. to assess the administration's metrics
for how they're doing against the Taliban, .. the numbers that the administration has put
together is how successful the Afghan National Army has been in taking control
of certain areas of the country. What
the numbers don't tell you is that as the United States pulls back,
almost everybody in the region, Afghans and Americans alike, can see that the
future of Afghanistan is that some parts of the country are going to be
essentially controlled by the Taliban, because the Taliban have always been
there, and the Taliban probably always will be there. And so then the question
is, do you bring the Taliban into the government in some way, which is what
these negotiations are about. And
how do you run on a platform that says I'm pulling us back from Afghanistan,
but we acknowledge that parts of the country will be in Taliban control in a
few years?
(Or,) Do you continue to try to go
out and kill every Taliban you can find, ..
But that then raises the question for how long and with how many troops
.. ?
GLASSER
given that that what we're doing is
leaving, it's pretty hard to .. say, oh, this is outrageous, we should be
fighting the Taliban more aggressively, because the bottom line is that's
actually not what the American people want.
FREI
as the Taliban like to say, .. he Brits have the clocks, we have the time.
you can just smell that everyone is heading
to the exit, and that smell was enhanced considerably this week by the election
of Francois Hollande in Paris who basically made it an election platform that
France would pull its troops out a year before everyone else's deadline.
