General Petraeus on Iraq and Afghanistan

On the BBC program "Newsnight," General Petraeus gave his last interview as the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. He is moving on to a new job as head of Central Command.

When asked if he would use the word "victory" in Iraq, General Patraeus said, "I don’t know if I will. I think that all of us at different times have recognized the need for real restraint in our assessments, in our pronouncements if you will, and we have tried to be very brutally honest and forthright in what we have provided to Congress, to the press, to ourselves. In fact, we say we have to be first with the truth — we try to beat the bad guys to the headlines, but it has to be the facts."

The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan seven years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is changing radically, and Petraeus says the fighting in Afghanistan isn’t going in the right direction: "There’s no question that the trends have not gone in the right direction in Afghanistan, that there have been challenges emerging, particularly this year, that are serious and have to be dealt with, and certainly the direction of forces, some of which would have come here, is in fact an answer, in part, to the challenges in Afghanistan."

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