A report from U.S.-government-owned VOA News on November 13 quoted from President Obama’s statement made in a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in which Obama said he will soon decide how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan. The president attributed his delay in making his decision to his determination to "get it right."

Obama said that while U.S. policy on Afghanistan must protect America from terrorist networks, that commitment to Afghanistan is not "open-ended."

During the press conference, Obama stated that he and Prime Minister Hatoyama had discussed  U.S.-Japanese cooperation on Afghanistan and Pakistan and thanked the people of Japan and the Prime Minister for “the powerful commitment of a $5 billion over the next five years to support our shared civilian efforts in Afghanistan, as well as the commitment of a billion dollars to Pakistan.”

Jennifer Loven with AP asked the president: “on Afghanistan, if I might, can you explain to people watching and criticizing your deliberations what piece of information you're still lacking to make that call?” To which Mr. Obama replied:

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. — John Quincy Adams

Every once in a while it is refreshing to discover that one of your teachers was right about something. I don’t mean in the condescending way one might concede that “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” No, I mean something in the nature of a fundamental understanding of things has come to light to show why the teacher was right. When I was in seventh grade, for example, I challenged the dress code at my junior high school. One of my teachers listened patiently, then conceded that it was inherently arbitrary as to what to require in a dress code, but if the administration did not require some things, some students would come to school “in a bathing suit or less.”

We all laughed at the “bathing suit or less” argument. But I clearly recall that when attending college several years later, I looked around at what passed for fashion in young ladies’ attire and said” “My God! Mr. Wells was right.”

But it was also while I was in college that a professor challenged my contention that we had neither need nor reason for revolution in America because all questions and issues were settled at the ballot box. Really.

VOA News has reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while speaking to Pakistani journalists in Lahore on October 29,  said it is hard to believe that Pakistani authorities do not know where al Qaeda leaders are hiding. Clinton said it is also difficult to believe the Pakistani government could not "get" the terrorists if it wanted to.

“Al Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,” Bloomberg News quoted Clinton’s statement to a group of editors in the eastern Pakistani city. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”

Clinton engaged in question-and-answer session with students at the Government College of Lahore, where she told the students that inaction by their government would result in ceding territory to terrorists.

A car bomb explosion blasted through the crowded Meena Bazaar market area of Peshawar, the most populous city in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, on October 28, killing at least 90 people and wounding 100 others. The blast occurred a short time after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, for three days of talks with senior government officials. The two cities are about 88 miles apart.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister of North West Frontier Province, said in a telephone interview with Reuters news that the blast was set off by a suicide bomber in a car packed with as much as 330 pounds of explosives.

Reuters reported that the explosion occurred in the busy Peepal Mandi market street “in a city that for years served as the headquarters of the Pakistan- and U.S.- backed mujahideen war against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan.” (In an article entitled “Bleeding Afghanistan” published in The New American magazine for December 8, 1986, this writer interviewed an American journalist who told of meeting up with a mujahideen group in Peshawar in June 1985 and was issued a Soviet-made AK-47 automatic rifle before accompanying the resistance fighters into Afghanistan.)