Terrorists have safe havens in Pakistan: President Obama

"With respect to Afghanistan, this is going to be a big challenge. I think because of the extraordinary work done by our troops and some very good diplomatic work done by Ambassador Crocker in Iraq, we just saw an election in Iraq that went relatively peacefully and you get a sense that the political system is now functioning in a meaningful way. You do not see that yet in Afghanistan. They've got elections coming up, but effectively the national government seems very detached from what's going on in the surrounding community. In addition, you've got the Taliban and al Qaeda operating in the Fatah and these border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan and what we haven't seen is the kind of concerted effort to root out those safe havens that would ultimately make our mission successful. So we are undergoing a thorough review, not only is general Petraeus, now the head of CentCom conducting his own review, he's now working in concert with the special envoy that I sent over, Richard Holbrooke, one of our top diplomats, to evaluate a regional approach. We are going to need more effective coordination of our military efforts with diplomatic efforts with development efforts with more effective coordination with our allies in order for us to be successful. The bottom line, though, and I just want to remember the American people, because this is going to be difficult, this is a situation in which a region served as the base to launch an attack that killed 3,000 Americans. And this past week I met with families of those who were lost in 9/11, a reminder of the costs of allowing those safe havens to exist. My bottom line is that we cannot allow al Qaeda to operate. We cannot have those safe havens in that region. And we're going to have to work both smartly and effectively but with consistency in order to make sure that those safe havens don't exist. I do not have yet a timetable for how long that's going to take. What I know is I'm not going to allow al Qaeda or bin Laden to operate with impunity, planning attacks on the U.S. Homeland.