palestinian authority providing security of a high quality. in other words, if you go back a few years, there were often militia running cities and towns, you know, there wasn t a properly constituted palestinian police and security force. today there is. you know, today they are building rule of law institutions, courts and prisons and so on, and when the palestinians because remember, this is a small bit of territory. you can fit the whole of israel and palestine into new york state let alone california. so it s a small bit of territory. so people are living side by side. security really matters. so the palestinian authority building this security capacity give confidence to the israelis. at the same time as a result of that, the israelis have moved some of the restrictions, given the palestinians greater freedom to operate. all that has to go far further.
review and we ll make an assessment. is the strategy working? is it working in part or are there other aspects of it that aren t working? how s the coordination between civilian and military? are we doing enough to build afghan security capacity? how are we working effectively with our allies? so we are in the midpoint of implementing the strategy that we came up with last year. we ll do a review at the end of this year. general petraeus understands that strategy, because he helped shape it. and my expectation is that he will be outstanding in implementing it, and we will not miss a beat because of the change of command in the afghan theater. keep in mind, during this entire time, general petraeus has been the centcom commander, meaning he s had responsibility in part for overseeing what happened in
isn t working? are we doing enough to build afghan security capacity, how are we working effectively with our allies? so we are in the midpoint of implementing the strategy that we came up with last year, we ll do a review at the end of this year. general petraeus understands that strategy because he helped shape it and my expectation is that he will be outstanding in implementing it and we will not miss a beat because of the change in command in the afghan theater. keep in mind that during this entire time, general petreaus has been the cent com commander which means he s had responsibility in part for overseeing what happened in afghanistan and that is part of the reason why i think he s going to do such a capable job, not only does he have extraordinary experience in iraq, not only did he help write
the persian gulf region. the white house correspondent says it is a message directed at iran. good evening, mike. the approach has multiple goals, to deter iranians and calm the israelis. officials say the united states now has cruisers pauling patrolling the gulf at all times that can intercept medium-range weapons. pentagon officials confirm there is an accelerated deployment of defensive weapons, patriot missiles, and they would be operated by american troops. it is believed the patriot missiles can shoot down short-range missiles that the iranians could launch and other countries including israel and saudi arabia possess similar technology. at a pentagon briefing i asked defense secretary gates about iran as a threat he talked about the value of building the security capacity of america s
little bit later on today. this is, of course, a significant shift in policy for president obama. he had said he was going to draw down will all of the troops from afghanistan by the end of 2016 and now as you just said, it was announced last night that he will be leaving a presence there of about 5500 troops. initially it was only going to be agembassy presence. about a thousand troops there really focused on the security capacity. now they re going to be bases in bagram, jalalabad and also canada ha, a significant increase in the u.s. presence there coming against the backdrop of the surge of the taliban in afghanistan as well as kunduz, the first afghanistan gan city to be overrun by the taliban since 2001. i was on a background call with six other reporters last night. if this recent uptick in violence prompted the president to come to this decision, they said no. instead, this is the product of