up to no good. what danger is there of that? are those days gone where we have to worry about terrorist organizations like isis and al qaeda taking up space in a place like afghanistan because we re not there? well, i wish that were the case, but it s just not. our intelligence agencies have focused on this and are there problems in other parts of the world? east africa, west africa, other parts of the middle east? absolutely. but ungoverned spaces, as you say, nature abhorrors a vacuum. it tends to fill it, and in this case it s filled it before with maligned actors. let s hope it doesn t come to that. you re right, ali, to point out our successes in foreign policy. we ve done a pretty good job in colombia helping the colombians rebuild that society. we ve done a pretty good job in the balkans. 20 years ago the balkans were on fire. we had some missteps and failures along the way as well. the jury is still out on
dangerous parents of the world, to do things that low inevitably protect the united states, it will prevent isis from establishing themselves in areas where they could proliferate their activity. as they get squeezed in iraq, this is where they re going to end up? i think it s a legitimate feel th feeling that this will spread into this part of the world. you need to worry about yemen, you need to worry about north africa, in order to ensure that this doesn t become eat hot bed against the homeland. do you agree that? i do, but i actually think exactly that, that terrorists move to ungoverned spaces, so by definition, you don t have a government who controls the space and you re going to have these kind of understand don in.
need to perform certain aspects of this particular mission. and so i would want to know do they have the resources that they need. and, again, there are a lot of opticals and a lot of challenges dealing with dialect, dealing with ungoverned spaces. that s the other important piece of this, joy, is that the fact we need to be helping them from a military standpoint, but i would imagine that this particular part of niger that was close to mali that was probably ungoverned and that some of these islamist forces may be providing services that the government is not providing. and so we need to make sure that we can also help them with governance. i cannot stress to you how important this governance piece is away from this as we try to move away from a long-term military commitment to this area. sure. very quickly before i let you go, your colleagues on the other
campaign promise to defeat isis. we re going to have a lot of these kinds of issues, because they re fleeing all over the place trying to set up places in ungoverned spaces. bret: this president communicates differently. if he had answered that way to that question and said this is under investigation, thank the soldiers for their sacrifice and the families, but this is why we stand for the national anthem and put our hand over our heart. or he had somehow answered the question differently than he did pointing back to past presidents we would be in a different news cycle would we not part of the blame is attributable to president trump, i don t think it was correct to talk about what previous presidents did or didn t do. there is pabilt on culpability how the media doesn t respond to the defenses of this president. it would be great to have a good conversation about what s happening in niger. we have been there for a long time. we should know a little bit more about what we re aimi
afghanistan next year and only a few remaining to protect the u.s. embassy in kabul, and is that a mistake in your opinion, because senator rand paul says he wants all u.s. troops out of there. yes, and afghanistan will turn into iraq, and that is what we did in iraq, withdrew everybody but a few people around the embassy, and look at the mess krcreated since then. and look, we are in afghanistan for the exact same reason tas we we were there in the fall of 2001, to prevent at a tacks from being masterminded or launched from there against us. and the fact is that afghanistan is always going to be very attractive to terrorists. they have a lot of, a large amount of ungoverned spaces. they have the illegal drug crop that can help to finance them, a and the history there of terrorism. so, you are seeing isis growing today in afghanistan as well as al qaeda, as well as the