china, but it is really important in the context of the challenge of china, for the cia. china s what intelligence collectors call a hard target. it is really opaque, tough to get into, you really need officers who have this kind of deep can cultural and regional expertise to kind of get after the problem. and you need to be able to send them where they re needed. you need to send them to, say, west africa, where china has a lot of investment and united states wants to be able to see what they re up to. so bottom line, jim, in a lot of ways this is a return to a really traditional way of thinking about espionage, that s a little bit different from how the cia might have been focusing on the counterterrorism problem which had a little bit more of a paramilitary element to it over the last 20 years. it also comes at a moment in which human spying, traditional human intelligence gathering is getting more difficult for everybody, not just the united states. take a listen to what cia direct
counterterrorism problem. lots of reconstruction needs to be done. lots of problems with the iraqi government. but, still, let s let them have their day and celebrate three years ago a lot of people predicted this would never happen. what about isis in syria. you alluded to that. not just the same parallels when it comes to these two countries. very different. the line in the sand between iraq and syria may be arbitrary but what happens on the two sides of the border is very different. in iraq we have a very real partner. and, again, i could talk all day about what is wrong with the iraqi government but it functions very well. it is a partner we can work through. schools are already open on the east side of mosul. probably on the west side, too. certainly on the east side. an iraqi ministof education andl money and books and so on to them. but what are we going to do in raqqa make sure the schools are
talk about that and the potentially radicalization of those individuals. absolutely. those in the muslim brotherhood are not inclined to support u.s. foreign policy but al qaeda s message to suppress the muslim whole. in that sense, that becomes a very, very attractive message when you see your brothers shot down in the streets and ultimately killed. where is the incubator? what we were concerned about a month ago? i don t think yet but it certainly could be inspect syria is the place where you have the greatest danger of foreigners coming to syria and joining al qaeda and then potentially going back to western europe and even the united states and launching terrorist attacks. the instability there gives them free rein in terms of potential planning outside of syria. egypt, in the short term, might not be as big counterterrorism
have said they re hiding in pakistan, coming into afghanistan, is this the first time we ve seen at the level of hillary clinton and secretary of defense, and acknowledged that the problem really is pakistan? we re seeing more of that. more of a move as talking about this as a counterterrorism problem. joe biden had been saying this and look at from the report. it s about pakistan. it s about these areas of pakistan where according to what we know, we re working just fine with those people in the travel regions. that s not what we ve been hearing from everyone else and less about rebuilding afghanistan. if you re reading between the lines, we have not met the objectives that we set. when this was announced, the goal was 2010 was going to be the year we break the taliban. we were going to control outside the green zone. if you read the language now, it s we ve made significant