Adam Smith

This problem is not going away.

The best way to sum it up is our country simply wants this problem gone.

I continue to reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, let me just say again that most of the arguments I have heard are, ``Don't do this.'' I haven't heard an alternative. I think what we need to remember--and we hear it a…

I continue to reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Williams), my friend and colleague.

I, again, reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Pittenger), my friend and colleague.

What I really want to focus on is what should be done, regardless of who it is, who's in charge of it.

Thank you. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

I continue to reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Schock).

May I inquire as to how much time is remaining? The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Yoder). The gentleman from Washington has 7 minutes remaining. The gentleman from California has 10 minutes remaining.

To my mind, is not a logical thing for American counterterrorism purposes.

We need to find some way to contain that and hopefully get us to the point where we can have a peaceful and reasonably stable regime in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

We would like to see a smoother transition in Afghanistan.

That said, we have got to hand off responsibility at some point and I think it is important we have done this in a stairstep manner.

The stability of the Afghan Government still is plagued with corruption and plagued with a number of difficulties.

Those gains are fragile and reversible because the problems with the Afghan Government remain.

I hope the President will heed the advice of his military commanders.

I fear that the totality of the President's interest on Afghanistan is simply to do what is necessary to finish the job and withdraw.

It has been challenged. I mean, witness the drone strikes and some other things.

I want to emphasize though that although we agree that some degree of conditional military assistance is an appropriate way forward, the scale of leverage we can develop through assistance of the kind that any of us are interested in…

We don't have the ability to walk in and say we are going to fix this because there just isn't U.S. credibility in those parts of the world.

I think this hearing is incredibly important as well. We are struggling with a very, very difficult national security and policy challenge.

At the end of the day, it is simple to say that what we need to do is we need to win the ideological war.

But how do we contain that? Which groups are the greatest threat?

This is more for the White House: Sell it. Because if you don't, there ain't no way we are going to pass it.

If the White House is going to push a policy like this, they have got to fricking push the policy, all right?