Adam Smith

If we are going to be serious about ISIS, the President needs to assign the military a clear mission and then allow the military to carry it out.

I think they still are too, too open to a more radical interpretation of their religion that creates a larger problem.

There was a reluctance to use any Islam, Islamist, Islamic, anything that sort of gave our enemy the title of being affiliated with the Muslim religion.

We have to be very, very diligent to protect our country, not just from refugees, but from, you know, gosh, our own citizens.

I think it is important for the United States to be able to demonstrate to Sunni Muslims that this is not a confrontation between the West, led by us, and Sunni Islam.

The root cause of the problem here is we don't have a legitimate Sunni force in Syria or Iraq that--well, that exists, basically.

A comprehensive solution is needed.

How do we find allies in the Muslim, Sunni Muslim world in particular, since these groups are Sunni?

I think this hearing is perfectly appropriate to really think broadly about what is our strategy.

Secretary Clinton has testified here for longer than she did in the previous two testimonies on this subject combined.

We've spent the $4.7 million that we have spent on this.

I don't really think it should have been formed in the first place, but what we've heard here is...

I think every military commander's first instinct is to say: Give me another 30,000 troops, and I can save the situation.

Capping the number of troops in Colombia was an important part of the success because it made the Colombians aware that we would help but it was their fight.

That partnership on our side between defense, development, and diplomacy is the building block to successfully build the partnerships with the local countries.

Building up the level of cooperation between the State Department and the Department of Defense is very important.

I think building that partner capacity and finding allies who can help us is a critical piece of it.

But it certainly hasn't spun out of control. And we have had no attacks against U.S., Western targets come out of Al Shabaab and Somalia because we built that partner capacity and because we were able to successfully partner.

We cannot succeed in the current national security environment unless we build partner capacity.

We need allies. We need friends. We need partners in order to multiply, be a force multiplier basically.

As far as how we reform development policy, I think the best thing we could do is centralize it.

Trying to maintain some stability in Afghanistan... it is still very fractious and still very difficult.

I wish that we didn't have national security interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a very, very difficult place to work with.

My view is we are in Afghanistan today for the same reason we were in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, to prevent it from becoming a safe haven for terrorists for attacking us.

Our outside experts sort of basically said that the strategy is sound. It is the implementation that is key.