All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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Although the story is about where the candidates stand on the issue of combating Islamic extremism, the star of the piece is a down and out mountain climber named Greg Mortenson, who, for the past 15 years, has been building schools in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. His thesis is simple: the Taliban fear education much more than they fear smart bombs. It's the old cliché of winning hearts and minds. Everybody talks about it. Mortenson did it and has recounted his amazing story in a best selling book "Three Cups of Tea."

Mortenson started his work in 1993 after he almost died in a failed attempt to climb K-2, after Everest the world's tallest mountain. His life was saved by an illiterate porter who lead him down from the mountain, and Mortenson set out to repay the debt by building a school for the porter's village.

It was an enormous undertaking. Before he could build a school, he had to build a ...

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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It would be easy to watch tonight's story on the Marine Corps mascot and think it's a lot of foolishness.

I mean, really, does a dog need a service record complete with all his merits … and demerits (he once ate a Marine's hat). But it shows the lengths the Marines will go to in order to cultivate their public image.

Chesty is an English bulldog – those pug noses and jutting lower jaw are bred to make them better able to hold on once they sink their teeth in – and he's named after Chesty Puller, the most decorated Marine in history. He is, in other words, the perfect symbol of the Marine Corps.

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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Will there be a strike – either by the U.S., Israel or both – against Iran's nuclear complex? And will it happen before the Bush administration leaves office? I doubt leaders in either country know the answers to those questions.

Israel is putting the pressure on, telling the Bush administration in every way possible: "if you don't do it, we will." That's a threat designed to be heard not just in Washington but in every capital of the world – including Tehran. Israel wants the Iranians to know that it really will strike if uranium enrichment continues and it wants the rest of the world to know that the only way to stave off military action is with much more draconian economic and diplomatic sanctions that will persuade Teheran to change its mind.

Everyone agrees on two things: 1) Iran with a bomb would be a disaster and 2) bombing Iran would be a disaster. The only argument is over which would be the greater disaster.

One school of thought says that Iran would be like any other country that has the bomb – afraid to use it for fear of retaliation. But even those who believe that Iran would play by the same rules of deterrence that every other nuclear state plays by acknowledge that at the very least an Iranian bomb would cause other oil rich states to get a bomb of their own and nobody thinks a nuclear arms race in the Middle East can have a good outcome. It's really a moot point because Israel is certain that Iran with a bomb would be a greater disaster and Israel will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

The real question is: "what is Israel's red line? What will it take to trigger a strike?"

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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The war began in dramatic fashion: Stealth fighters and cruise missiles launching a bolt out of the blue attack against a compound where Saddam Hussein was believed to be spending the night. Saddam survived the strike and perhaps that should have been an omen of the difficulties to come – that it would take more than high tech weapons to get rid of Saddam. It took foot soldiers to flush him out of a hole in the ground. And today it is foot soldiers in the form of the troop surge who have helped produce a reduction in violence.

Donald Rumsfeld used to talk a lot about "transformation," and a great transformation has finally taken place, although not on his watch … and not the one he envisioned. What he had in mind was transforming the Cold War military into a smaller, more agile fighting force. After he left, a larger fighting force was sent into Iraq to conduct a new counterinsurgency strategy.

The conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. wouldn't be in so much trouble in Iraq if Rumsfeld had just sent more troops in at the start. I'm not sure I buy that. For one thing, more troops would have taken longer to get there, so the whole dynamic of the initial invasion would have been different. For another, there was no plan for what to do with more troops. Finally, if more troops had used the same heavy-handed tactics that prevailed in the first years of the occupation, they might have succeeded only in outraging Iraqis even further.

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General Peter Pace retired today as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. David Martin, National Security Correspondent for CBS News, has these thoughts on his career. -- Ed.

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For the past six years, General Pete Pace has had an office not far from my broadcast booth in the Pentagon, so it was not at all uncommon to run into him in the hallway. He was always going somewhere in a hurry. Partly that's a function of the demands of being the nation's senior military officer, but partly it's a reflection of the fact that he's a driven man -- driven by something that happened nearly 30 years ago in Vietnam. That's when young Marines under his command as a green second lieutenant followed his orders and were killed. He kept a photo of the first Marine he lost on his desk and could recite from memory the names of all who had died, including the segreant who stepped in front of him and took a bullet aimed at him. He would frequently say -- sometimes choking back tears -- that he owed those men a debt he could never repay and that his mission in life was to support the troops in the field. You didn't have to be around him much to be convinced that he was absolutely sincere.

The question, of course, is how well did he fulfill his life's mission. He was the nation's second ranking military officer for four years and highest ranking for the past two -- a time in which the war in Iraq turned into a near disaster whose outcome is still in doubt. As he leaves, the troops he is so devoted to are serving 15 month tours in Iraq with only 12 months at home. No one will say it publicly, but senior officers who served with him are harshly critical of his inability or unwillingness to stand up to the famously domineering Donald Rumsfeld. Pace himself admits he made mistakes, and the reason he is retiring today is that his confirmation hearing for a second tour term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs would have been a bruising battle in which all those mistakes were laid on the public record.

When I interviewed him just before he became Chairman, Pace said "whenever I'm done serving, I will leave knowing that I tried my best." I have no doubt he tried his best, never once sluffed off. It will be up to history to decide whether his best was good enough.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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You need a scorecard to keep track of all the reports coming out on Iraq in the next two weeks -- one from the Government Accountability Office, one from retired Marine Corps General Jim Jones, one from the Pentagon, one from the White House, and the Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker. The first two have already leaked. One said, in essence, the surge is not working, having failed to meet 15 of 18 benchmarks established as measures of progress; the other said the Iraqi police are so corrupt and ridden by sectarian loyalties that the entire unit should be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. Those were both outside reports.

Now it's the administration's turn...

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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The House committee investigating the Pat Tillman case was unable to pin Donald Rumsfeld down on when exactly he found out that the former NFL star had been killed not by enemy but by friendly fire. But to me, the answer is obvious -- he first heard about the possibility of friendly fire within days of Tillman's death in April of 2004. Testifying with Rumsfeld was former Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Meyers, who said he first heard about it in late April and that it would be logical -- although he had no specific recollection -- that he would pass that on to Rumsfeld.

The two men met and spoke to each other constantly, and to me it's inconceivable to me that Meyers wouldn't have given his boss a heads up on such a high profile news story as Tillman's death. So I am convinced that the two top people in the Pentagon knew by late April of '04 that there was an investigation into whether the first bona fide hero of the war against terror had been accidentally killed by his own men.

That was before the nationally televised memorial service at which Tillman was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for bravery in the face of enemy fire. Neither man did anything to correct that false account -- but they have a good excuse. Investigating Tillman's death and informing his family was the Army's job, not theirs. Meyers said it would have been "irresponsible" of him to intervene because he would have been seen as trying to influence the outcome of an investigation.

But I'll bet you both men wish they'd bent the rules a little and asked the Army what the hell was going on.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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Civilians suffer in every war, and Iraq is certainly no exception.

The estimates of how many innocent Iraqis have died since the American invasion vary widely but average out somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000. Think of a town near you with a comparable population, and you get some feeling for what a horrendous number that is. Iraq is a perfect example of what happens to civilians in a counter insurgency war. The insurgents deliberately target civilians to prove that the government in power is unable to protect them, and the counter insurgents -- in this case, American soldiers and Marines -- try to protect civilians until the government in power is capable of doing so on its own.

For a while, it looked like the American troop surge was having some success in bringing down civilian casualties. The U.S. military doesn't release body counts of civilians -- in part, because the numbers are unreliable and always subject to dispute -- but internal estimates had civilian deaths down by 46% in June. The car bombing this weekend in which an estimated 170 people were killed seems almost certain to reverse that trend. As bad as it seems, Iraq is probably not as bad as previous wars...

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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For me, reading the Family Jewels is like listening to Golden Oldies.

I spent my early years as a wire service reporter in the 1970s covering all the investigations into the Family Jewels. There's nothing in the documents that surprises me, but even on a first scanning of some 700 pages I see some nuggets I'd either forgotten or never knew. For most Americans, including myself, the Congressional hearings into assassination plots, drug testing and mail opening provided the first exposure to the world which one CIA officer famously called a "wilderness of mirrors." If you missed it the first time either because you were too young or too busy, you can catch the rerun in these documents.

All of the activities described in the documents occurred during the Cold War, a very different time when Communism not terrorism was the main enemy. Different people will have different reactions. Some will be horrified that the CIA was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, and others will see nothing wrong with trying to get rid of a man who allowed the Soviet Union to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. Some will read the documents and conclude that the CIA was a "rogue elephant;" others will read the same material and decide it was doing exactly what the White House wanted it to.

Scholars will be mining these documents for years, and that's their real significance -- for good or ill history always catches up with you.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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It's hard to say what's most alarming about the Pentagon's latest mental health survey -- the scope of the problem or the lack of effort that has gone into dealing with the problem.

First, the scope: 31 per cent of Marines, 38% of soldiers and 49% of National Guardsmen returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reported psychological symptoms such as depression, anger or alcohol abuse. When you consider that by now more than 1 million men and women have served at least one tour of duty, percentages like that amount to an epidemic of mental health disorders.

And it doesn't stop with the man or woman in uniform. Hundreds of thousands of children have had one or both parents leave them for extended tours of duty. The longer the war goes on, the worse the problem will get as more and more men and women go back for repeat tours.

All of that -- plus the stigma that prevents many soldiers and Marines from seeking mental health counseling -- seems fairly predictable, although the numbers -- one out of every two National Guardsman -- are probably higher than anyone expected. Which makes the Pentagon's lack of preparedness for this epidemic all the more baffling. While the number of soldiers and Marines needing help has gone up, the number of mental health professionals in the armed forces has gone down "dramatically."

The American military does not have enough mental health professionals for peace time, much less war. As the study put it, "the single finding that underpins all others in this report is that DoD (Department of Defense) leacks the resources -- both funding and personnel -- to adquately support the psychological health of service members and their families in times of peace and conflict."