Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On 88 Days To Kandahar 20240622

Good evening. Im bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose, along with my wife. On behalf of the entire staff, welcome. A few quick administrative notes. Nobody could time to turn off your cell phones or anything that might go beep. Secondly, when we get to the q a part of the session, we would ask if you have a question that you make your way to that microphone that there because we are videotaping tonight, taking ourselves of our Youtube Channel and also cspan booktv easier. Lastly, at the end before you come up to get your book signed, please fold up the chairs that your city in and leaned them against something that looks like it wont topple over. We are very pleased to have Robert Grenier here with us this evening to talk like his new book, 88 days to kandahar. Bob spent 27 years with the cia, three of them as station chief in islamabad during what turned out to be a very critical time. Before and immediately after the 9 11 attacks. He was very much involved in the u. S. Efforts to oust the taliban from afghanistan and bring hamid karzai to power, and the books title refers to the period between september 11 and december 2001 when karzai made his return to afghanistan from pakistan. Of the books of course have reported extensively on the war in afghanistan, including some by other former cia officials, but bob offers a fresh details about the role of both the cia and the pakistanis in the pashtun areas of afghanistan in the months after 9 11. With his ringside seat as a Senior Agency official stationed closest to afghanistan, he recounts meeting by meeting, sometimes even phone call by phone call, how events unfolded. As he explains at the beginning of the book, he knew early on that he wanted to write about the experience and about what happened. So we kept extensive notes and was able to review many relevant documents. After his pakistan tour, bob was brought back to cia headquarters by george kennan, who was then, of course, cia director, to head the agency group covert operation in support of the invasion of iraq in 2003. Later he assumed leadership of the agencys catechism center and he was removed from the position in early 2006 after clashes with other top officials and retired from the agency later that year. Joining a Security Firm as managing director and is now chairman of the rg partners, Strategic Advisory firm that focuses on security and intelligence matters. The economist magazine has praised bobs book as quote and engrossing wellwritten insiders account and a Washington Post review has called quote in admirably frank addition to the bookshelf of memoirs about americas involvement in afghanistan and d iraq. The post review without is a quote, he has a sweeping story to tell what she does and a sharp, straightforward style while pausing to let us in on ad hoc decisionmaking of the sometimes absurd world he inhabited. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Robert Grenier. [applause] thanks very much for that introduction. At the end of the day all i really wanted to do with this book was to tell a story. And a story begins early on a sunday morning. Its a clear, bright day. It was surprisingly comfortable for islamabad pakistan. But it was enough to enjoy. In fact, i was sound asleep i was absolutely exhausted ive been up until 3 00 in the morning. I slept fitfully for maybe three or four hours, and then the phone rang. And so i admit that i may have betrayed a slight hint of irritation when i picked up the receiver and said hello . I immediately regretted it because it was a pause at the other end of the line, and a very familiar voice said, did i wake you up, son . Oh, good god. Is the director. So i sat up at attention in bed and i did it within you can do in those circumstances. I lied. I said no, mr. Director, i was just getting up. He said look, we are going to be meeting tomorrow at camp david. Members of the war cabinet. And were going to discussing the campaign in afghanistan. He said the pentagon is telling us that there are very few legitimate military targets in all of afghanistan. We can probably get them from the air in a matter of days. We know where all the terrorist Training Camps are, but that terrorists have all fled. The seat of power in washington, d. C. , he was called in the middle of the night halfway around the world completely bypassing the entire chain of command to ask some sleeping field operative what we ought to do. If you didnt know we were in trouble before, you knew it now. So i said, mr. Director, im not sure what we are thinking about this and just the right way. You are asking about military tactics. This is a political problem. We probably have the power to Chase International terrorist out of afghanistan, but whos going to keep them out . At the end of the day what we need to have is a competent Political Authority able to assert its control over afghanistan that will do will begin. And that is to keep it from again becoming a safe haven for International Terrorists. If the taliban is going to be that covered, well then, so much the better, they are there and theyre controlling most of the country. If mullah omar ahead of the taliban is not willing to change policy with regard to bin laden, been there others in the leadership we know who may be willing to step into just that. If we cant convince the taliban as a whole to do what needs to be done, then we have to smash the taliban and we have to do it anyway that will enable us to bring Something Else in its place. So whatever military means we use, we have to sequence them and calibrate and in such a way as to get us to where it is we need to be politically. So as im going through this recitation, hes taking o notes and he stopped and asked the question. I said look, this isnt going to work, this is taking too long. Me try to write all this down. So he said that idea. Remember, this is early sunday morning my time. Its late saturday night time, hihas died. He said its 11 00. The helicopter comes to me at six. Can you give me something by been . I said yes, sir, i can. I drove as fast as he pretendedd did office. Hammered out an eight page message in about three hours but by this time my senior lieutenants were coming back in. So i circulated it to them and i got some good input from them, made those changes and sent it back. I didnt completely bypassing the chain of command, and send it to security detail and said had this to the director as soon as he gets a. As far as i was concerned that was for the time being the end of a story. I had no idea what was going to happen after that. But he did wake up and they gave him my piece and you look at it any circulated copies to the other members of the war cabinet, to cheney and rice and rumsfeld and secretary powell and chairman myers. And to discuss it that day at camp david. Then the following morning, monday, they met with the president and laid it out for the president. The president said done, this is our template going forward. The next thing i knew, tommy franks, the Combatant Commander for the region, was giving me on the phone to do a Video Conference because hed been ordered to make sure his battle plan conformed to my paper put this is absolutely extraordinary. Esso but not the way things normally work. Well, it said that no plan survives contact with any. This plan was no exception. But there were in a lot of principles which and in we did actually followed during the conduct of what we thought was of the war. And so what was it that we said . To reiterate, we said at the end of the this is a political problem, not a military problem. I said, whatever military means we use, we need to make sure we are not perceived by the afghans as invaders. Afghanistan has a nasty habit of dealing very badly with for invaders. The time of alexander, discovered by the soviets to to their cost in the 20th century, discovered by the british as well in the 19th, and i was very concerned we would reprieve the experience they had as well. So i said but to keep our military footprint as small as possible we have to make a clue we are not seeking Permanent Military bases. Not seeking to occupy the country. As part of that with to make it clear that we are not coming in on her own again. We are coming in our behalf of afghanistan. Afghans have to be in the lead. Is the afghans were willing to do on his own account and of their own volition what we want them to do, such that we can support them, we will not succeed in the end. As we will colonize the place, and i didnt see any advocates for that. But as we are looking for these allies, our most natural allies with the Northern Alliance, collection of ethnic minority send in the north of the country who been fighting a civil war, a losing civil war mind you are quite a number of years with the taliban. I said we will find support within. We must come in on their site, but, but we have to be extremely careful lest we are perceived by the far more numerous visits from in the, oregon, many of whom put had up here from the taliban. We may adhere to them we are simply entering a battle on the side other enemies come as hard as they are the taliban they will be coalesced around the taliban and the political situation with the worst rather than better. So its extremely important as we support the Northern Alliance that we also are fighting in support of the pashtuns. And i respect at least we have had, weve gotten a head start. For the previous 18 months we have been reaching out to pashtun warlords, if you will. Most of them tribal commanders. Many of them we establish relationships with back in the days of the ethics of jihad in the 1980s. Many of them have been marginalized by the taliban, some of them were fighting for the taliban and still were looking for the opportunity to come back and reclaim what they felt was the rightful place in pashtun society. So now after 9 11 when everything was possible, we went back to them again as if this is your chance. If youre willing to rise up against the taliban you have the full weight of American Military power behind you. Thought that was a pretty good pitch. But almost to a person they demurred. You dont survive as a warlord in afghanistan to come in on the wrong side of the fight. They came up with any number of excuses, but the meaning, the burden they had was that we did make sure that you, the americans, are serious. We need to make sure whos going to win at the end of the day before we will commit ourselves. There were only two tribal leaders of any consequence in southern afghanistan who are willing to commit themselves and rise up in rebellion against the taliban. And take the risk associated with one of them was harmed karzai, whom we know and love. Love. Came out of this very nicely, thank you very much, twotime president of afghanistan. And also a former governor of kandahar had the dubious distinction of being the first provincial governor to be driven out of power by the taliban when it first was up in 1994. Those were the only two that we could induce initially to take the fight to the taliban. Much of this book tells the improbable and at times hairraising story of these two individuals going back essentially on their own to the respective tribal areas, raising small tribal armies and some of surviving long enough for me to get my cia officers, accompanied by u. S. Army special forces to join with them Andrew Marshall u. S. Air power in two attacks, one from the north and one, east. They converge on kandahar on the seventh of december, 2001, drove the taliban and alqaeda from power. We thought that was the end of the war. In fact, it turned out only to be the First American Afghan Border as that was underway it was a separate campaign, also been fought, a parallel war that is being fought within the borders of pakistan. As they can be both the north and south was going forward, militants, foreign militants allied with bin laden were fleeing afghanistan primarily into pakistan in hopes of finding safe haven elsewhere. So cia in conjunction with the notorious pakistani intelligence service, the isi, were doing a land office business, find interesting many people in many of these people ended up in guantanamo. We thought it was all enormously successful. But as i look back now its clear to me that we really didnt understand how and why we had one. We understood the military part of it we realized this was by wrote a political structure, struggle but we didnt fully understand the political situation in southern afghanistan especially that convinced the taliban that they needed to give a. Because we didnt understand why wed want them we could really understand just how tenuous our victory was. We could spend a long time cataloging the mistakes were made by any number of afghan actors, by the americans, by the international community. Among many other things we shifted our focus. As brad just mentioned before very long i was ordered back to washington to become cias iraq Mission Manager we are off to the next finger afghanistan was largely left aside. By the time i returned to begin to focus once again on pakistan and afghanistan, this time as the director of cias counterterrorism center, i made an extensive visit to both countries in the spring of 2005 and already we could begin to see that things were starting to unravel. We did not is going to go. I certainly didnt get th that e could begin to see the taliban reinserting control in significant parts of afghanistan. That was the situation that persisted when i left government in 2006. And then in my humble estimation we as a country made a very serious political and strategic mistake. In a small way in the latter part of the osha administration and in a much bigger way in the early days of the obama administration, we essentially took over the war ourselves. We concluded that the afghan authorities at the time simply were not up to the test. They simply were not up to what would be required we felt in order for them to prevail against the taliban. So you remove all those principles we talked about at the outset, that the americans must keep their footprint very small, the packet has been the lead, we have to be working in support of them rather than the other way around all of that was left aside. We decided in effect afghanistan was too important to be left to the whims of afghans. And so at the height of the obama surge, with 1000 american troops, another 45,000 from nato. Were spending at a rate of 100 billion a year, we completely overwhelm this small, primitive agrarian country with a tiny gdp and a Debt National institutions. It didnt go well. Its brought us down to the current path were essentially the United States has largest withdrawn from afghanistan. We are going to withdraw further. Again in my humble estimation i think have made it very serious mistake by trying to do too much, now we are compounding that error by trying to do too little. And so having won what now i call the First American afghan war, having certainly not one the second american afghan war, i am very concerned that we are setting the scene, setting the stage for what will ultimately have to be another, a third american afghan war. As brad eluded a couple of minutes ago, this book was a long time in coming, especially for somebody who knew he was going to write it back in december 2001. But on balance as a look at it now im kind of glad i waited a separate written this book whatevers got out of Government Back in 20062007 as i read the intended it wouldve been a very different story. Essentially within an adventure story. I hope it still is at its heart, but now with what we know with a perspective that we have a time, that adventure story, one persons perspective is bracketed in a much larger geo political story, the sort of the First American afghan war, how and why was that we won, how we lost our way and failed to win the second american afghan war, and we met may yet be forced to fight a third. Thank you all very much for your patience. And lets to open the floor for questions. [applause] certainly are not my image of a cia officer the you look more like an accountant to me. I hate it when people say that. However, however, based on your experience better, do you see any incentives for the taliban to negotiate with the current Afghan Government and try to put an end to this . Or is it much more likely that they would just kind of way to know, continue with her terrorist attacks and take over the country . Did you alter the question . Good. Im not very optimistic. I know theres been some recent development, some talks that people sort of buzzing, were beginning to make progress. I share your pessimism, sorting of the stage. The taliban to succeeding on the battlefield. They certainly dont want to leave the United States with a strong position in afghanistan because they know ultimately thats going to work against them. Theyve tried to make it clear that a condition of their engagement with it, government is the departure of the foreigners. I dont think that they are about to make peace. What i would hope, seems to me the best we could hope for over the long term is that the taliban will simply conclude that its not going to win along the line. I think this requires a more robust, a limited and sustainable but get more robust engagement on the part of the country. If we could get into the point where they conclude, were just not going to succeed militarily, we will have to reach some sort of an agreement, i just dont think its in their dna to form themselves as a Political Party and form a coalition government. Its just not the way the thing. Spirit just as a followup to that, if thats the case is there, will the taliban be sort of a selfcontained afghanistan creature, or do you foresee linkages with isis, connections with pashtun how does that there are three in afghanistan some who up until now have been fully with the taliban, there may be others who may defect because they see their mission in much broader more global terms. The taliban per se this focus on national goals. I think they will remain that way. In terms, they will be around for ever. They are a part of postures aside and certainly for the foreseeable future to be a part of that society. My thinking on this has been influenced by one of the founders of the taliban, and have had an opportunity to meet with him several times since we both got out of government. What he says is that, you know, we the taliban, we really shouldnt be involved in politics. He said we would not a Political Party. We are a social movement. We need to go back to what we were. We need to be a social force which is exerting influence to make sure that those who are in power our ruling in a way thats consistent with our conception of islam. I think ultimate thats what theyre going to go but its going to take a long time to get them there. Thank you. First off, thank you for your service. I just want to ask you a question about pakistan since you served there for several years. Do you think in the long run that the current civilian government or military government, it will be able to hold off the more fundamentalist aspects of the Pakistani Society . And do you think that they will be able to avoid another war with india, a possible nuclear war with india . And thank you. Well, to an important issues, and to think in answer to your first question, yes, i think ultimately they can prevail. They really are in an existential struggle with islamic extremists who have been energized, if you will, by the u. S. Presence in afghanistan. But the relative departure of the americans is not getting him to rethink their program. They are opposed to the government. But i think, although there have been times when it appeared as though neither the civilian government nor the army really frankly have the will to resist them over the long term, i think in fact they did and ultimate i think it will succeed. It wont be pretty and it will be a long struggle but they will be able to do that. Part of that will be there marshaling the majority of pakistani opinion, which is not extremists, to that end. I think weve seen instances. Back in 2009, other times since then with the pakistani populace has been energized political and support of the government in order to control the extremist. With regard to india, father folks think this whole issue with kashmir over which india and pakistan fought four wars and now, in sort of a thing of the past, its an anachronism. I can turn in pakistan it is not. I have spoken with young Pakistani Military officers looking for signs that they are different from those who came before them and they are not. They are still focused like a laser beam on kashmir. I think kashmir has to be set up and i think its possible to settle. I dont think that pakistans and indians can do it on their own. I think they need a quiet outside involvement with the indians are very, very resistant to the idea, always have been, but i think that if we are to peace ultimately, the stability in pakistan but peac peace and e wider south asia to include afghanistan, there has to be a resolution over kashmir. Thank you. Just as a postscript to that as well, theres one area in the book were described a situation in the spring, specifically in 2002002 with india and pakistan came very, very close to allout war yet again. In fact, i was convinced that they were going to go toward the had it not been for the diplomacy of the thin side of state they wouldve gone toward the we are not out of the woods. This could still happen. Its something we need to be aware of. I graduate from college in the 1960s. What you say about how we gradually took over the war in afghanistan and iraq sounds very much like vietnam. We came in with a few advisors and then settling we had half a million die in the field. Fighting for a government that have no support at home. And so there was a book talk a couple weeks ago of the nixon tapes between his election, first election in the second election where he found that as soon as the americans got out, the government would collapse because there was no support in the country. Now, where do you see afghanistan going but it sounds like you think we should stay there longer, but the government is very unpopular, very corrupt but the vietnamese government was. How do you see us making this work, and whats the point of our staying . I mean, nixon just kept it going for another 25,000 deaths. In my humble estimation i think you probably agree with this, i think it is a needlessly. A lot of people died both vietnamese and americans needlessly so so he could be reelected in 1972. I suspect domestic politics played a role in the. You may be right. Why should we be doing this at all . And the concern that i have is that violent islamist extremism as all the is not going away the effect its had a greater and longer life than i ever wouldve predicted. Right now the front lines if you are in iraq and syria, and a few other lesser fronts scattered around the region. Over the long term i dont think isis is going to succeed its going to take a long time to roll the backing syria. We could spent a lot of time talking about that. Iraq is only marginally better. But eventually i dont think they are of the way to the future to people at the to people at into they did not want to live under these barbarians and ultimate that will cost them. Large numbers of International Terrorists looking for safety the taliban will not say no. That is why we need to stay engaged on a sustainable basis. And trying to achieve things on their behalf that they cant sustain. I admit right up front, won the pecan sustain and uncomfortable as it is, that is the option we should take. Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Ltd. Counterinsurgency, as well as insurgency. Help the government to conduct a successful insurgency in those areas it can naturally control and helping likeminded individuals to resist the taliban in those areas that are within the taliban to help the resist the taliban. We should be doing counterinsurgency and insurgency in different parts of the country. Thank you. You did not mention the ha a Haqqani Network. Of wonder how all significant there. He was very much active from 1999 to 2000 until 2001 and at the time of 9 11 u. S. Minister for Tribal Affairs for the taliban government and tremendously influential figure on both sides of the pakistan border. The pakistani are afraid of him as they are afraid of the sun is now, tremendous influence, it is difficult for outsiders to include for instance the pakistani army. The Haqqani Network are working along with the afghan taliban, the organization we stinkstill think is loyal to mullah omar. They have not aligned with the pakistani taliban. Part of the reason much to our anoints the pakistani east have been speaking to and cooperating with the Haqqani Network to make sure theyre focused on afghanistan and not pakistan or as mama died. They are intractable problem. From traveling in tribal areas myself and asking questions about about the haqqanis the physical reaction i got from people told me a lot about the power influence they have in tribal areas. Glad you kept knows because this is a superb book. I read all of them. Up until now, a bit too much chest thumping in the memoirs. And would have been disastrous in the Southern Campaign . For great details. What strikes me is how many times you cite how you guys were kind of like moving forward with your plans if you were at justin and washington was clueless. You were making a policy. I can quote a couple good sentences. This is what i find arming. Do you want to expand on that . It is funny. When you put yourself back in a situation you live the number of years ago, as i did in writing this book i find myself getting at all over again. I left it all behind. In fact i had i think the looking at it in a more balanced way what you see in this book is a classic field perspective. If you are a field man when you are a field man i have been part of the headquarters visa at different times and perceive what i was doing in a different way. If you are working in the field you naturally tend to see the uzbek headquarters as being clueless and they often are but of necessity you are limited in your perspective just as i was limited in my perspective about political realities in washington. The things people in my headquarters with doing, i thought were breathtakingly stupid, made a certain amount of sense within that hothouse of politics, interagency politics in the way the cia was dealing with it with the pentagon, the white house and others. The mark of wisdom, it is difficult to grasp, when you are dealing with idiocy in washington to have that experience and knowledge and discipline to recognize why it is they do what they do end similarly if you are in washington despite the fact you like to think you are in charge of this whole thing and you have that 5,000 miles screwdriver and tinkering with things come at the end of the day i am not going to understand the questions let alone the answers. I need to defer as far as i can to the folks who are much closer to the battlefront. For all your straight talk, you never included a line when going back to washington, when i you going to unfuck yourself . Thank you for speaking today. I am a tibetan from india in exile, having grown up in china. Since you look so knowledgeable and agreeable high want to take this opportunity to get some advice and help. What cia can do, how much it can do and the u. S. Government itself can do in a problem about tibet. In india also. We have a government in exile. How much does the u. S. Have any stake in problems for example if the indians in india are doing something politically against our countrys ideology and the mullahs and things like that or sri lanka or china is a problem that we dont agree completely on all of that. On the neighboring countries, if they are doing something wrong and People Like Us if we know, i am nobody and have no issue for politics but as a human being, ridiculously weird problems. Y do something continued to do these things when it is 2015 when the cia or other governments power can how much can we expect in terms if it is against u. S. Interests and things like that . Appreciate your question. I wish that i knew more about tibet. I am no to that expert. From what lionel i know about the dynamics, the recent history of tibet i have a tremendous amount of personal sympathy for the cause. There were officers, a couple generations removed, a generation removed from me as i was coming up in a young officer in the cia who cut their teeth working with the tibetans and their effort to try to resist the chinese and that didnt go particularly well at the time. I wish i could Say Something more encouraging. There is not much i can say that is very encouraging. China is a large and very powerful country, has a tremendous amount of influence, we and other countries in the region have a very long agenda with china. There are many things we would like to change at about chinese policy weathered is monetary policy, economic policy, concerns about expansionism in the South China Sea as well as to that, the task of governments to try to balance those interests and part of the role for people like yourself is to make sure that issue remains visible, and from the margins for the u. S. To exert pressure and influence in a positive way. I am not terribly optimistic that the u. S. Will make major departures. And i wish it were otherwise. The cia making mistakes, iran not once, afghanistan, iraq, yemen, september levon, can we test the cia. It is interesting, the quote i have in the book talking about the earlier part of my career, the management fads, i havent executive coach, running the training program. Sort of like a jewish grandmother. I would sit in her office in the afternoons, and no one is more loyal to this organization than you, it is intentionally subversive. More than half a point, gets to the heart of what you are saying. Always focused on my organization not so much for what it was but what it needed to be. I love the cia, warts and all. Has done a lot of good things and some disastrous things, no question about that. To me what was most important was the mission. As long as the u. S. Remains a global power you need to have a cia and that means burning down the current cia and selling salt and building up something new, that is the way i see it. The cia has a Critical Mission given the historical role of the United States and we try to do the best we can. I can get into a debate with you as to whether the overthrow of that was done well or not. It was not bad, probably as good as it gets. There was a lot we didnt see, the iranian revolution, some serious mistakes before 9 11, after 9 11 for some period of time we did pretty well at least while i was there. These other people when i handed over god knows that i take your point. I dont know you nor have i read your book. High was in the peace corps in nigeria in 65. I never left that sense of being a peace corps volunteer boy worked in cobble ten times and i went back one time on my own after being there on an a i p project with booz allen ministry of finance, central server, Civil Service administration and anticorruption project which gets a laugh from everyone in kabul is they said can be taken back to the hotel . I said grammy anyplace and i will take a taxi and they thought i was crazy. I have been to the it compound, i have seen how people like you, i am putting you into a box, steve department, embassy, so isolated from what is going on among the Common People whereas with my background and especially in kabul i can walk around all the time with afghan friends, one project, have my friends pick me up in their thin skinned vehicle and go up for peace corps at pizza and ice cream and many engagement parties and hotels, 6es were separated where it was acceptable. My point is with all of your you may be as an individual quite brilliant and analytical but in terms of people in the american bureaucracies, you are so isolated and deservedly so because you fear being killed but i dont and you can say i am crazy, it is said incredible said for however well your book was written just assume that. And the gap between the american presence and the general expatriate communities is so huge that there is no understanding of on the ground basic intelligence so how do you think the American Foreign policy shaped by distortion of fortresslike living and escorts by heavilyarmed vehicles with the entourage of three or four vehicles for one american official, how is that gap ever to be overcome for American Foreign policy to have any sort of alignment with reality . Our wish i could disagree with you. Unfortunately we are in fundamental agreement in defense of my current colleagues i suspect they are doing a lot better in intelligence collection than their posture would suggest that they are. It is much more difficult, you are working through others, dealing with principal agents, and a tremendous amount of stuff that you absolutely miss. If i were to answer your question i would start from the beginning, in 1983 i was a junior officer in saudi arabia, and the attack on the American Embassy in kuwait. And they formed a commission. The Commission Said what we need to do is reinforce and fortify our embassies so they dont blow the love the way they did in kuwait. Our embassy in yemen, was not on the street. It would take an army to get into the american compound, the point i am making is we as a government have to an increasing extent of decades been increasingly risk averse. When i first got to this point in my career, dealing with congress and others and government agencies, and older colleague used to give me advice, pull me inside, put his arm around me and said remember, fear drive the system. He was absolutely right. The fear he was describing was political fear. People being afraid of being blamed for whatever potential disaster is going to come over it the horizon and as a result the government is not willing to put our people in harms way. You could be almost as secure most times going by yourself in a thin skinned a vehicle, dressed like a local, i have a harder time than you do. If you are careful and judicious but if you get killed, how will that look back politically in washington, you lead this individual go in a thin skinned vehicle traveling on his own. We use armored convoys which themselves are huge targets. What i am saying is there are a great many people who are currently living their secluded lives and essentially separating themselves from populations they are trying to understand and doing it not because they want to but because those are the dictates handed down from washington and like every stupid things it comes from washington theres a reason for it you need to understand. I would like to piggyback on the idea, and i am currently reading a biography of George Kennedy and one thing that strikes me is canon really understood russia and russian culture and a lot of policymakers who listened to him benefited from that. In your position now on the field, what sense did you get from the people in washington, their knowledge of afghanistan, you read about iraq, what was your sense in terms of the understanding that your superiors had in washington of the area that they were dealing with handcrafting policy. Tempting as it is to look at washington as a stupid model, in fact, it is not a monolith. There are people in different positions in the chain of command in different concerned agencies who have greatly varying knowledge and understanding of the particular geographies they are dealing with. Among my colleagues in the near east in south asia at that time there were a lot of people who did understand south asia and what we had been doing and who given the opportunity would have been Effective Advocates to push at the time. There were others in an organization, and craig terrorist organizations end didnt because of their personal experience didnt know much about cultures and political structures with in terrorist organizations which had a great deal of influence so that was often the difficulty. And you must go and do this and we would say there are serious unintended consequences and this is what they are. And frequently lead to cl view hamid karzai is an interesting fellow. I think at the time he had american and international support, the interim chairman of the interim Afghan Government was elected president and reelected president , very interesting individual. Like most of us he had some good qualities and some flat sides. As time went on and the situation evolved as it did with the u. S. Taking a prominent overwhelming role in afghanistan, he frequently found himself as somebody whos influence was limited by the confines of the palace that he occupied. That was an extremely humiliating situation for him. It made his relations with americans increasingly poisonous over time. The fact that the taliban during his entire tenure absolutely refused to deal with him at all, was 8 huge humiliation for him. Essentials what the taliban was saying is we can deal with the putt or the puppet master. Wide deal with the puppet . That stunned him particularly in circumstances where he was frequently made to feel like a puppet and overtime he built up enough baggage that it simply became poisonous and very difficult for him and americans to maintain constructive relations. The other point i would make which relates to what he was doing, still doing what he does, which is playing politics. One of the things we used to criticize him for, i am thinking during the time after i left, government just watching him as an outside observer it was pretty clear to me we were criticizing him for doing political things, which in the highly imperfect structures that he occupied he felt he needed to in order to maintain Political Support and they were often situations, in afghanistan simply would not admit of. We like to do all of the above and eradicate and get rid of corruption and promote female education these are all worthy of things and need to happen and given realities on the ground we would not have been in position to explore all of those with equal vigor at the same time and those were the types of judgments americans were reluctant up until the end to make an that very much complicated relations with hamid karzai. Believe me, even in my time i found hamid karzai often very difficult to deal with. Intended to listen to whoever it was, there were times when i would get calls from field operatives dealing with him to say you got to talk to hamid karzai because he will do something really stupid so you get into a socratic dialogue with him and tease out from him the potential unintended consequences and he would say okay, you are right, we mustnt do that. I didnt know which was worse. I didnt know it was worse than he came up with this to that ideal or the first place or that it was so easy to talk him out of it afterwards but this is what you joel with with hamid karzai. [applause] there is a lot more, copies of the book are available, please form a line to the right of the table. Thank you. You are watching booktv and cspan2 with top fiction nonfiction books and authors. Booktv television for serious readers. Here are some programs to watch this weekend on booktv. Missouri senator claire mechanical talks about her life and political career on afterwards. 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