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
Islamic i think we should start off by saying the biggest threat in 2014 to the the u.s. homeland and more broadly to the middle east and north african stability there. isn t s. not china or russia. it s individual, greek. offerings that doesn t align themselves to a command structure so, these are the actor threat is the threat that is targeting the u.s. homeland. you mentioned al qaeda. this is organization that operates across north africa of the is a harrahs desert. it s trying to establish a huge region. praise under sharia or islamic law. my gearia, maly, all away across libya and algiers. trying to take advantage of ungoverned spaces. so countries that have poor governance, mass corruption, weak police, weak army.
Not helpful. and what we need to do is change the mined set that we measure progress against al-qaeda and how we measure that is complex. one of al-qaeda s objectives to achieve various areas where people have sharia and islamic and they are doing that in syria and iraq and north africa. so they are a big threat as well. they are a worse threat. i think the buzzword is containment. i think we are kidding ourselves if we think that military activity alone defeat. and i say that losly al-qaeda. we can t. the first bon is ungoverned spaces. we know that al-qaeda thrive in ungoverned space and it is a double edge sword how difficult it is to make an