GOP presidential prospect Barbour questions Afghan
By JOHN DISTASO
Senior Political Reporter
6 hours, 54 minutes ago
MANCHESTER – Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says the United States is spending far too much in lives and money on a war in Afghanistan that appears to have shifted from an anti-terrorism offensive to a futile attempt at "nation-building."
The likely 2012 GOP presidential contender stopped short of calling for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in an interview during his visit to the first-in-the-nation primary state Thursday. But he said it is time for a "total re-evaluation" of the U.S. role there.
Meeting with editors of the state's largest newspapers, Barbour said that with only 100 al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as reported recently by Gen. David Petraeus, it appears to him that the United States has changed its mission.
He said the United States first went into Afghanistan "to find and kill terrorists," and he still believes winning the war on terrorism should continue to be the United States' "premier objective."
But he stressed, "I think it is time for the (Obama) administration to take a step back to look at what we're doing there. And if the mission is nation-building, the American people need to be told that in a very straightforward way. If the mission is still to win the war on terrorism, then we need to reconcile why we have 100,000 soldiers there and why we're spending $2 billion a week when I do not think it is at all commensurate" with the threat from al-Qaida in that country.
The 63-year-old former Republican National Committee chairman said that while it is "not fore-ordained" that he will run for the Republican presidential nomination, "the only issues left for me are personal." He said he is "pleased with the response I've gotten from the donor community."
But, Barbour said, "this is a 10-year commitment to the most consuming job on the face of the Earth to the exclusion of virtually everything else."
Barbour, a two-term governor who will be "term-limited" out of office at the end of this year, is also a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association. He visited New Hampshire in that role last year to campaign for John Stephen, who unsuccessfully challenged Gov. John Lynch. One of Barbour's earlier political posts was as White House political director during Ronald Reagan's administration.
He said he has also been a lobbyist, "and a pretty good one, I'm proud to say," representing pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb and Glaxo Smith Kline. He said those connections did not influence his efforts to better manage Medicare and Medicaid in his state by instituting the use of generic drugs.
Barbour, asked what sets him apart from the Republicans in the presidential field, said, "I believe the American voters are looking for plain-spoken common sense; somebody who tells the truth, whether it's popular or not, and is focused on getting results."
He said that "being a governor is the closest thing to being President, although it is a small fraction of the job. Governors actually do things and get results, good or bad."
Barbour's startling view of the U.S. role in Afghanistan may actually unwittingly give cover to President Barack Obama, who has tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 since taking office in 2009 and plans to begin a withdrawal in July.
But Barbour said political considerations are secondary to doing what's right.
He said the job of fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan could be left to "special operations teams, drones and a tiny fraction of the number of soldiers" currently in the country.
"Let's have a fair opportunity for those on the other side to make their case, but I believe that what we will see is that we have had mission creep to the point that our goal is nation-building," he said.
Barbour said the war on terrorism should be fought "everywhere we find terrorists, but that doesn't mean we should try to make Afghanistan into India, because we're not going to."
On Libya, Barbour said he hopes that Obama's "relatively minimal action and apparent withdrawal of American military forces is a sign that he's not going to engage us in another nation-building exercise.''
"We have no interest in Libya that is sufficient to get involved in a civil war there," he said.
Barbour, because of his Southern roots, has been asked by the media occasionally to clarify his stance on racial issues.
He said he would have vetoed any legislative attempt in Mississippi to authorize a license plate honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. But he said his state Legislature never took it up.
He said he is involved in a privately-funded Mississippi initiative to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, who in May 1961 actively challenged segregation in the South.
"We try to get people focused on the future," he said. "The purpose of the celebration, which I'm one of the hosts of, is to show the progress that's been made."
He cited a Nissan plant in Jackson, Miss., with 4,000 employees, "half black, half white, with black supervisors, black executives. It is a great metaphor of the change. Race is irrelevant at Nissan, and we're trying to make race irrelevant in the state."
Barbour defended winning $50 million in state funding for a civil rights museum despite a tough economy.
"This is the right time to be doing it and to have it" completed in time for the state's bicentennial in 2017, he said.
He is also proud of his work with the Mississippi Legislature in budget management, saying that in recent budget negotiations the "biggest issue was how much in reserves we should leave for 2013."
Barbour opposed the federal stimulus, but said he accepted $383 million for his state.
He said he rejected any stimulus money that required state taxes to be raised, but said, "I'm not going to let my taxpayers pay federal taxes, and then the federal government offers us $383 million a year for education and not take it."
He is also proud of his management of the state's Medicaid program, which, he said, came in $48 million under budget without eligibility changes.
He said he instituted a previously unenforced federal legal requirement that Medicaid recipients re-establish eligibility annually in person, which rid the program of more than nearly 200,000 people who had become ineligible since they had signed up for the program.
"Our error rate for eligibility is one-tenth of 1 percent. The national error rate is 6.4 percent," Barbour said. He said if the national error rate was reduced to the Mississippi error rate, $25 billion would be saved on Medicaid.
Barbour cited his experience in dealing with the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused along the Mississippi Gulf coast in 2005.
"Dealing with that kind of crisis management is unusual for a governor and is more like some of the things that Presidents have to deal with," he said. "I think the results we achieved speak for themselves."
Mississippi also suffered environmental havoc as a result of last year's oil spill in the Gulf, but Barbour continues to support off-shore drilling there and elsewhere.
Barbour noted that there are more than 31,000 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, "and this is the only time that anything vaguely similar to this has ever happened."
He said it was an isolated case of "cutting corners, not following the normal standards and protocols when this was a particularly difficult well. So it has not changed my view.''
"It's interesting that the President would shut down the Gulf of Mexico and then give billions of dollars of American money to Brazil to drill offshore in the Atlantic Ocean," he said. "It's only explainable by one thing: The energy policy of the Obama administration is to drive up the cost of energy so Americans will use less of it."
He called for "more American energy -- more drilling in the Gulf, more shale production of natural gas and a little bit more shale production of oil. It means more coal, more nuclear. We have a nuclear power plant at home, and we'd like another one."
And, unlike several other prospective presidential candidates, Barbour supported as "a step in the right direction" U.S. House Speaker John Boehner's deal with Obama to cut $38 billion from the current budget, rather than hold out for larger cuts.
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