of understanding, and we work together. we need to understand that. and i think this administration, and even the last administration understood that. there s a fundamental schizophrenia in some parts of pakistan s national security apparatus, we accept it and work with it to achieve the objectives we want. what we don t do is turn our back on somebody and do something stupid like sanctions, because we ll end up screwing ourselves in the process. there s no question it s a balance. there s no black-and-white answer that pakistan is good or bad, though you can draw some conclusions about where the compound was, which does not play well since it was so close to their military schools and et cetera. i want to talk about afghanistan. what does this mean for our mission in afghanistan? one thing to add to the earlier commentary, the importance of pakistan is hard to overstate. not just because they re a giant country with nuclear weapons,
they are incredibly professional at what they do. right. i read a report about when they were given the mission they erupted this cheers, because they were so excited to do it, which is great. it s great to hear that we ve got guys like that who are willing to go into any situation to go get the bad guys. philip, let s talk about pakistan a bit. i want to bring you back in. apparently we did not tell pakistan, though there were initial reports that their secret intelancy was working with us. what did we tell them? and if we didn t tell them anything, was that the right decision? i think it was the right decision. frankly a lot of commentary is misguided today. we have a security stuffs in government that s under a lot of pressure from its own people, from its parliament. they ve been engaged in a civil war now for nine years, a war against their own people in the tribal areas next to afghanistan. they have lost a lot of people, but at the same time they have a lot of sympathizers a
afghanistan are maybe not the best way. osama bin laden did need the afghanistan after the u.s. went in and cia apparently got intelligence from captured detainees, but the last two significant blows came from precise strikes by small groups of highly trained special forces. so what does that teach us about the war on terror and where it s going next? well, for more on that, let s bring in evan coleman, nbc news terrorism analyst and steve clemens, senior fellow for the new america foundation. great to have both of you here. let me start with you, evan. these smaller strikes, god, they seem like such better ways to go than gigantic wars to the naked eye. that s certainly what it appears like in our recent experience. am i missing something? well, we have to be careful. first of all, regardless of what you think about the u.s. presence in afghanistan, i think you have to be realistic that the only way you put pressure on
that s not true in yemen or somalia. from your knowledge of al qaeda, do you think they re more fearful of us being in afghanistan or more fearful of the drones that we use even without 100,000 of our troops in afghanistan? which has done more arm to them, both within the jihadist community and their infrastructure? they d like to have afghanistan back. and they re quite frightened of the drones that are attacking them in pakistan. but i think these are either-or pakistan. if we weren t in afghanistan, the taliban would come back in the southern part of the country and bring al qaeda back with them. one of the most interest things to me is your description of the bureaucracy of al qaeda. they have rules everything from the size of furniture to vacation schedules and right. the pre-9/11 vacation policy is more generous than cnn s vacation policy and it was a highly bureaucratic organization. that structure was sort of destroyed in the post-9/11 environment. so this group that
parallel state in afghanistan is now very much on the smaller size. it is located in the tribal regions of pakistan. it s not the first murderous organization in history that was bureaucr bureaucratic. thank you so much for this conversation. you can read an excerpt from peter s primer on all things al qaeda. later on in the show a revolutionary plan to cut health care costs by up to 50%. the case for treating the so-called super utilizers coming up. [ female announcer ] the only thing better than seafood