were sustain an over the horizon counterterrorism so attacks like this does not hit the u.s. homeland. they hit u.s. interests yesterday. 13 u.s. service members are dead. they clearly have the capability to do that now and there s every reason to believe their capability will grow in the coming days. so how do you address this rising terror threat in afghanistan at the same time as you re removing u.s. assets? there s a significant chasm between the ability to launch a suicide terrorist attack at a local asset in afghanistan versus striking the u.s. homeland two oceans away. so, we should not just presume that isis-k immediately has those capabilities but as i said, the united states needs to maintain an over the horizon counterterrorism capability to
we can quit them. they won t quit. the calculation we have to make is within ascendant communist chinese how much do we invest in trying to build infrastructure and nation build in countries in the middle east with no infrastructure at all like afghanistan versus small counter-terrorism measures seriously executed like not releasing gitmo prisoners and killing people who deserve to be killed while then staring counsel the communist chinese. empires fall when they try to do too much in too many places. that s happened to us in afghanistan. scale back, realize this threat isn t going away. otherwise, brian, to your point, we will get another 9/11 because if we are going to turn our backs and they are not going to stop. steve: so, pete, as we look at the image of the phi you actually guarded at gitmo. is he actually one of the taliban leaders. the taliban, what they are trying to do now, you know, people were terrified as soon as they get to town they are just going to start killing peopl
casualties and attrition rates of the afghan security forces. perhaps there was a concern by the inspector general that this sort of move against transparency was increasing. but to be fair to the pentagon they have actually been pretty forthcoming both today and yesterday as well as in the past about this particular metric, about how much land is controlled by the government of afghanistan versus the taliban. jon: do the numbers suggest 60% of the territory of afghanistan is outright controlled by the government, about 10% controlled by the taliban, and the other 30, 40% is kind of somewhere in the middle. that s right, jon. a whole lot better than in 2009 before the surge of u.s. troops that was directed by president obama. but of great concern is the fact that the government-controlled territory has since been declining since about 2014 as u.s. troops have been pulled out of afghanistan.
reporter: well, brooke, if you look at very recently defense secretary gates said that he hoped that the iraqi government would ask the u.s. to keep troops there beyond the end of the year and he said, if they did ask, i would hope that we would say yes. you know, will leon panetta feel the same way? when you look at afghanistan, there is going to be a very, very intense argument over whether to go with the counter insurgency strategy that david petraeus was running out of afghanistan versus a counterterrorism strategy that joe biden advocates with fewer troops and special ops going after specific targets. whenever you come to these decisions, you re going to have different voices in the room all trying to weigh in for the president. chris lawrence in arlington, thank you. next, on reporter roulette, the food pyramid is no longer a pyramid. it will become round.
joe johns, have a great rest of the weekend and safe travels. you, too. on this memorial day, i want to begin on cordova, alabama. it hit on the morning of april 27th by a powerful ef-3 tornado, and then the very same day ef-4 tornado hits that same town that night. cordova, alabama, is not the town that you see here in some of the video, some of the aerial pictures here and satellite images. a lot of folks have certainly lost their homes, but as we told you on friday, the cordova mayor jack scott is invoking a ordinance that rejects any trailer which is being offered by the federal government to folks whose homes have been destroyed. and jack scott is saying emergency or not, the law is the law. and as we showed you on friday, none of the folks in cordova are none too thrilled about the 50-year-old ordinance. we will talk to some folks live in a moment, but first, listen to this. what i suggested is putting the fema trailers in my backyard, because of the mayor, we wan