Washington Unplugged 4.03.09
On today's show, Arianna Huffington on Michelle Obama, Muslim-American relations as the president heads to Turkey, and Obama-inspired body art.
Hillary Clinton: Afghanistan action now

by Mark Silva

All the focus on President Barack Obama in his travels across Europeand on the sideshows of the Michelle Obama-Queen Elizabeth II touch and Michelle Obama-Carla Bruni 'fashion smackdown'has tended to overshadow the work of one hard-working erstwhile frontrunner for the White House and now secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton has been working on building a NATO consensus around the newly fashioned U.S. strategy for Afghanistan.

The review is finished, the secretary says, and now the action starts. She met this week with an Afghanistan donor's conference in the Hague.

"The NATO summit is not a pledging conference, but of course we will be talking about how our allies can match their resources to the needs identified in the strategic review," the secretary said.

Those resources are not necessarily combat troops, she stressed, in a conference call with reporters covering the president's trip to Europe. "I think we're trying to focus on what we think will work, and what we believe will work is moving as quickly as it feasible to having security taken over by the Afghans themselves," she said.

White House National Security Advisor Jim Jones, joining Clinton on the call, stressed that the Obama administration has military, diplomatic and development components in its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

Jones, a retired Marine Corps General who served as NATO's supreme allied commander, senses a new feeling among alliance members that they must work together on Afghanistan.

""Having been at NATO and having been around since 2003 working on Afghanistan, I can tell you that there is a new spirit and there's a new feeling, and now wewe'll know shortly exactly what that transmits to in terms of offerings," Jones said.

"There's been "very little credibility for what's already been invested," Clinton told reporters en route to the Netherlands. "A lot of these aid programs don't work."

The new U.S. approach involves "looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent, and where it's going, and trying to track the outcome," she says.

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