Candidates Show G.O.P. Less United on Goals of War

The shift, while incremental so far, appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world. A new debate over the costs and benefits of deploying the military reflects the length of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulty of building functional governments and the financial burden at home in a time of extreme fiscal pressure.

The evolution also highlights a renewed streak of isolationism among Republicans, which has been influenced by the rise of the Tea Party movement and a growing sense that the United States can no longer afford to intervene in clashes everywhere.

The killing of Osama bin Laden has intensified questions about the need for prolonged American involvement in fighting Al Qaeda.

The evolution of thinking inside the party is coming into view as Republicans begin sorting through their field of candidates to select a nominee to challenge President Obama, who faces a decision this summer about a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan. It could leave some of the party?s presidential candidates at odds with its most influential voices on foreign policy, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who continues to call for an aggressive military effort to stabilize Afghanistan.

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah who just finished a two-year stint as ambassador to China in the Obama administration, said Tuesday that the cost of a continued military presence was a leading factor in his belief that a major troop drawdown should begin in Afghanistan.

Mr. Huntsman, who has said he would make his candidacy official next Tuesday, said a force of about 15,000 troops should be left behind for anti-terrorism efforts, but added: ?There?s the desire on the part of most Americans to begin phasing out as quickly as possible.?

?This would mean that the very expensive boots on the ground may be something that is not critical for our national security needs,? Mr. Huntsman said in a brief interview. ?Nor is it something we can afford at this point in our economic history. I think most Americans would say it?s probably a good transition point.?

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said in the Republican presidential debate Monday night that it was ?time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can,? consistent with the advice of commanders about their ability to hand off control of regions to Afghan security forces without risking a return of the Taliban.

?But I also think we?ve learned that our troops shouldn?t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation,? he said.  ?Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan?s independence from the Taliban.?

On Tuesday, Mr. Romney sought to draw a distinction between his thinking and that of Mr. Huntsman and others who say the financial cost should be a big factor in the calculation.

?There will be some who argue it?s too expensive now, we?ve got to bring the troops home right now, or others will say, politically we need to make one decision or another,? Mr. Romney said here. ?You don?t make a decision about our involvement in a conflict based on dollars and cents alone or certainly not with regards to politics.?

Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, said that conditions on the ground and the advice of military commanders ? not the cost ? should guide decisions about Afghanistan troop levels.

?We have to remember why we invaded the country in the first place,? Mr. Pawlenty said, adding that the security level was not yet sufficient for a full withdrawal. But he said, ?Our mission in Afghanistan is not to stay there forever or to stay there for 10 more years to rebuild their country.?

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Israel Vulnerable to Cyber Attack, Leaders Warn

The outgoing head of Israel's internal security service Shin Bet and the head of the country's cyber task force, among others, warned at a conference on cyber warfare at Tel Aviv University last week that strategic Israeli installations are essentially unguarded against cyber attack.

Around the world, a series of high-profile security breaches have afflicted major government and commercial institutions in recent weeks, including the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, Sony, and Citibank. Earlier this month, hackers compromised the computer systems at two Israeli diplomatic legations in the U.S. and put them out of service for several hours.

Last year, it was discovered that cyber warfare had broken new ground with the Stuxnet worm attack, which targeted the control systems of nuclear plants. The U.S. and Israel have been accused of designing the worm, which disabled the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz by causing extreme temperature variations, and which went undetected for months, perhaps years. Several speakers at the conference referred to Stuxnet as a game changer because it brought cyber warfare into the realm of offensive acts against critical infrastructure. But there was no public acknowledgement or even hint that Israel was indeed responsible for the worm. Instead, discussion focused on the country's defense against cyber attack.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the conference, "The more computerized we get, the more vulnerable we become. There is therefore no choice but to deal with this in a more systematic and focused manner."

The outgoing Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, blamed China for some recent computer security breaches around the world and said the Chinese government's cyber command now comprises "the largest number of hackers on earth." He said there was evidence that on April 8, 2010, China diverted 15 percent of U.S. Internet traffic through its routers. (He was referring to an incident described in the report of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released last November. The attack lasted for 18 minutes and appears to have been a case of IP hijacking or BGP hijacking?the takeover of whole blocks of website addresses by corrupting Internet network routing.) Cyber warfare is already "an existing reality," he said.    

Diskin asserted that Israeli networks critical to cell-phone communications, transport systems, finance, and the supply of electricity and water are all wide open to attack, and that this constitutes "a major threat to national security" because Israel, like all modern states, relies heavily on such systems to function normally.

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ThingLink launches rich media tagging, making images social and interactive

We reported back in March that image-tagging service ThingLink had partnered with SoundCloud, allowing for audio to be embedded within images on websites. And from today, this has been taken a step further.

ThingLink has launched rich media tagging, allowing greater interaction with external media platforms such as social networks and video-sharing websites. This means you will now be able to consume more external content from within an image itself, rather than it simply linking to external content.

ThingLink specializes in what it calls ?in-image interaction tools?, and from today web publishers, brands, bloggers?anyone with a desire to upload images to a website, can use this new functionality.

Rich media tags have so far been developed for the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Spotify, Vimeo, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and Twitter. And this tagging can be used to enrich the story behind anything from a promotional flyer or photograph, to a branded product or piece of artwork.

Ulla Engestrom, founder and CEO of ThingLink said:

?ThingLink is changing how people engage with photos by transforming them from a static image, into a navigational surface for exploring rich, relevant content that enhances the viewer?s knowledge and experience. The implications for this are immense. We know context creates clicks and anticipate these rich media tags will significantly increase the amount of time people spend interacting with an image and in turn increase plays, follows and engagement with the platforms connected to them.?

So, ThingLink has taken the concept of ?image as a platform? and really run with it. Examples of how rich media tags are already being used include Canadian band Simple Plan, who have revealed details of their new album ?Get Your Heart On? as follows:

To use rich media tags, publishers simply connect their website, blog or Flickr account with the ThingLink platform and they are provided with embeddable code to make all or individual images taggable. When linked with a URL to one of the rich media enabled sites, a tag then appears revealing the related content. These tags will then be revealed every time a viewer scrolls their mouse over the uploaded image. By using ThingLink, publishers can also include links to other social networks, blogs, news and commerce sites that are yet to have rich media tags created.

This new functionality reminds me a little of Webdoc, in that you can create really rich, interactive multimedia assets simply.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/06/15/thinglink-launches-rich-media-tagging-making-images-social-and-interactive/

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Improving the Security of Cloud Computing

On-demand cloud computing and data storage can save companies money, but many businesses?particularly in finance and health care?are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.

New security solutions are appearing: One verifies cloud providers' claims that your data is safely lodged on its own server. Another protects your cloud-based data by using a math function to divide it into 16 segments, any 10 of which can be used to re-create the entire original set.

The first of these solutions responds to recent demonstrations that hacking within clouds?using one set of rented computers or "virtual machines" to attack another?is theoretically possible. In 2009, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and MIT showed how an attacker using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud could land on the same physical server as his intended victim. (In one method, they forced a hypothetical victim to hire more virtual machines by bombarding his website with traffic and then created attacking virtual machines at the same time. This put the two sets of machines on the same cloud server 40 percent of the time.)

The researchers also pointed out that attackers who sat on the same servers as victims could do things like monitor usage of shared physical resources, such as the server's central processing unit (CPU), to infer information such as what kinds of programs the victim was running and how much Web traffic the victim was handling. These actions are known as "side-channel" attacks.

Amazon, in a move similar to ones made by other cloud providers, now offers a virtual private cloud service in which a customer is promised his own isolated server. Because customers are likely to want to confirm that they're getting what they paid for, a group of researchers at RSA Laboratories, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has developed a verification method that involves monitoring a piece of shared server hardware called the CPU cache, which allows quick access to frequently tapped memory resources. The prototype technology lets a client monitor whether the CPU cache on its cloud server is doing anything beyond what would be expected by the client's own computation. Such a discovery would suggest that someone else is sharing the server. "This allows you to check on your situation in the cloud," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a coauthor of the paper that described the Amazon weakness. "It's a way of doing detection on when you actually have a physical server to yourself."

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Israel Vulnerable to Cyber Attack, Leaders Warn

The outgoing head of Israel's internal security service Shin Bet and the head of the country's cyber task force, among others, warned at a conference on cyber warfare at Tel Aviv University last week that strategic Israeli installations are essentially unguarded against cyber attack.

Around the world, a series of high-profile security breaches have afflicted major government and commercial institutions in recent weeks, including the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, Sony, and Citibank. Earlier this month, hackers compromised the computer systems at two Israeli diplomatic legations in the U.S. and put them out of service for several hours.

Last year, it was discovered that cyber warfare had broken new ground with the Stuxnet worm attack, which targeted the control systems of nuclear plants. The U.S. and Israel have been accused of designing the worm, which disabled the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz by causing extreme temperature variations, and which went undetected for months, perhaps years. Several speakers at the conference referred to Stuxnet as a game changer because it brought cyber warfare into the realm of offensive acts against critical infrastructure. But there was no public acknowledgement or even hint that Israel was indeed responsible for the worm. Instead, discussion focused on the country's defense against cyber attack.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the conference, "The more computerized we get, the more vulnerable we become. There is therefore no choice but to deal with this in a more systematic and focused manner."

The outgoing Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, blamed China for some recent computer security breaches around the world and said the Chinese government's cyber command now comprises "the largest number of hackers on earth." He said there was evidence that on April 8, 2010, China diverted 15 percent of U.S. Internet traffic through its routers. (He was referring to an incident described in the report of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released last November. The attack lasted for 18 minutes and appears to have been a case of IP hijacking or BGP hijacking?the takeover of whole blocks of website addresses by corrupting Internet network routing.) Cyber warfare is already "an existing reality," he said.    

Diskin asserted that Israeli networks critical to cell-phone communications, transport systems, finance, and the supply of electricity and water are all wide open to attack, and that this constitutes "a major threat to national security" because Israel, like all modern states, relies heavily on such systems to function normally.

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Shuttle?s End Leaves NASA a Pension Bill

The shuttle program accounts for a vast majority of the business of United Space Alliance, originally a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. With the demise of the shuttle program, United Space Alliance will be left without a source of revenue to keep its pension plan afloat. So the company wants to terminate its family of pension plans, covering 11,000 workers and retirees, and continue as a smaller, nimbler concern to compete for other contracts.

Normally, a company that lost a lifeblood contract would have little choice but to declare bankruptcy and ask the federal insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, to take over its pensions. But that insurer limits benefits, meaning not everyone gets as much as they had been promised. United Space Alliance?s plan also allows participants to take their pensions as a single check and includes retiree health benefits, neither of which would be permitted by the pension insurer.

United Space Alliance, however, has a rare pledge from a different government agency to pay the bill. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says in its contract with the company that it will cover its pension costs ?to the extent they are otherwise allowable, allocable and reasonable.? NASA interprets this to include the cost of terminating its pension plans outside of bankruptcy.

The pension fund now has about half the amount needed. The president?s budget proposal for the 2012 fiscal year requests $547.9 million for NASA to provide the rest. That is nearly 3 percent of the agency?s total budget and just about what the Science Mission Directorate at NASA spent last year on all grants and subsidies to study climate change, planetary systems and the origins of life in the universe.

?We know that it?s NASA?s obligation to fund this, and NASA will do so,? said a spokesman for the space agency, Michael Curie.

Other federal agencies have made promises to pay contractors? annual pension costs ? the Energy Department, for example, for companies that run nuclear sites ? and some government auditors have been warning for years that investment oversight was lacking and that the potential costs had been underestimated. This appears to be the first time, though, that a company?s main contract has expired and an agency has had to bear the cost of terminating its plans.

Although NASA was reimbursing the contractor for the annual pension contributions, it had no say over how the money was invested. United Space Alliance put most of the money into stocks.

The backstop will be unusually costly because of market conditions. While United Space Alliance has made its required contributions every year, the fund lost nearly $200 million in the market turmoil of 2008 and 2009. When interest rates are very low, as they have been, the cost of the promises rises rapidly as well, creating a bigger shortfall.

The cash infusion is also being readied at a time when some members of Congress are demanding cuts in spending and threatening to block anything that could be construed as a taxpayer bailout.

?It?s unfortunate that it?s coming in this fiscal environment,? said Bill Hill, NASA assistant associate administrator for the space shuttle.

He said that he hoped Congress would appropriate the money before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30. If not, he said, NASA will have to divert funds from space-related activities.

Already, United Space Alliance has had five rounds of layoffs and has shrunk to about 5,600 employees from a peak of 10,500. Its workers have performed a wide range of jobs for the space shuttle program, mostly in Florida.

Beth Robinson, chief financial officer of NASA, said that even if United Space Alliance declared bankruptcy at this point, the pension agency would go after NASA for some of the cost. She said the contract was issued during a stock market boom, with a clause saying that if the plans should terminate with a surplus, the extra money would go to NASA. At the time, no one expected them to terminate with a deficit.

The cost of the termination may fluctuate along with market conditions as Congress considers what to do.

Tracy E. Yates, a spokeswoman for United Space Alliance, said the company could not predict the outcome. ?However, we have not seen or heard anything to date that indicates that NASA will not receive funding for this obligation,? she said.

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Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 3 comments

This week Joe, Clive and Harry are joined by David Hing, who sits down to help discuss the wealth of news that poured out of E3 2011 last week. This includes the unveiling of the Nintendo Wii U and the PlayStation Vita, as well as the release dates for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

We didn't limit ourselves to just E3 announcements, though. A croaky Joe also let us know what the Duke Nukem Forever launch party was like, while the rest of us speculated about how the game would shape up. Check out the Duke Nukem Forever review to see how right everyone was in their predictions!


After that, we go through the usual reader mail and competition details. As always, feel free to send in any questions you might have for us too.

The bit-gamer podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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LulzSec attacks Minecraft, Eve Online, League of Legends, others

Ever persistent in their hunt for "lulz," the crew behind Lulz Security struck again today, bombarding no less than five separate companies with distributed denial of service attacks. Celebrating "Titanic Takeover Tuesday," the group boasted of its antics on Twitter and even allowed visitors to request certain targets be attacked by calling 614-LULZSEC.

Starting approximately eight hours ago with Escapist Magazine, the group claimed that it was hammering the site with only 0.4% of its total ammunition. "Let's see what their admins are made of -- game is on folks," said LulzSec. Although it was reportedly taken offline at some point, the gaming magazine's site currently loads for us -- albeit very slowly.

After tackling Escapist, LulzSec set its crosshairs on the space-themed MMORPG Eve Online. The group not only disabled Eve's login server, but also their website (eveonline.com -- it appears to be functioning now). LulzSec proceeded to attack FinFisher.com, because "they sell self monitoring software to the government or some shit like that."

Minecraft felt the group's wrath next, having its login servers incapacitated. The popular dig 'em up's site was also taken offline thanks to a flash mob of angry gamers, not a direct assault by LulzSec. A similar attack was repeated against League of Legends: its login servers were hit by a DDoS and its main site(s) buckled under the load of seething players.

None of the attacks seem to have been provoked, nor do they serve a purpose beyond LulzSec's entertainment. The group made headlines just yesterday for publishing information swiped from the servers of Bethesda and the US Senate. Last month, they infiltrated Sony Pictures and released a stack of sensitive user data, including plaintext passwords.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44248-lulzsec-attacks-minecraft-eve-online-league-of-legends-others.html

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Candidates Show G.O.P. Less United on Goals of War

The shift, while incremental so far, appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world. A new debate over the costs and benefits of deploying the military reflects the length of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulty of building functional governments and the financial burden at home in a time of extreme fiscal pressure.

The evolution also highlights a renewed streak of isolationism among Republicans, which has been influenced by the rise of the Tea Party movement and a growing sense that the United States can no longer afford to intervene in clashes everywhere.

The killing of Osama bin Laden has intensified questions about the need for prolonged American involvement in fighting Al Qaeda.

The evolution of thinking inside the party is coming into view as Republicans begin sorting through their field of candidates to select a nominee to challenge President Obama, who faces a decision this summer about a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan. It could leave some of the party?s presidential candidates at odds with its most influential voices on foreign policy, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who continues to call for an aggressive military effort to stabilize Afghanistan.

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah who just finished a two-year stint as ambassador to China in the Obama administration, said Tuesday that the cost of a continued military presence was a leading factor in his belief that a major troop drawdown should begin in Afghanistan.

Mr. Huntsman, who has said he would make his candidacy official next Tuesday, said a force of about 15,000 troops should be left behind for anti-terrorism efforts, but added: ?There?s the desire on the part of most Americans to begin phasing out as quickly as possible.?

?This would mean that the very expensive boots on the ground may be something that is not critical for our national security needs,? Mr. Huntsman said in a brief interview. ?Nor is it something we can afford at this point in our economic history. I think most Americans would say it?s probably a good transition point.?

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said in the Republican presidential debate Monday night that it was ?time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can,? consistent with the advice of commanders about their ability to hand off control of regions to Afghan security forces without risking a return of the Taliban.

?But I also think we?ve learned that our troops shouldn?t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation,? he said.  ?Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan?s independence from the Taliban.?

On Tuesday, Mr. Romney sought to draw a distinction between his thinking and that of Mr. Huntsman and others who say the financial cost should be a big factor in the calculation.

?There will be some who argue it?s too expensive now, we?ve got to bring the troops home right now, or others will say, politically we need to make one decision or another,? Mr. Romney said here. ?You don?t make a decision about our involvement in a conflict based on dollars and cents alone or certainly not with regards to politics.?

Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, said that conditions on the ground and the advice of military commanders ? not the cost ? should guide decisions about Afghanistan troop levels.

?We have to remember why we invaded the country in the first place,? Mr. Pawlenty said, adding that the security level was not yet sufficient for a full withdrawal. But he said, ?Our mission in Afghanistan is not to stay there forever or to stay there for 10 more years to rebuild their country.?

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