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