Former New York City Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells Newsmax that the Pakistani school shooting, in which more than 140 people were killed, should be at the top of the news, but he fears we've become too desensitized to such attacks.
"There were more than [130] kids killed yesterday in Pakistan, and it's not even making the top of the morning news today," Kerik told J.D. Hayworth and Francesca Page on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV Wednesday.
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"We have become so accustomed to this stuff that it's almost secondary in nature, and it should not be," he contends.
At a school in Pakistan in the city of Peshawar, 132 children and nine staff members were killed after a
Taliban attack Tuesday.
Kerik said that he agrees with Arizona
Sen. John McCain, who said that the attack is proof that the U.S. government should leave residual forces in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from growing like the Islamic State (ISIS) grew in Iraq.
"Pulling all of our people out at the conclusion of some of this stuff is bad," the former NYPD commissioner said.
"For intelligence purposes, we should have people there for support, for training," Kerik explained.
"These countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and some of the others, they need an enormous amount of support and sometimes they just need to know that we're behind them, that somebody is behind them and if they run into trouble, we're going to be there for them," he said.
"When you pull completely out, it leaves them no hope, no support, and it really gives us no intelligence as to what's going on on the inside," he added.
"That's a problem for us. We have to leave a contingent there to benefit us," he explained further.
Kerik said that the attack is "a combination of both" the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and a 9/11 moment for Pakistan.
"I remember being in Amman, Jordan in November of 2005 right after they bombed the three hotels there — it's the same picture just in different places — brutal, savage, human massacres by people that want the demise of freedom," he contends.
"Whether it's Jordan, whether it's Pakistan, whether it's 9/11 in ground zero, which was really the first battleground in this war . . . it's the same enemy and people can't be surprised what happened in Pakistan, shouldn't be surprised what happened in Australia, and should not be surprised if and when it happens here again," he added.
According to Kerik, "the further you get away from 9/11, the more people forget . . . Our intelligence is much better today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001 but the problem is somebody is going to slip through the crack, and when they do, we're going to have instances like we saw in Australia or what happened in Pakistan or some of these things we've been seeing around the U.S. in the last few months."