Last month, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said the only way to get the Taliban to the negotiating table for real peace negotiations is apply more military pressure. “The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile,” Crocker said.

In an interview that aired yesterday on CNN, host Fareed Zakaria asked outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen if the withdrawal President Obama ordered this year would in any way impede this fight to the negotiating table. Mullen, in what was his last interview as JCS chairman, said it would not:

ZAKARIA: Why has it not been possible to draw some of the Taliban back into the fold? Ryan Crocker, the ambassador, says it’s because we haven’t yet hit them hard enough or they haven’t – they don’t feel beaten down enough. Do you think that’s true?

MULLEN: I do agree with that. I think that reconciliation takes place. You get them to the table when they’re in a much weaker position. And there’s no question that at some point in time there’s got to be ail political solution here and reconciliation is key to that.

ZAKARIA: But is that compatible, that desire to hammer them more? Is that compatible with this drawdown?

MULLEN: Absolutely.

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But since Crocker’s comment, peace negotiations with the Taliban are now virtually non-existent after Taliban operatives killed former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. Former presidential candidate and Northern Alliance leader Abdullah Abdullah said the lesson of the attack should be that “we shouldn’t fool ourselves” that the Taliban “are willing to make peace.” Indeed, President Hamid Karzai announced today that he would instead turn his attention to cutting a deal with the Pakistanis.

But Mullen’s comment pretty much puts to rest claims by critics of Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan that it wouldn’t leave enough troops there to force the Taliban to the negotiating table. “I don’t think there will be serious negotiations with the Taliban until they are convinced that they cannot succeed” in attaining their goals, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said in July, “through the force of arms on the battlefield.” Yet Mullen — the outgoing top military official — disagrees.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney lauded President Obama for his significant success in his counterterrorism efforts and even admitted Obama secured more successes than the Bush administration. However, still smarting from Obama’s rebuke of torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2009, Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney asked that Obama apologize to the Bush administration after wrongly insisting he benefited from such techniques.

Today on CNN, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) once again slammed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” stating, “It’s very obvious one of the great recruitment tools that our enemies has is the fact that we tortured people which is not in keeping with the standards of the treatment of prisoners.” In direct rebuttal of Liz Cheney, he added, “We never got useful information as a result of torture but we sure got a lot of angry citizens around the world.”

When asked whether Obama owes the Bush administration an apology over his rebuke of torture techniques, McCain coyly responded, “About what?” Noting resounding opposition in the Senate to torture and the United Nations Geneva Convention’s prohibition of such treatment, he dismissed the idea that the Bush administration deserves any apology after having used those methods:

MCCAIN: The vote was 90 to 6 in the United States Senate to prohibit cruel and inhumane mistreatment — this amendment, a piece of legislation that I was a sponsor of. The Senate has spoken, the American people have spoken, people of the world have spoken. Torturing people in violation of international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions is prohibited and frankly very harmful to the image of the United States of America.

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