a few quick administrative notes, now would be a good 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 there because we are videoing tonight, we're videoing ourselves and for our youtube channel and also c-span booktv is here. and lastly, at the end before you come up to get your book signed, please fold up the chairs that you're sitting in and lean them against something that looks like it won't topple over. [laughter] we're really very pleased to have robert grenier here with us this evening to talk about his new book, "88 days to kandahar." bob spent 27 years with the cia, three of them a a 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 book's title refers to the period between september 11th and december 2001 when karzai made his return to afghanistan from pakistan. other books, of course, have reported extensively on the war in afghanistan including some by other former cia officials, but bob offers 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 the senior agency official stationed closest to afghanistan, he recounts meeting-by-meeting and 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 this experience and -- about the experience and about what happened, so he kept extensive notes and was able to review many relevant documents. after his pakistan tour, bob was brought back to cia headquarters by george tenet who was then, of course, cia director, to head the agency group that coordinated covert operations in support of the invasion of iraq in 2003. later he assumed leadership of the agency's counterterrorism center. he was removed from that position in early 2006 after clashes with other top officials and retired from the agency later that year. joining crow incorporated, a security firm as managing director, and he's now chairman of erg partners, a strategic advisory firm that focuses on security and intelligence matters. the economist magazine has praised bob's book as, quote, an engrossing, well-written account. and a washington post review has called it, quote, an admirably frank addition to the book shelf of memoirs about america's involvement in afghanistan and iraq. the post review went on to say, quote: he has a sweeping story to tell which he does in a sharp, straightforward style while pausing to let us in on the ad hoc decision making of the sometimes-absurd world he inhabited. so, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming robert grenier. [applause] >> thanks, brad, thanks very much for that introduction. you know, 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. it was a clear, bright day. it was surprisingly comfortable for islamabad, pakistan. but i wasn't up to enjoy it. in fact, i was sound asleep. i was absolutely exhausted. i'd been up until 3:00 in the morning, i'd 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?" and i immediately regretted it, because there 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, it's the director. so i sat up at attention in bed, and i did the only thing you can do in those circumstances, i lied. i said, no, mr. director, i was just getting up. he said, look, you're going to be meeting tomorrow at camp david, members of the war cabinet, and we're going to be discussing the campaign in afghanistan. he said the pentagon is telling us that there are very few legitimate military targets in all of afghanistan. they can probable hit them from -- probably hit them from the air in a matter of days. we know where all the terrorist training camps are, but the terrorists have all fled. he literally asked me, he said do we bomb empty camps? this was the 23rd of september, 2001, 12 days after 9/11, the worst one-day disaster in american history since pearl harbor. and here was george tenet, the director of central intelligence at the seat of power in washington, d.c., who's calling 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 didn't know we were in trouble before -- [laughter] you knew it now. so i said, look, mr. director, i'm not sure we're thinking about this in just the right way. you're asking me about military tactics. in the end, this is a political problem. yeah, we probably have the power to chase international terrorists out of afghanistan, but who's 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 what we can't, and that is to keep it from again becoming a safe haven for international terrorists. if the taliban is willing to be that government, well, then so much the better. they're there. and they're controlling most of the country. and mullah omar, the head of the taliban, is not willing to change policy with regard to bin laden, then there are others in the leadership we know who may be willing to step in and do just that. and if we can't 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 in a way that will enable us to bring something else in its place. so whatever military means we use, we have to sequence them and calibrate them in such a way to as to get us to where it is we need to be politically. so as i'm going through this recitation, he's taking notes, and he's stopping to ask me questions. i said, look, mr. director, this isn't going to work. this is taking too long. let me try to write all this down. so he said, good idea. remember, this is early sunday morning my time, it's late saturday night his time. he said it's 11:00, the helicopter comes for me at 6. i'm going to be getting up at 5, can you get me something by then? i said, yes, sir, i can. i drove as fast as i could into the office, i hammered out an eight-page message in about three hours. by this time my senior lieutenants were coming back in, so i circulated it to them, got some good input from them, made those changes and sent it back again completely bypassing the chain of command and sent it to tenet security detail and said hand this to the director as soon as is he gets up. and as far as i was concerned, that for the time being was the end of the story. i had no idea what was going to happen after that. but he did wake up, and they gave him my piece, and he looked at it, and he circulated copies to the other members of the war cabinet, to they think and to rice and -- cheney and rice and rumsfeld and secretary powell and chairman meyers, and they discussed it that day at camp david. and then the following morning, monday, they met with the president and laid it out for the president, and the president said is, done. this is our template going forward. and the next thing i knew, tommy franks, the combatant commander for the region, was getting me on the phone to do a video conference because he'd been ordered to make sure that his battle plan conformed to my paper. this was absolutely extraordinary. this is simply not the way things normally work. well, it said that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and this plan was no exception. but there were in it a lot of principles which in the end we did actually follow during the conduct of what we thought was the war. and so what was it that we said? well, to reiterate, we said at the end of the day this is a political problem, not a military problem. and whatever military means we use, we need to make sure that we are not perceived by the afghans as invaders. afghanistan has a nasty habit of dealing very badly with foreign invaders. it's been true since the time of alexander, it was discovered by the soviets to their cost in the 20th century, discovered by the british as well in the 19th, and i was very experienced that we would reprise the experience that they had as well. i said we have to keep our military footprint as small as possible. we have to make it clear we're not seeking permanent military bases, we're not seeking to occupy the country. and as part of that, we have to make it clear that we are not coming in on our own account. we are coming in on behalf of afghans. afghans have to be in the lead. unless there are afghans who are willing to do on their own account and of their volition what we want for them to do such that we can support them, we will not succeed in the end. unless we're going to colonize the place, and i didn't see any advocates for that. but as we're looking for these allies, our most natural allies were the northern alliance, collection of ethnic minority centered in the north of the country who'd been fighting a civil war, a losing civil war, mind you, for quite a number of years with the taliban. i said, obviously, we will find support with them, we must come in on their side. but, but we have to be extremely careful lest we are perceived by the far more numerous pashtuns from who the taliban have drawn, many of whom have had it up to here with the taliban, if we make it appear to them that we are simply entering the battle on the side of their enemies, they will recoalesce around the taliban, and the political situation will be worse rather than better. so it's extremely important as we support the northern alliance that we also are fighting this support of pashtuns. this that respect at least we had had, we'd gotten a head start. for the previous 18 months, i and the members of my station had been reaching out to pashtun warlords, if you will -- most of them tribal commanders can -- many of whom we had established relationships back in the days of the anti-soviet jihad in the 1980s. many of them had been marginalized by the taliban, some of them were fighting for the taliban and still were looking for their opportunity to come back and reclaim what they felt was their rightful place in pashtun society. and so now after 9/11 when everything was possible, we went back to them again, and is we said this is it, this is your chance. if you are willing to rise up against the taliban, you will have the full weight of american military power behind you. be i thought it was a pretty good pitch. but almost to a person they demurred. you don't survive as a warlord in afghanistan by coming in on the wrong side of the fight. and they came up with any number of excuses, but the meaning of it, the burden behind it was that we need to make sure that you, the americans, are serious. we need to make sure who's going to win at the end of the day before we'll commit ourselves. and there were only two tribal leaders of any consequence in southern afghanistan who were actually willing to commit themselves and rise up in rebellion against the taliban and take the risks associated with it. one of them was hah middle karzai -- hamid karzai who we know and love. thank you very much, two-time 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 as they first rose up in 1994. those were the only two that we could induce initially to take the fight to the taliban. and so much of this book tells the improbable and, at times, hair-raising story of these two individuals going back essentially on their own to their respecte tribal areas, rising -- raising small tribal armies and somehow surviving long enough for me to get my cia officers accompanied by u.s. army special forces to join with them and to martial u.s. air power in two ax access of attack, one from the north, one of the east. and they finally converged on kandahar in december 2001, drove the taliban and al-qaeda from power. we thought that was the end of the war. in fact, it turned out only to be the first american afghan war. but as that was underway, there was a separate campaign that was also being fought, a parallel war, if you will, that was being fought within the borders of pakistan. because as the campaign both in the north and the south was going forward, militants, foreign militants allied with bin laden were fleeing out of afghanistan primarily into pakistan in hopes of finding safe haven elsewhere. and so cia in conjunction with the notorious pakistani intelligence service, the isi, were doing a land office business finding and arresting these people, and many of them eventually ended up in guantanamo for their pains. we thought it was enormously successful. but as i look back now, it's clear to me we really didn't understand how and why we had won. yeah, we understood the military part of it, and we realized this was primarily a political struggle, but we really didn't fully understand the political situation in southern afghanistan especially that convinced the taliban that they needed to get up. and because we didn't understand why we'd won, we didn't really understood r understand just how tenuous our victory was. now, we could spend a long time cataloging the mistakes that were made by any number of afghan actors, by the americans, by the international community. among many ore things we -- other things we shifted our focus. as brad just mentioned, you know, before very long i was ordered back to washington to become cia's iraq mission manager. we were off to the next thing. afghanistan was largely left aside. and by the time i returned to begin to focus once again on pakistan and afghanistan, this time as the director of cia's counterterrorism center, i made an extensive visit to both countries in the spring of 2005. and already we could begin to see the things were starting to unravel. we didn't know where television going to go -- where it was going to go, but we could begin to see the taliban reasserting control in significant parking lots of afghanistan. and 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 bush 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 weren't up to the task. they simply weren't up to what would be required, we felt, in order for them to prevail against the taliban. and so you remember all those principles that we talke about at the outset, that, you know, the americans must keep their footprint very small, that afghans have to be in the lead, we have to be working in support of them rather than the other way around. all that was left aside. we decided, in effect, that afghanistan was too important to be left to the whims of afghans. and so at the height of the obama surge, we had 100,000 american troops, we had another 40,000 from nato, we were spending at the rate of $100 billion a year. we completely overwhelmed this small, primitive, agrarian country with a tiny gdp and, at best, nascent national institutions. it didn't go well. and it's brought us down to the current path where, essentially, the united states has largely withdrawn from afghanistan. we're going to withdraw further. and again in my humble estimation, i think that having head a very serious mistake by trying to do too much, n we're 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 won the second afghan war, i'm very concerned we're stetting the stage for what -- setting the stage for what will ultimately have to be another, a third american afghan war. as brad kind of alluded 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 this december of 2001. but on balance as i look at it now, i'm glad i waited. because if i'd written this book when i first got out of government back in 2006-2007 as i originally intended, it would have been a very different story. essentially, it would have been an adventure story. and i hope it still is at its heart. but now with what we know, with the perspective that we have of time, that adventure story, one person's perspective, is bracketed in a much larger geopolitical story, the story of that first american afghan war, how and why it was that we won it, how we lost our way and failed to win the second american afghan war and how we may yet be forced to fight a third. thank you all very much for your patience. and let's throw open the floor for questions. [applause] >> you're certainly not my image of a cia officer. you look more like an accountant to me. [laughter] >> i hate it when people say that. [laughter] >> however, however, based on your experience there 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 will just kind of wait 'em out, continue with their terrorist attacks and take over the country? >> can you all hear the question with the microphone? good. yeah, i'm not very optimistic. i know that there have been some recent developments, there have been some talks about talks that have some people sort of buzzing, oh, we're beginning to make progress here, but i share your pessimism certainly at this stage that the taliban is actually succeeding on the battlefield. they, they certainly don't want to leave the united states with a strong position in afghanistan because they know, ultimately, that's going to work against them. they've tried to make it clear that a condition of their real engagement with the current government is to, is the departure of the foreigners. i don't think that they're about to make peace. now, what i would hope, it seems to me that the best we can hope for over the long term is that the taliban will simply welcome conclude that this is -- will conclude that it's not going to win, and frankly, i think this requires a more robust, a limited and sustainable but yet more robust engagement on the part of the united states. if we could get them to that point where they conclude, you know what? we're just not going to succeed militarily, we're going to have to reach some sort of an agreement, i just don't think it's in their dna to form themselves as a political party and form a coalition government. it's just not the way they think. now -- >> just as a follow-up to that -- >> yeah. >> if that's the case, is there -- will the taliban be sort of a self-contained afghanistan creature, or do you foresee linkages with isis, connections with -- i mean, how does that all -- >> there are extremists in afghanistan, some of whom have up this now been affiliated with the taliban, there may be others who will eventually defect because they see their mission in much broader, more global termings. the taliban per se is, though, is still very much focused on national goals, and i think their going to remain that -- they're going to remain that way. they're going to be around forever. i mean, they are a part of pashtun society and certainly, you know, for the foreseeable future they're going to be a part of that society. my thinking on this has been very much influenced by one of the founders of the taliban, and i've had the opportunity to meet with him everything is times since -- several times since we both got out of government. and what he says is that, you know, we the taliban, we really shouldn't be involved in politics. we said we're really no a political party, we're a social movement. we need to go back to what we were. we these to be a social force which is exerting influence to make sure that those who are in power are ruling in a way that's consistent with our conception of islam. i think, ultimately, that's where they're going to go, but it's going to take a long time to get them there. >> thank you. >> yes, thank you. first off, thank you for your service. >> thank you very much. >> and i just wanted 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, they'll be able to hold off the more fundamentalist aspects of the pakistani÷y ]@ society, and do you think that they'll be able to avoid another war with india, a possible nuclear war with india? and thank you. >> yeah. well, two really important issues, and i think that in answer to your first question, yes. i think that, ultimately, they can prevail. they really are in a existential struggle with islamic extremists who have been energize ared, if you will, by the u.s. presence in afghanistan. but the relative departure of the americans is not getting them to rethink their program. they're implacably 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, had the will to resist them over the long term. i think, in fact, they do, and ultimately i think they will succeed. it won't be pretty, and it's going to be a long struggle, but i think ultimately they're going to be able to do that, and part of that will be their martialing the majority of pakistan think opinion which is not extremist to that end. and i think we've seen instances, you know, back in 2009, other times since then where the pakistani populace has been energized politically this support of the government -- in support of the government in order to control the extremists. with regard to india, a lot of things -- people think this whole idea of kashmir is sort of a thing of the past. i can tell you, in pakistan it is not. and i've spoken with young pakistani military officers looking for signs that they are different from those who came before them, and they're not. they're still focused like a laser beam on kashmir. so i think that kashmir has to be settled. i think it's possible to settle it. i don't think the pakistanis and indians can do it on their own. i think they need a quiet outside involvement. the indians, of course, are very, very resistant to that idea, always have been are. but i think that if we are to have peace, ultimately -- not only stability in pakistan, but also peace in the wider south asia to include afghanistan -- there has to be a resolution over kashmir. >> thank you. >> just as a postscript to that as well, there's one point in the book where i describe the situation in the spring, may specifically of 2002, when india and pakistan came very, very close to all-out war yet again. and, in fact, i was convinced that they were going to war. had it not been for the shuttle diplomacy of the then-secretary of state, i think they would have gone to war. this could still happen, and it's something we need to -- [inaudible] ma'am? >> i came of age in the 1960s, i graduated from college then, and 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 advisers and then suddenly, you know, we had half a million guys in the field. fighting for a government that had no support at home. so there was a book talk of the nixon tapes and his election -- the first election and the second election where he found that as soon as the americans got out, the war was seat that poised. the government would collapse because there was no support in the country. now where do you see afghanistan going? it sounds hike you think we should -- like you think we should stay there longer, but the government is very up popular, it's very corrupt like the seat that please government was -- vietnamese government was. how do you see us making this work, and what's the point of our staying? i mean, nixon just kept it going for another 25,000 deaths. >> yeah. and in my humble estimation, i think he did so needlessly. >> yes. >> and a lot of people died needlessly -- >> so he could be reelected in 972. >> well, i suspect domestic politics may have played a role in all of that. you may be right. but why should we be doing this at all? and the concern that i have is that violent islamist extremism, as we all know, is not going away. in fact, it's had a greater and a longer life than i ever would have predicted. right now the front lines, if you will, are in iraq and syria. and a few others, you know, lesser fronts scattered around the region. over the long term, i don't think that isis is going to succeed. now, it's going to take a long time to roll them back in syria. we could spend a lot of time talking about that, the most intractable problem, frankly, i've ever seen in my professional life. iraq is only marginally better. eventually, i don't think they're the wave of the future in that region because people at the end of the day do not want to live under these barbarians and, ultimately, that is going to cost them. but when and if that happens and/or similar things happen elsewhere, those extremists are going to be looking for safe havens elsewhere. people didn't go to afghanistan in the first place because they particularly liked it. in fact, extremists now will tell you we'd much rather be in syria than in afghanistan. but my concern is that at some point if the taliban prevails in afghanistan and they're able at least to control large parts of the country and when, ultimately, large numbers of international terrorists -- properly so-called -- come knocking on the door looking for safe haven, the taliban will not say no. that's the concern we have, and that's why i think we need to stay engaged on a sustainable basis. only doing, only helping afghans to achieve what they can achieve and not trying to achieve things on their behalf that they themselves cannot sustain. that means an open engagement. i admit that right up front, but i think one that we can sustain. uncomfortable as it is, i think that's the option that we should take -- >> so counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency? >> well, i would say, i would say limited counterinsurgency as well as insurgency. i think that we should be trying to help the government to conduct a successful counterinsurgency in those areas that it can naturally control and helping like-minded individuals who are willing to stand up and resist the taliban in those areas that are within the ambit of the taliban to help them resist the taliban. so i think we should be doing counterinsurgency and insurgency in different parts obviously country. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> you didn't mention the haqqani network, so i'm wondering how significant they were when you were there ask today. >> well, the old -- [inaudible] who have taken over the franchise, but he was still very much active back in that period, 1999-2000, leading up to 2001. and at the time of 9/11, he was the minister for tribal affairs for the taliban government. and tremendously influential figure on both sides of the pakistan/afghanistan border. and the pakistanis were absolutely afraid of him as they are afraid of his sons now, because they have tremendous influence. and they control an area that's very difficult for outsiders to fight to include, for instance, the pakistani be army. right now they, the haqqani clan, the haqqani network, are working along with the afghan taliban, you know, the organization that is still loyal, we think, to mullah omar. they have not aligned themselves with pakistani taliban. and part of the reason that, much to our annoyance, the pakistanis have been speaking to and cooperating with the haqqani network is to make sure that they remain focused on afghanistan and not focused on islamabad. we haven't heard the last of them. they are an intractable problem. but i can tell you from traveling in the tribal areas myself and asking questions out loud about the haqqanis that just the physical reaction that i got from people told you a lot about the kind of power and influence that they have in those tribal areas. >> i'm glad you kept notes, because this is really a superb book. >> well, thank you. >> i've read all of them. up til now there's been a bit too much chest thumping in the memoirs of the northern campaign i think this book balances that out with great details. >> thank you. >> what strikes me among the many things of the book though is how many times you cite how you guys were kind of, like, moving forward with your plans, that you were adjusting, and washington was clueless. you guys were making the policy. [laughter] i mean, i could quote a couple of good sentences here, and i know you wrote them deliberately, right? [laughter] this is what i kind of find alarming. do you want to expand on what you've written about that here? >> yeah, yeah, well it's funny, you know? when you put yourself back in a situation that you lived a number of years ago, and as i did in writing this book, i found myself getting mad all over again. i thought i'd left it all behind but, in fact, i hadn't. and i must say i think that, you know, looking at it in a little bit more balanced way, what you see in this book is a classic field perspective. and, you know, if you're aield man, when you are a -- mind you, i've also been, you know, part of the headquarters beast at different times and sort of perceived what i was doing in a very different way. but if you're working out there in the field, you naturally tend to see the idiots back at headquarters being clueless. and quite frankly, they often are and of necessity. you're limited in your perspective just as, you know, i was limited in my perspective about political realities back in washington. and symptom of the things -- some of the things that, you know, people in hi headquarters that were doing that i just thought were breathtakingly stupid i'm sure made a certain amount of sense within that hothouse of politics, interagency politics in the way that the cia was dealing with the pent gone and the white house and -- pentagon and the white house and others. so i think that the mark of wisdom, and it's very, very difficult to seize and to grasp, is that when you're in the field and dealing with idiocy in washington, to have the experience and the knowledge and the discipline to recognize, you know, why it is that they do what they do. and similarly, if you're in washington despite the fact that you like to think that you're in charge of this whole thing and you've got that, you know, 5,000-mile screwdriver you can start, you know, tinkering with things to understand, look, at the end of day, i'm probably not even going to understand the questions, let alone the answers, and i really need to defer insofar as i possibly conference do the folks that were mush closer -- much closer to the battle front. >> for all of your straight talk in this book, you never included a line like hank crumpton's line of when are you guys going to un-fuck yourself. [laughter] >> oh, thank you for speaking today, and would you please -- i'm a city bet tan from india -- tibetan from india and a person in exile. having grown up in china, but since you look so is knowledgeable and so agreeable, i just want to take this opportunity to get some advice and help, you know? what cia can do, how much it can do or the u.s. government itself can do in a problem, let's say, about tibet, you know? in my country, of course, in india also we do have a government in exile. how much does u.s. have any stake in problems, for example, if the indians, indians are doing something politically to -- against our country's ideology? and, you know, what are the goals and things like that? and similarly in pakistan or sri lankans or, you know, china is considered always a problem that we don't agree completely and all that. and all the neighboring countries. so if they are doing something wrong and when people like us if we know -- i'm nobody, and i have no inclination for politics, but as a human being when you see likely dick lousily weird -- ridiculously weird problems, why don't they do something when it's 2015 now when cia or any other current governments can -- >> yeah, i got ya. i understand exactly where you're going. >> how much can we expect in terms of assistance or help or -- >> yeah. >> -- or if it's against u.s. interest and things like that, you know, that kind of relationship. thank you so much. >> well, i appreciate your question and, unfortunately, i wish that i knew more about tibet. i'm certainly no tibet expert. from what little i know about the dynamics in the area and the recent history of tibet, i have a tremendous amount of personal sympathy for the cause. and, you know, there were officers whom i knew a couple of generations removed from me -- a generation removed from me as i was coming up as a young officer in the cia, who had cut their teeth actually working with the tibetans in their effort to try to resist the chinese. and by and large, that didn't go particularly well at the time. i wish that i could say something that is more encouraging, but i don't think that there's very much i can say that, frankly, is very encouraging. i think, you know, china is a large and very powerful country, it has a tremendous amount of influence. both we and other countries in the region have a very long agenda with china. there are many things that we would like to change about chinese policy when it's monetary policy, economic policy, the concerns about expansionism in the south southa sea as well as with tibet, and it is the task of governments to try to balance all of those different interests. and i think part of the role for people like yourself is to make sure that that issue remains visible so that as and when it is possible at least for the margins for the u.s. to exert pressure and influence in a positive way, that they will seize those opportunities to do it. but again, i'm not terribly optimistic that the u.s. is going to make major departures in its policy vis-a-vis china strictly as a means to have helping the by bet tans. wish it were otherwise. >> i have a question. the cia making mistakes after mistakes. iran not once, many times. afghanistan, iraq and the most terrible is yemen, and the most terrible is september 11th. i mean, can we trust the cia? [laughter] >> you know, it's interesting when one of the -- a quote that i have in the book sort of talking about the earlier part of my career, there's a certain stage where, you know, sort of following along the management fads of the time, i had an executive coach. i was seen to be an up and comer. i was running the training program at cia, so i had an executive coach. she was sort of like a jewish grandmother. so i would sit in her office in the afternoons, and she would sort of make these observations, and she would say, you know, i don't know of anybody who's more loyal to this organization than you. but your relation to it is essentially subversive. [laughter] ask, you know, i think she -- and, you know, i think she had more than half a point. i guess it gets to the heart of, i think, part of what you're saying. i was always focused on my organization not so much for what it was, but for what it needed to be, and i hoped it could be reformed into being. mind you, i love the cia. warts and is all. and i think it's done a lot of very good things, and i think it's done some disastrous things, no question about that. that's all a matter of the historical record. to me, what was most important was the mission. and i think as long as the u.s. remains a global power, then you need to have a cia. and if that means burning down the current cia and trying to build up something new elsewhere, then that's what we have to do. that's the way that i see it. cia has a critical mission given the historical role of the united states, and we try to do the very best that we can. i could probably get into a debate with you as to whether, you know, the overthrow was done well or not. put the shah this power for 25 years, you know? that's not bad, you know? policies successful for 25 years? that's probably as good as it gets. now, obviously, there was a lot that we didn't see about the iranian revolution. there were some serious mistakes before 9/11, i think after 9/11 at least for some period of time i felt that we did, we did pretty well. at least while i was there. [laughter] what these other people did when i handed it over, god knows. [laughter] but i take your point. thank you very much. >> hi. i don't know you, nor have it read your -- i read your week. i was in the peace corps in 1965, and i've never left that sense. i've worked in kabul maybe ten times, and one time i went back on my own after being there op an aid project with booz allen, ministry of finance, civil service administration and anti-corruption project which gets a laugh from everyone in kabul -- >>uh-huh. >> my point is because of the way i work if i wear afghan clothes, i can walk around in kabul. one time i went to a military camp and they said can we take you back to the motel, i said, no, drop me off any place, i'll take a taxi. they thought i was crazy. i've been to the aid compound, the isaf compound, and i've seen how people like you -- and i'm putting you into a box -- that you're so isolated from what's going on amongst the common people whereas with my background, can -- and especially in kabul with the way i look -- i can walk around with my friends. one project i would have my friends pick me up in their thin-skinned vehicle, and we'd go out for pizza and ice cream at restaurants, and i went to many engagement parties at hotels, you know, where the sexes were separated, but it was fun to dance with men where it was acceptable. [laughter] my point is, with all of your -- and you may be as an individual quite brilliant and analytical, but in terms of people in the american bureaucracies, you know, state, aid, embassy, you're no icelated. and -- so isolated. and in your mind, deservedly so because you fear being killed, but i don't. and that's, you know, you can say i'm crazy. but your excellence gap is so incredible that for however well your book was written -- which i've not read -- i don't see, and i've worked in baghdad, i've worked in gaza, you know, i go to all the beauty spots this the world. and the gap between the american presence and the general expatriate communities is just so huge that there's no understanding of on the of the -- on-the-ground basic intelligence. so how do you think the american foreign policy shaped by a distortion of fortress-like living and escorts by, in heavily-armed vehicles with an entourage of three and four weeks, you know, for one american official -- vehicles, you know, for one american official to visit begin, how is that gap ever to be overcome for american foreign policy to have any sort of alignment with reality? >> well, i wish that i could, i could disagree with you. unfortunately, we're in fundamental agreement. now, in defense of my current colleagues, i suspect that their probably doing a lot better in intelligence collection than their posture would suggest that they are. it's much more difficult. you're working through others, you're having -- dealing with principal agents. perhaps you can't see when you're out this a convoy but, you're right, you're not getting out there among the people, getting a feel for the environment, and there's a tremendous amount of stuff that you shul, you absolutely miss. i guess if i were going to answer your question, i was going to start at least from the beginning in my limited personal perspective, i would start with 1983. in 1983 i was a junior officer in eastern saudi arabia, and there were a string of terrorist attacks, one of which was an attack on the american embassy in kuwait. the and after this disaster as after almost any disaster as perceived in washington, they did what has to be done, they formed a commission. and the commission said what we need to do is to reenforce our embassy. our embassy was a mud home that was right on the street. that was our embassy. it would take an army, in fact, several have tried with maul armies, to get into the american compound in sana'a now. the point that i'm making is that we as a government have, to an increasing extent over decades -- not just yesterday -- been increasingly risk averse. you know, when i was, when i first started, first got to the point in my career, i was a gd15 and started dealing with congress and others in government agencies, an older colleague who used to give me advice every now and again pulled me aside, put his arm around me and said, remember, fear drives 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 the horizon. and as a result we as a government are not willing to put our people in harm's way. i absolutely agree with you that it could be almost as secure. most places, most times going out in a low profile way by yourself in a thin-skinned vehicle dressed more or liz as a local -- less as a local, i have a harder time at it than you do. if you're careful and judicious about it and you don't form patterns, you can do that quite successfully. but if you get killed, how is that going to look back politically in washington? you let this man go out in a thin-skinned vehicle traveling on his own. instead we end up using armored convoys which themselves are huge targets. i think there are a great many people who are currently living those secluded lives and, essentially, separating themselves from the populations that they're trying to understand. and they're doing it not because they want to, not because they think that it's wise, but because those are the dictates that are handed down from washington. and like every stupid thing that comes from washington, there's a reason behind it that you need to understand. >> i'd like to piggyback on that idea of dictates from washington. i'm currently reading a biography of george kennan. and one of the things that strikes me is that kennan really understood russia and russian culture. and as a result, a lot of policymakers who listened to him been fitted from that. now, in your position out in the field did you get -- i mean, what sense did you get from the people in washington as far as the, you know, their knowledge of afghanistan history and afghan culture and to some extent, you know, you write about iraq too, apparently. in your book. what was your sense in terms of the understandings that your superiors had in washington of the area they were dealing with and how they were crafting policy? >> yeah. tempting as it is to look at washington as a spaceless and rather stupid monolith, in fact, you know, it's not a monolith, and obviously 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 that they're dealing with. so my colleagues this the near east -- in the near east and south asia division at that time, there were a lot of people who did understand south asia, who understood what we had been doing and who, given the opportunity i think, would have been effective advocates for some of the things that we were trying to push at the time. there were others in an organization, wonderful organization that i ultimately led in the counterterrorism center, who knew a great deal about terrorism, knew a great deal about terrorist organizations but didn't because of their personal experience, didn't know very much about the cultures and the political structures welcome back which those terrorist -- within which those terrorist organizations were functioning and had a great deal of influence over them. so that was often the real difficulty. you'd have people who were focused like a laser beam on the terrorists and saying you must go and do this, and we'd be saying, hang on, there's some serious consequences to a when you're proposing, and here's what they are, so it frequently led to clashes, and this is one of the things that i tried to describe as impartially as i can. [laughter] in the book. but there are often reasons for it. and i think for whatever, whatever reasons by and large at least during the time that i was there, we were able to put our point of view forward. there were times when we had to be, had to be surreptitious in our methods dealing with the big enemy in washington but, ultimately, i think we were mostly successful. >> thanks a lot. >> we have time for one more. >> i don't know if you can answer this, but at what point did you realize that maybe karzai wasn't the one that was really going to fix things in afghanistan? and he's still making trouble this afghanistan. and whoever -- it's like a triumvirate now. and how's that going to help anything? >> yeah. hamid karzai is, he's an interesting fellow, and he -- i think at the time that he had american and international support to be at first the interim chairman of the interim afghan government and then, of course, was elected president and reelected president, he's a very interesting individual. and i think like most of us, he has some very good qualities, and he also has some flat sides. and i think that as time went on and the situation evolved as it did with the u.s. taking the very, very prominent, overwhelming role that it did in afghanistan, i think he frequently found himself as somebody whose influence was limited by the confines of the palace that he occupied. and i think that was an extremely humiliating situation for him. i think it made his relations with the americans increasingly poisonous over time. i think that the fact that the taliban during his entire tenure absolutely refused to deal with him at all, i think, was just a huge humiliation for him. essentially what the taliban was saying, look, you know, we can deal with the puppet, or we can deal with the puppetmaster. why do we want to deal with the puppet? that stung him particularly under circumstances where he was frequently being made to feel like a puppet. and i think over time he built up enough baggage that it simply became poisonous and very, very difficult for him and the americans to maintain constructive relations. the other point that i would make which i think relates to what he's doing right now, he's still doing what he does, and that's playing politics. and one of the things that we used to criticize him for -- and i'm thinking more during the time after i left government but just watching it as an outside observer -- it was pretty clear to me that we were criticizing him for doing the political things which in the highly imperfect structure that he occupied, he felt he needed to do in order to maintain political support. and i think there were often situations where we, we were asking him to do things that the political situation in afghanistan simply would not admit of. and over time i think we've had to make some hard judgments. we would like to do all of the above, we'd like to deal with the taliban, we'd like to eradicate popty cultivation, we'd like -- poppy cultivation, we'd like to get rid of corruption, we'd like to promote female education. these are all worthy things that really need to be to done and really need to happen, and yet given the realities on the ground, we would not have been this a position to you pursue wh all of those with equal vigor at the same time. and i think those were the types of judgments that were, that americans were reluctant up this the end to make -- until the end, and i think that very much complicated our relations with hamid karzai. again, believe me, even this my time i found karzai up very difficult to deal with. he was a person who tended to listen to whoever it was that was the last person who spoke to him. there were times when i would get calls from field be operatives who were dealing with him to say you've got to talk to hamid, because he's going to do something that's really stupid. and so you'd sort of get into a socratic dialogue with him and sort of tease out from him what were some of the potential unintended consequences of what he was proposing to do, and he would say, oh, yes, yes, you're right, we mustn't do that. and i don't know that it was worse that he came up with the stupid idea in the nurse place -- first place or that it was so easy to talk him out of it afterwards, but that's what you dealt with hamid karzai. [laughter] [applause] >> there's a lot more -- [inaudible] copies of the book are are available, bob will be up here signing copies. please form a line to the right of the table, and please remember to fold up your chairs. thank you. ♪ ♪ >> all persons having business before the honorable, the supreme court of the united states, are admonished to -- >> number 759, petitioner -- >> arguments number 18, roe against wade. >> marbury and madison is probably the most famous case this court ever decide canned. >> dredd and harriet existed as enslaved people on land where slavery wasn't legally recognized. >> putting the brown decision into effect would take presidential orders, and the presence of federal troops and marshals. and the courage of children. >> we wanted to pick cases that changed the direction and um port of the court -- import of the court in society and that also changed society. ♪ ♪ >> so she told them that they'd have are to have a search warrant, and mrs. mapp demanded to see the paper and to read it, see what it was, which they refused to do. so she grabbed it out of his hand to look at it, and thereafter the police officer handcuffed her. >> i can't imagine a better way to bring the constitution to life than by telling the human stories behind great supreme court cases. [applause] >> koramatsu boldly opposed the forced internment of japanese-americans during world war ii. after being convicted for failing to report for relocation, he took his case all the way to the supreme court. >> quite often in many of our most famous decisions are ones that the court took that were quite unpopular. >> if you had to pick one freedom that was the most essential to the functioning of a democracy, it has to be freedom of speech. >> let's go through a few cases that illustrate very dramatically and visually what it means to live in a society of 310 million different people who helped stick together because they believed in a rule of law. ♪ ♪ >> landmark cases, an exploration of 12 historic supreme court decisions and the human stories behind them. a new series on c-span produced in cooperation with the national constitution center, debuting monday, october 5th, at 9 p.m. and as a companion to our new series, landmark cases, the book. it features the 12 cases we've selected for the series with a brief introduction into the background, highlights and impact of each case. written by veteran supreme court journalist tony morrow, published by c-span in cooperation with congressional quarterly press. landmark cases is available finish $8.95 plus shipping and handling. get your copy at c-span.org/landmarkcases. >> supreme court justice stephen wryer talks about his -- stephen breyer talks about his latest book at the national constitution center's annual celebration of constitution day. it's next on booktv. 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