Reply #43: So if you are so caring of what the General Said,

[FrenchieCat]

why are you not listening to what he has to say?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK (RET), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: We've had a great show. It was a strong speech, Larry. I think he laid out an important case.

I agree with a lot of the sentiments that Michael Moore expressed. I do think in this case, the president limited the objectives. He's not talking about nation-building. He's not talking about building a democracy.

I think he pointed right at the objective, go after Al Qaeda. He didn't talk about Pakistan, but Pakistan is all over this speech. And the simple truth is that, as he said, you can't get at Al Qaeda in Pakistan without doing more in Afghanistan.

So I think that he's going to put a lot of pressure on the Pakistanis and give them a lot of help and expect them to do a lot more directly against Al Qaeda while the U.S. forces in Afghanistan also work against Al Qaeda and work for a very minimalist objective with the idea of getting ourselves out of there in a responsible way pretty quickly.

More....
CLARK: I think victory here is we go after Al Qaeda, particularly in Pakistan. We do it with the leadership of the Pakistanis, we give them the support to do it, we build a strong relationship with Pakistan, and we leave behind in Afghanistan some kind of minimally stable government.

If we have to go back in there at some later time, if we have to leave a residual force, if we have to leave some special forces and intelligence collectors there, we might have to do that.

But the point is the objectives in Afghanistan are pretty minimal. What we really want to do is go after Al Qaeda. And that's a war that there won't be a victory parade. Mark's exactly right on that. But we'll know when we're winning. We've already done a pretty good job against Al Qaeda. We just need to finish the job a little bit more in Pakistan, and we can't do that if we don't hang on in Afghanistan.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0912/01/lkl.01.html