War on drugs. Where does your name come from . I was born in czechoslovakia. Is not czechoslovakian. Wanda with a w is a fairly common polish name. The one that i was named after, is the inventor of orchids. It is interesting because a lot of my work is based on working on endangered species and conservation. I guess i was born to this name. My last name is arabic even though i was born in czechoslovakia. Brian you thank your mother in your books. Vanda essentially, those letters are the female endings. It can mean belonging to the man. For simplicity, and also because i did not want the connotation, i dropped those letters. Brian how long have you been in the United States . Vanda about 30 years. I came in high school. I started high school in the czech republic. I won a scholarship to a private, american high school. It was extraordinary. I loved every moment. I was very grateful. I never went back. I did all of my undergraduate work and graduate work in the u. S. Brian describe the kinds of things you are expert in. Vanda in the morning, when you ask me that question, i tell that i work on nontraditional Security Threats which covers everything from organized crime, counterinsurgency. In the evening when i am depressed, after working on the subjects, i say that i work on how things fall apart. Both of them are misnomers. The nontraditional Security Threat rebellion, insurgencies, they predate conventional warfare. In the evening, when i say that i work on how things fall apart, it is a key component in what animates my work in recognizing governed domains. That is why we have organized crime. Even in the absence of governance, some form of governance is favored by nongovernment actors. Benevolent and malevolent ones. For example, in france, maybe that is why they do not want to devote state resources to governance. That is how i work when i look at organized crime and insurgency i think about what kind of governance has emerged. Brian after you went to the Phillips Academy for high school, where did you go next . Brian i went to brandeis and then i transferred to harvard. In government. Harvard calls it political science. I focused on international relations. This was in the 1990s. I was looking at low intensity conflict which later became known as insurgencies. I started looking at the intersection at the time of criminality, and insurgency and that is what carried through my graduate studies and the work that i do today. Brian you got a phd from m. I. T. In what . Vanda political science. Brian lets go to a video clip and then have you tell us what this is all about. [video clip] the sound of gunshots ricochet across kabul. This was outside the star hotel, close to major embassies and government ministries. This was supposed to be one of the most secure parts of the city. There were also attacks on the Parliament Building and nato headquarters and another base on the outskirts. Brian where were you . Vanda this is a video from kabul. I have been able to do a lot of fieldwork in my life as part of my work. That has brought unique insights, including empathy with people. During one of the trips, with other colleagues as guests of nato, we were on the streets. We were trapped inside the ministry of mines. We were expelled byt h the guar. There are stories about the drama it captures many aspects of war. We often focus on war in the moments of suffering when a bomb goes off. But there are long periods in between that things dont happen. Unfortunately, the number of bomb attacks has gone up significantly. Since the 2002 video. We will be going back and i will see how much more difficult it is to travel around the city. As a female. It is very risky. If you get stopped on the road and the taliban checks who is under the burqa. There is a risk of being kidnapped. The ability to move around has never been easy but it has become significantly more difficult even since that video. Brian how many times have you been to afghanistan . Vanda at least 10 or 11 times. Brian when you go, how close have you come to this kind of episode . Vanda it varies. You can be just a few streets away and you dont necessarily know that things are happening until the driver says we have to get out right away. I have never been in direct crossfire. Brian let me show you some video back in 2013 about a man that we came to know, hamid karzai. [video clip] i am very happy to hear from the president , as we discussed earlier, that in spring this year, the Afghan Forces will be fully responsible for providing security to the afghan people. That the International Forces , the american forces, will be no longer present in the afghan villages. The task will be that of the Afghan Forces to provide for the people in security and protection. Brian what happened near the end of his term . What happened in his relationship with the United States . Why was he so negative . Vanda i think this is a broader question of what happened to his term overall. The end was a long culmination of progressive deterioration of the relationships from 2008. It is a larger story of the deterioration of the afghanistan government. To corruption, afghans would call, towards the end, his government a mafia government. Eventually, the combination in washington of the abuses taking place and the progressively colder relationship from washington, certainly when president obama came to power. President karzai became convinced that the United States was trying to undermine him or get rid of him. They were trying to support rival candidates in the 2009 election. Probably so. Demandingington was much more accountability over how money was being spent, the corruption that pervaded every aspect of afghan life. Afghan peoplehat faced. Land theft, disappearances of people. A very you a very brutal mafia. Washington was trying to put pressure on karzai to moderate his behavior and the behavior of the ruling elite around him. He was unable and uninterested to do so and came to see it as very threatening. He viewed the entire relationship with the United States with conspiracy. Brian back in may of this year, the special investigator for the United States government, talked about the deteriorating security situation in afghanistan. This is a short time ago. Let us watch this. [video clip] i remember when i started coming three years ago, i could travel around most of the country. I could go to the big city off to the west. I could go to kandahar. My people, my agents actually traveled around in cars without having military escorts. We do not have anyone in those cities now. Jalalabad is a very dangerous place. We use afghans as sources. They help us do monitoring of sites for us. We try to come up with other means to do it. This is not your normal ig operation. My monitors wear flak jackets and helmets. My agents are carrying machine guns when they go out there. This is not your ordinary situation. Brian what do you think . Vanda afghanistan is not an ordinary situation. The level of corruption that pervades every day life. Security has deteriorated very significantly. It is difficult to get around. It requires bravery or foolishness or a combination. I have spent part of the spring this year in somalia. Going back there to look at changes there and you have a situation, in some ways, it is more difficult than in afghanistan. A lot of insecurity. Real difficulties in getting around. A tremendous amount of corruption. It is possible, but it is tough. Brian you say in your book that afghanistan is one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. You name north korea and somalia. How do you see corruption . Vanda i rely for the rankings. It is a very important question of what is corruption . Corruption is at the core of policies failing across a range of domains. Whether it is combating poaching and wildlife tracking , or staterafficking building efforts in afghanistan and in somalia. Other parts of the world are also corrupt like india. But that country is not collapsing. The United States is trying to devise anticorruption measures, they often fail. They need to succeed in that effort or the entire policy effort might be undermined. To me, this is the key priority corruption to focus on, those that alienate people to the preparing a group like taliban. Is an effect on resources. Or whether this is charging bribes, judicial processing, they satisfy the party with the bigger bribe. Bribes, but are willing to productive if they are in the form of tax. It is rapacious and unpredictable and ever escalating bribes without delivery of services that debilitate society to the point of fighting with a militant group. Brian you know more than most. We have been there since the early part of 2001. Depending on where you look, it is a 1 trillion expense and more before it is over. If you combine that with iraq it is somewhere between 4 trillion and 6 trillion. What would you say to someone who had lost their son or daughter over there or who had gotten wounded, that we accomplished there . Vanda it is a tough question and it is increasingly difficult to answer, particularly if you combine it with how much longer we should stay. Clearly, the lives of particularly urban afghans have improved significantly. In some ways, the lives of rural afghans have improved. Access to primary education is better. Access to health care for women and families is significantly better in most areas. From the u. S. National security perspective, i think that we are certainly much better off without al qaeda having a platform for operations in afghanistan. However, increasingly, we need to ask ourselves what are we trying to achieve and how much of our resources will we commit how much of our resources are devoted to it. Many of my sympathies are to the people, my drivers, my translators, ordinary afghans. It is increasingly tough to justify those expenses, particularly if we do not see significant improvements in afghan governance. There is a moment of opportunity. There is a new government. Karzai is no longer president. On paper, the new government is committed to combating terrorism. Combating corruption committed to improving governance and i think we should not quit as yet. We need to demand accountability from our partners. Brian has it been worth the price . 2700 americans killed. 2700 people killed. Americans, more than that. We go to bed here vanda i think that the u. S. Did achieve improvements in security but it depends on how it ends. Here is where i hesitate and. Ncreasingly interrogate myself we do not know how it will end. If we withdrawn now, it may collapse. It is possible five years down the road, we will be back in a new civil war in afghanistan. Isis is emerging in the country. It is much worse than the taliban and. The taliban is deeply entrenched. If we end up five years down the road in a new civil war in afghanistan and safe havens for taliban and isis, then i would say it is not worth the price. Brian let me ask you about karzai again. Was he honest . Vanda i think he was honest but the timeframe that he was working in, i am not sure that it translates to how we define honesty. Brian billions of dollars have been lost over there. Has he taken any of that . Was he personally corrupt, i do not have any information. There have been newspaper articles. From his perspective, this was not personal bribes. This was the method of ruling. Using the money delivered to him to pay opponents. This was just every day doing business in afghanistan. We certainly know that people close to him, including his Vice President , people in his family like his brother, had their hands in any money coming in, taking bribes, and corrupt money , as well as participating in many illegal rackets, like smuggling. Brian how well did you know the new president before he was elected . Vanda i had many exchanges with him. Brian were you surprised when he got elected . Vanda i must say, yes. I watched his First Campaign in 2009 against president karzai then. He got about 3 of the popular vote. His learning about becoming an afghan politician from a former world bank technocrat is the change in persona. It was astounding. Brian how much time did he spend in the United States . Doing what . Vanda he got his phd at columbia in anthropology, and then he was at the world bank for many years. I think about three decades. Brian lets watch a little bit of his march 2015 speech before the congress when he was here. [video clip] to the brave veterans and to the families who tragically lost their loved ones to the enemys cowardly acts of terror. We owe a profound debt to the Many Americans who have come to build schools, repair wells, and cure the sick. At the end of the day, it is the ordinary americans, whose hardearned taxes over the years has built the partnership that has led to our conversation today. Brian when you look at that and you hear him say that about the soldiers, you still go back to the fact that we have spent all of this money and lost all of these people, and we wake up and see one out of six americans go to bed every day hungry. You wonder again what did we gain by being over there . Why is afghanistan not a mistake if iraq was a mistake . Vanda in afghanistan there were real terrorists. Afghanistan. In iraq was a problematic country, no doubt about it. They were a major thorn in the side of u. S. Security arrangements in the middle east. And they were a very problematic country, but terrorism was not there. It turns out that Saddam Hussein also did not have the wmd weapons which was part of the justification. Afghanistan had real al qaeda, which was a major operation for al qaeda and it was the place from which the 9 11 attacks were organized. It depends on how it ends. If five years down the road, we are back in a civil war and the country collapses, a combination of taliban, isis, and other militant groups control large parts of the country, and they become bases for terrorism, then it probably will not have been worth the effort. Brian 10 you explain can you explain our relationship with pakistan . I preface this by saying that we have listened for months and months at about iran and the nuclear bomb. When pakistan has it and india has it. You talk about it in your book about the relationship with the taliban and they are being harbored in pakistan. We have this supposed friendly relationship with pakistan. Can you help us on this one . Vanda our relationship with pakistan might be a relationship with a defined friend and partner, but it is an extraordinarily tortured one. A marriage of abuse from which there might not be a divorce. Pakistanis and the pakistani establishment military police the United States uses them and , abandons them when it suits their will. They are an unreliable partner. The United States focuses on the pakistan, in the last decade and a half, from the has nurtured supported, and protected the taliban. If you do find that as betrayal of the worst kind including because obviously otherwise it is our soldiers at risk. The taliban is killing as many u. S. , nato, Afghan Soldiers as it can. Perspective,stani they are skeptical of the state building project. They do not believe it will be a stable government. Especially not one that is allied or susceptible. They want to calculate proxies. They believe the taliban is such a proxy. From their interest perspective, what they are doing is not inconsistent with their state interest. It is diametrically opposed and antagonistic to ours. There is another dimension of the u. S. Pakistan relationship. A lot of the pakistani sponsorship work thinking down on the taliban that we have been demanding for a decade and a half. It stems not from duplicity and scheming but simply stems from weakness. Pakistan, for decades, has sponsored many militant groups. There are pakistani groups, in the heartland, core of the country, the industrial military heart of pakistan. They cannot control them. A lot of political groups on the border with afghanistan. There are increasingly many militant groups in the business half of the country, karachi. Part of the reason pakistan does not take a strong stand is that they do not have the capacity and they are afraid that it will backfire and many of these militants will now start attacking the pakistani state with much greater violence and energy than what has been happening. Brian do you think the pakistanis knew that Osama Bin Laden was there . Vanda i do not believe so. I do not have any personal information that would make me believe one way or another. From my conversations with u. S. Officials in whom i have faith, i believe the pakistanis were persuaded. They were surprised by the attack and did not know about it. There are questions about why they did not know. How could they be so oblivious . What does that say about their internal security . The fact that they are ignoring a very unusual situation. Brian lets go back for a moment you graduated from harvard and m. I. T. With a ph. D. Did you become an american citizen . And if so, why . Vanda yes. All of my professional and personal life was here in the United States. I love the United States. With all of the difficulties and challenges the country aces at home and abroad. I identify with the people and the country. Brian when did you first learn english . Vanda my last year of elementary school. About two years before i came to the United States. I grew up in communist czechoslovakia. Most of my childhood. Communism ended when i was 13. This was 1989. I grew up in a small village in the borderlands of czechoslovakia. About an hour away from germany and austria. In the mountains. Very beautiful and isolated place. My village had about 1200 people. It was very difficult to study english. There were no opportunities. One would have to travel 20 kilometers to a bigger town. Also english was prohibited. One had to have a special dispensation to study english from the communist regime. I started studying in a town about 20 kilometers away. I would take a bus. I was in my last year of elementary school. Brian is your mom still alive . When did your dad die and what of . Vanda he died of cancer when i was 13. He suffered with it for about three years. Brian what did he do for a living . Vanda he was an interesting man. One who shaped my life deeply. By the time i was born, he was working in the textile firm. Before i was born, and afterwards, he was engaged in a variety of communist activities. He was part of the czech resistance against the nazis. People often ask me about how i came to work on smuggling, crime, and i say that part of my childhood was very much about that and not disclosing what my father was doing. I knew what he was doing. It was very risky. He was preparing me that one day he would not come home. I knew from early on what was happening and that i could not speak about it. At one thing, he was helping to smuggle dissidents out of the country. I lived a childhood of a disjunction between what is legal and what is illegal. Brian what about your mom, where is she . Vanda she still lives in the village. She was a post office clerk. She is retired now. Brian what was her attitude about communism . Vanda she strongly disliked it and disapproved of it. There was unity in the family about that. She was very afraid for what would happen to my father because of his activities. Brian how old was he when he died . Vanda 68. He was older than my mother. An older man when i was born. Brian where did you get this fearless approach to going all over the world to problem situations . How many different places have you done your studies . Vanda i couldnt count. Probably i have been to every single continent except for australia. I badly want to go to antarctica. I have been to all of them. 100 or something countries. I certainly didnt do research in all of them, but maybe 30 countries that ive done research. Brian where other than somalia and afghanistan have you spent a lot of time . Vanda colombia and mix co. I am completing a book on Mexican Security crime, just now. It should be out next year. Brian going back to afghanistan, i want to show you another video clip. This is down the alley that you have been studying. This was in january of this year when he was here talking about this. [video clip] some of the examples we go through in your report that came out last month, some of the waste and fraud. Money that could have been better spent. Looking at the 7 billion to combat opium production. Talk about that effort. Unfortunately, there is nothing positive about that. If you use any metrics that we normally use for fighting drugs, the amount of crop being produced, we fail. There is a 30 increase in the amount of fields under production. The amount of opium actually produced. We fail. That has increased. The amount of interdictions decrease. The amount of people using drugs in afghanistan has increased. Phenomenally. Using every indication it has been an abject failure. We have wasted 7 billion. Brian do you agree . Vanda i think that there is one very important aspect and one that is positive. We could have done much worse. That is not a satisfactory nswer. We need to be realistic about what interventions can accomplish. We could have much better metrics and we would for example, if we decided to start heavily eradicating the fields and sprayng them in the same way that coca is sprayed in columbia, the war in the country would already have been lost and the government would have collapsed. Afghanistan, unfortunately after decades of civil war and insurgency, it is a country that revolves around opium and poppy. Perhaps china in the 1920s may have had something comparable. We decided that we would destroy one third of the economy without anything to replace it. E have just eliminated political order in that country. The taliban is very skilled at mobilizing poppy farmers. That they would protect them from eradication teams. A government that is trying to kill people with hunger. That is what insurgents learn around the world. The islamic ones or be they leftist revolutionaries like the eln in columbia. He best way to win political apital is to win the economy. We need to do a deeper examination about the metrics and if they are right. It cannot be viewed in isolation. It has to be viewed within the larger picture of state building and priority efforts. The problem is that we have Unrealistic Expectations about how long it takes to wave the magic wand and get a legal economy going in the country that is still in violence and destroyed economically. Poppy is there to stay in afghanistan. I think we can be smarter about how interdiction is done. We can be smarter about how the livelihoods are helped. We need to Pay Attention even if you do all of these things, you would still have uge amounts of opium and poppy. Rian lets look at it from an american perspective. We have lost 7 billion and that is not the only place. We have blown billions of dollars. How much of that poppy a lot goes to europe, but how much of the drugs that are created from the poppy in afghanistan are coming somehow or another into this country . Not only do we lose 7 billion ut we feed the drug habit of the people in the United States and in the end, it seems like a circle that we end up paying for it by borrowing money. Vanda we do not know exactly but under 10 of u. S. Opiates come from afghanistan. The vast majority of u. S. Opiates, heroin and other opiates, comes from mexico and colombia. These days primarily from mexico. I say perhaps because what we re seeing in the United States is once again a change in addiction. For decades, cocaine was the dominant drug abuse. Then it became opiate use. This increased demand and it is possible that we could get more from afghanistan. So far, 90 of afghan opium has been going to europe or the middle east. Pakistan, and iran have huge ddiction problems. The major demand markets for afghan opium. Brian looking at your xperience in mexico. They are talking about el chapo. I want you to put that in perspective, please. [video clip] el chapo or shorty is officially the worlds most powerful drug trafficker. A short man with big plans. He controls these distribution cells throughout the United States. From rags to riches, in less than a decade, he turned a startup operation into a multinational criminal empire. He is like the Osama Bin Laden of drug trafficking. He has proven to be more elusive than bin laden. He was captured in the 1990s and managed to escape eight years later. He bribed his way out of what was supposed to be a high security penitentiary. Brian how could he possibly have done this twice . Vanda the corruption and incompetence of the prison officials in mexico. Brian they bribed the whole crowd . Vanda they certainly had to have a lot of support in the prison. The tunnel through which he escaped is extraordinary. The idea that there would be no noise coming from the tunnel is difficult to imagine including because the tunnels are something that he is known for to smuggle drugs into the United States. He previously used them as escape methods. The fact that this went undetected is unbelievable. Brian how big a drug user is United States . Vanda huge. Brian in comparison to other countries . Vanda one of the largest. One of the interesting things that is changing about the global drug trade is that the u. S. Is no longer the largest, per capita. It used to be the largest in cocaine use. These days, places like brazil and argentina probably have per capita use as large as the United States. In terms of opiates and heroin. Iran, russia, and pakistan have a lot of users. One of the biggest countries, but not the sole user. Brian in one of your books, you had a book called shooting up. What was the basis of that book . Vanda the subtitle of the book is counterinsurgency and the war on drugs. It looks at the intersection of the drug trade and the economies. The main focus was on the drug trade. It is fundamentally challenged by what became the dominant the narrative would go that the taliban takes the opium poppy, the shining path takes coca. The best way you win wars is by destroying the coca. Several years after i wrote the book, i challenged this narrative and said yes, illicit economies like drugs bring insurgents a lot of money but they also bring a lot of political capital. If you want to win conflict, you cannot antagonize rural populations that are dependent on this illicit economy. Or you make the life very much harder. This narrative that you win by destroying the illicit economy is incorrect. By the way, it is not even guaranteed that the insurgents will make less money because hey can also adapt and their economies are very resilient. Worse comes to worse, they can always switch to other illicit economies. In burma, a new funding stream became available. And it was worse for the public goods perspective. Hey would not be defeated. Moreover, one does not succeed in even the pure narcotic subjective unless one has control. One needs to win the war before the protection can be tackled through brutal means, eradication. Mao in the 1960s was probably the most successful government n destroying the illicit economy. Or through providing illegal economic alternatives. Brian should i assume then that we have wasted billions of ollars in the world drugs. Anda yes. It is not wasted. A lot of money has created counterproductive effects in the United States. Brian how much are we spending now . Vanda the assumption is that it is about 40 billion a year, including money spent domestically, including on incarceration of users, a policy that is just bad just from every aspect. Unfortunately, the fortunately, the Obama Administration has started moving towards changing that. Nonviolent users are increasingly being released from prison both at the federal and state level. That is how we need to move forward. Treatment as well as external policies, eradication and interdiction. Brian your last name has brown in it. Who is brown . Vanda sam brown. A scholar of international relations. We met in boston when i was at harvard. He was a professor. At brandeis. We got to know each other. When i was between my undergrad and my graduate years, i spent a year in washington and he was at the time a visiting scholar at the brookings institution. We met there. Brian where are you now . Vanda i am also at the brookings institution. Brian does it pay for all of your travel and the work you are doing now . Vanda i need to raise all of the money for my work. It is a challenge because fundraising is challenging in general. I have to raise all of the money for the fieldwork. Brian what kind of people support you . Vanda a combination of foundations. Brian the one thing that ive ead that i have to ask you about is that you gave credit to norway. Vanda norway supports brookings in general. Some funding goes to me as a scholar. It does not necessarily fund my fieldwork but it funds my salary at brookings. Brian why does norway fund brookings . Vanda norway is one of the countries that supports brookings because brookings is a hallmark of quality, ndependent research. Indeed, i feel very privileged to be at brookings and one of the reasons i am there is because it is a place that is truly committed to intellectual freedom based on sound scholarship. While i may disagree with my colleagues on policies like in afghanistan, on policies in other countries, and my judgments on columbia being a success that is what is wonderful about brookings. You can have a panel of scholars that can directly disagree with one another on the stage. There is not an ideology doctrine. There is not a uniformity of views. It is a place that i can thrive in. Brian there is one story i want you to tell about your car in the andes. Vanda i spent the time doing research in the andes on the coca economy and the drug trade. I have been quite a few times in peru. In this one trip, i decided to take a shortcut across the mountains to get to a coca area. This time, i was doing it in the summer season. The rains were pouring down. The roads that would normally be passable, were a disaster. Quite close to the coca area, i had to push the car. I ended up crashing in to the mountain. I was stuck close to a coca area on the road where no reasonable person would be. The police could ask interesting questions about what i was doing there. The outcome was that i spent a few days there trying to get ocal help. I did get local help. I got the car out with the villagers. I ended up doing Fascinating Research into the community. They put the car back together with scotch tape, chewing gum, and prayers. I managed to drive the car back. The car was barely moving. It was risky. Seconds away from death. I did not end up in the coca area that i was planning to do research in. I ended up on the outskirts of that. Nonetheless, it resulted in fantastic, interesting research. Brian do you have a theory about why people take drugs . Or about whether it is worth fighting the Drug Development out there or why people use so much of the drugs . Is it worth spending all of this time trying to eradicate them in the first place . Vanda a lot of the policies and the current design are problematic and counterproductive. I dont believe the answer is we should do nothing. Many people who are users would quit, perhaps 80 , but some people will become addicts and their lives will be ruined and the lives of the Community Around them will be ruined. We should not be indifferent to that. My view is that we should not say anything goes and anyone can use drugs however they want. It will have bad effects on people who cannot make the judgment. They will not be able to comprehend it. We should certainly move away from imprisonning movers. We should move towards much smarter eradication. I am one that believes that we should prioritize eradication f drugs. In the national parks, whether in the United States or colombia. But recognizing that eradicate anywhere and everywhere, we only move it around. There are areas we do not want to have drugs, just like we dont have any land encroachment, for example. I very much believe that we need to do interdiction but often we need to focus not on the amount of flow in the case of drugs, as being the predominant metric of success but focus on how we change the behavior of criminals so that they have the least propensity towards violence and the least capacity to corrupt. So that society is not dependent on them. That might mean thinking ifferently about who we target and how. In the case of drugs, the objective should be to shape criminal behavior towards the least threat towards state and society. I would not make the same argument about another illicit economy that i work on and am passionate about. Hat is wildlife. If you simply say that we focus on the behavior of organized crime groups, then we will lose tigers and we may not have any rhinoceroses. We are seeing a huge depletion of other animals like turtles, amphibians. With a strong impact on the echo system. Ecosystem. This is a depletable resource. We need to focus on reducing the volume of flows. Making Law Enforcement smarter and weeding out corruption. Reducing demand. All of which is a very tough task. Brian if folks want to read more about what you write, where do they find it . Vanda you can go to the brookings website. The vast majority of my articles will be posted but there will also be information about my books. Brian when is the book about mexico coming . Rian in the spring. Our guest has been dr. Vanda felbabbrown from the brookings institution. Book writer. Thank you so much for joining us. Vanda it has been a great pleasure to be here. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] for free transcripts or give us your comments about this rogram, visit us at q anda. Org. Its also available as a podcast. Later this morning here on cspan, three republican president ial candidates. At 10 00 a. M. Eastern, marco rubio delivers a speech in South Carolina about china. Then also from South Carolina, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker outlines his Foreign Policy goals. After that, donald trump speaks in nashville. Right now on cspan, washington journal is live with your phone calls, tweets, and facebook comments. At 7 45 eastern, Associated Press reporter Christopher Rugaber on a new a. P. Survey of economists that forecast weak economic growth. Then at 8 30 eastern this orning, a discussion from Mark Calabria and Michael Konczal about financial regulations and recent volatility in the stock market. Host good morning. Its monday, august 31, 2015. President obama begins this week on a threeday trip across alaska in which hell highlight the issue of Climate Change and call for a global focus on the issue. But even as the president is set to make his appeal against the back drop of melting glaciers, his administration is being criticized by some environmental groups for green lighting new Arctic Oil Drilling and for continuing to put off a financial decision on the keystone excel pipeline. This morning on the washington journal, were asking our viewers to weigh in on the president s environmental record as he begins the final year and a half of his presidency. What do you think president obamas legacy will be oe