anymore this weekend on booktv on c-span2. for the full schedule of authors and books visit us at booktv.org. >> coming up from the half king >> you're going to look at a beautiful picture but it is something i know well and i reported from as well. i am going to tell you about "the wrong enemy" which is my book. "the wrong enemy: america in afghanistan, 2001-2014". it is the story of the war. i reported for over ten years on afghanistan. also pakistan. and i wanted to write a book for two reasons. the title tells part of it. richard holbrooke was the special envoy to afghanistan and pakistan before he died in the last two years. and he once said to the british foreign secretary maybe we are fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country and it was when they were grappling with the problem of the taliban in afghanistan. the obama administration was trying to work out what to do. the insurgency had gotten so difficult in afghanistan said they had to order a surge of troops so the foreign troops went to 120,000 in afghanistan and they were losing the war. it was a very critical moment and the surge had its place, it had to be done. they were fighting the wrong enemy. the source of the problem and when you fight a war, you have to go to the source, was the first in pakistan. and american intervention within months in pakistan's tribal areas. in some of these areas, we are looking at. the taliban as well who has gone through the 19th. in afghanistan in the early years after 9/11, started to hear this from all the afghans on the bomb site. i went over to pakistan and started reporting there and found taliban hiding out and they started regrouping, started getting more confident, started moving around and i spent a lot of time in an area the we will tell you about that we know so well. it was a great control of pakistan to prevent coming out of what is going on. the second reason i wrote this book it sums up the war, tells the whole tale. two main themes, that we are fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong place. the second is pakistan not only controls it. they control the message and the journalist and friend and intimidated their own reporting, what is happening in pakistan. the level of stress and i run into problems myself which is in the book. in my hotel room in 2006 and you are not to talk to the taliban. that was where we knew the taliban leadership was reorganizing. basically telling me get out of town. and pakistani journalist to stop working with that. and a really important area because that is where they orchestrated the whole research, pakistan and iran, enormous push against american forces and against the whole subject in afghanistan. they didn't want a successful government in afghanistan, they wanted, pakistan wanted to keep afghanistan under its own to control it and dominates the that it could use afghanistan as an anax, those are the themes i was following. they were losing ground, became incredibly difficult to report for the whole eastern bounce, also precarious and all coming from pakistan where al qaeda was very active. i kept doing my daily job and of course we have this amazing moment in 2011 where osama bin laden was suddenly found to be in a bunker and was killed in a special operations raid. i got straight on a plane can within 13 hours drove afterward and found a house and started the reporting on the whole raid that came out of washington, the whole idea of how could he hide in this house? he was hundreds of yards, just a few hundred yards from the top military academy in pakistan so i continued another couple of years looking at how did he hide? who knew who was hiding? how did he survive? he had three wives with him, quite a small compound, three story house but it was small, and he had his career, his brother and their families. it was fascinating to go over everything, very difficult. a lot of denials from the pakistani government but eventually i did find what i thought was really important to report, one of the main chapters at the end was osama bin laden was actually being protected by the pakistani secret service. i found an insider in d i 5 who admitted that. we have a do special responsibility, one man was responsible for looking after him which manhandling him as the cia might have an intelligence be, it was completely reliable. it exists and they did it to protect him but also to use him so that he could influence their own militants, he could be used as a figurehead to control things, he was better at large. that was the main thing i found. there is much more to say but i will leave it at that. thank you. [applause] >> it is a real honor for me to be here talking with you not least because i think one of the first times i came to grips with what was going on in balochistan was reading your book and looking at this. scott yields which is a wicked -- i went six or seven months in that period we were there and this region is the size -- montana and wyoming. -- [inaudible] >> tv producer. i will just speak with my own voice. this is a region the size of montana and wyoming combined that borders iran and afghanistan. it is a huge mountainous region and a very sparsely populated part of the world but the people that live there historically have been there for several hundred years and they ruled themselves very tribal society. after indiana and pakistan became two separate countries balochistan felt disenfranchised. they were made to join pakistan, i was trying to understand the dynamics between the baloch on both side of the border but why they were part of pakistan were unhappy with their situation. many of them were incredibly unhappy. i traveled around on my first visit for five weeks and met with various militant groups, many of those in pakistan are seeking independence from the rest of the country. this has scared the central authorities and great deal. the example of bangladesh in the 70s seems to be dissected the form pakistan when the nationalists asked for their own nation state and got there with international approval. the people in this province feel they have been treated as second-class citizens for a long time. starting recently in iran, 2005, some of them thought to pick up on behalf of a pact for the central government. that inserting the campaign has spread and every subsequent -- increasingly prevalent. the counterinsurgency lost by the military intelligence agency earlier has been especially brutal and human-rights gained a lot of attention for the problems. activists have been picked up, kidnapped, disappeared, tortured and in many cases executed. to label and kill and dumb policy, talked about a lot over the years. when i saw what was going to happen, i was surprised, these people had a great deal of love for america. they hoped they might come to their aid before their desire for a separate state, that hasn't happened. and reporting on the very fraught relationship with america and pakistan. the idea of supporting a small population throughout the country and the demand for autonomy and independence for many of them has not been high on the priority list for americans dealing with drones and al qaeda and the taliban so lot of these people feel forgotten by those on the outside and alluded to the idea how difficult it is to report from this region. the fact finding military maintains control physically but also in terms of information flow and journalists like myself have real problems getting information out of there and many local journalist said ended up dead. so i met a fantastic photographer behind this in 2009. we stumbled across each other and a couple years later having stayed in contact decided we should do book about this problem so few people here about. and this book "balochistan: at a crossroads" is the result of that. i hope it is something people will pay attention to more and more. other journalists on talking about it a bit more openly but it is a subject as a consequence. that speaks volumes for the aptitude of the government so i am going to leave it there. if you have questions for me, we will take some. [applause] >> microphone coming from behind you. >> that is just a boom mike, open. >> changing the discussion to get the taliban in the state called pakistan. one or the other [inaudible] >> we call them the afghan taliban because they have afghan leadership, pakistani taliban which is another group of all the groups along the border of mostly pakistani so people born and raised on the pakistan side of the line. the pakistani taliban are packaged in so they are all along the border but what is interesting is they have allegiance and a very similar sort so most of the pakistani taliban actually learned to be friends with the afghan taliban. they actually sometimes swear allegiance to the afghan so for most people i would say they are all the same. they certainly talk the same. when you meet them they say we have the same names, we might do different operations, but we believe the same thing which is a very radical islamist -- they swear allegiance to more markets. they have this weird relationship with pakistani intelligence which is they are all actually -- what is the word? children of the pakistani intelligence services. and of course they do have relations with many militants so you could put them all in the same basket and they have relations with the al qaeda. >> those are things -- [inaudible] >> you see people try to make that argument. i don't really buy that. the afghan taliban has been a bit more, i would not call the nationalists, there islamists, their nationalists but they do keep to themselves. they haven't done a great deal of international terrorism in afghanistan. i would say they allow all foreign prices. they had everyone there, he had hosts to al qaeda and along the same lines. i think it is semantic. if you are an academic, actually they are all on the same wavelength and all aiming on the same thing. and really, which is to have an islamist radical sovereign kingdom that stretches beyond borders, they would love to stretch it across the middle east from pakistan and kashmir. in that sense they are on the same wave length. >> the journalists, amazed and curious how you got as a former agent the largest national open secret and my hat is off to you but also the reason afghan elected with success and if so, what do you think, making it harder for the taliban to affect the afghan government. >> the wording is very carefully posted in the book, and the safety of people -- i am sure you will appreciate it is dangerous for journalists to help me work on that sort of thing and dangerous -- to avoid, there is more i know. so i will stop there accept i really trust and believe in the store. after the elections it is very exciting, afghan politics always is. before the election i had to gonna book tour before the election happened but i was in the run up and was very exciting. a lot of people in those places. they were going to have a chance, there was a great deal of debate even with families and ethnic groups. i even heard people in canada hard, long lines of people coming out, people who didn't want to vote, so disillusioned with the security situation with hamid karzai, they did come out so that was good and at the same time other things happening, many of you might have heard, colleagues got shot the day before the election. and that was in the past to an area where security is not -- they went to see how the action would go. would people be too intimidated by the taliban or would there be fraud? what i am hearing since the election is it was a big success in the main cities. a lot of people turned out and a lot of people showed the way forward is democracy and they really are embracing it. the world intimidation and places where people didn't come out to vote. the community is there. between the taliban and government forces, they just say i don't want to go out. this disaffection or that, dealing in big areas. i am worried some people will feel disenfranchised. we need to see the two front runners getting everyone to something. on that that is really good. >> what is their feeling about the fact that their problem is released by the pakistani, how does that impact? second, in this election that the u.s. is pulling back even those they might need a report, what does that mean to the taliban and the pakistani market. >> i will take the second one. >> the question was about the impact of the taliban presence on the nationalist, people who want balochistan to be a separate entity and the second question was about the concerns of the future given the u.s. in afghanistan. so pakistan has the sort of the dividing line, rough one between the baloch ethnic group and a patch in ethnic group and that cuts through a very mixed city. the presence of the taliban north of there has been a significant one over the last six eight years. the nationalists from what i have gathered, the fact that the taliban are in their territory, there is a kindred spirit in a sense between the baloch end-junes in pakistan and i will tell you one particular moment that struck me. one of the minister in camps of the baloch liberation army there were two men being led away by the nationalists and i asked who are those guys and they said they are passed to neighbors who were prospecting and a gap on our land and we are going to let them go. another ethnic group in pakistan we would have killed some because past due ins let them go but we don't want them in our land so that shows you the difference but it is not very happy relationship these days. >> i would say the tribes are very good together and they cooperate, but what i think the tribes don't like is the taliban, and islamism position on the old traditions so the past ins and the baloch would live flying together. the problem is the militant islamist agenda of the taliban has created problems. on the election, it is something i am worried about and it is in the last chapter of this book but i see some hope in that i see afghans rejecting taliban and there was an uprising i followed a year ago in canada are which i think shows the real feeling in the provinces, the local people rose up but at the same time i went over to pakistan and found a great deal of preparation and planning for resurgence after the troops left, and i have seen other people like cat began gearing up to do a big offensive to retake territory in afghanistan, reestablish a presence and they would love to return to training camps and the whole taliban area and one of them, i went to pakistan, one of the founders of the islamic way of and they said, the white flag and taliban were flying in kabul so it is dangerous because pakistan will support that. they will continue to push because they see that as their way of controlling the security area, is a see us in their backyard. [inaudible] >> yes. the figure is slightly different. what they really like is for the taliban to control the past due and --pashtun it could be a pakistan area of influence. i don't know if they will actually stage an attack on july low-budget pour kabor kabul. they have started threatening people in the city's. they staged offensive against the cities to try to take them. they might try to do it more surreptitiously but they are definitely making a big pitch to regain their supremacy over afghanistan because they see the western forces and nato leaving. >> you said the both of you that i s i is behind the taliban, the pakistani taliban and obviously it is controlled by the army. my question is are you saying the pakistan army is the right enemy? and 2, whether they are the right enemy or not they are definitely behind all the chaos and it will happen again in afghanistan, the army wants afghanistan, or something like that. understanding that, supporting pakistan by funding and having a dialogue with the army and not the government sold how do we knows this? i don't understand the reason. >> this is also why i wrote the book because there is a lot of debate inside the military but particularly between parts of the government and the military. the military mostly know because they are on the ground what is going on and when you talk to them they are the most frank. the cia has its own opinion and the diplomats tend to say no, no, no, there's no proof, they are not supporting the taliban so you have this model in the american executive which is troubling and which i think forces strange foreign policy but you also have this argument which they all come up with we must engage pakistan and to impose sanctions and cut them off because in the 90s we did impose sanctions because of the nuclear issue pakistan was developing a nuclear weapon and they were cut off and sanctioned and that is seen as a disastrous decade when there was no military-military contact, very little financial aid going to pakistan and pakistan went in the opposite direction, anti-western. so the argument is engage and we will have a better time of it. my argument is we are engage in, spending a lot of money and getting nothing back and pakistan is moving in the opposite direction. increasing its nuclear arsenal thanks to a lot of money and killing people malicious style which is a war crime what they're doing in balochistan. the level of killings is comparable to any genocide in a lot of countries. i'm not saying genocide, but it is really comparable. what they are doing in afghanistan, tens of thousands of people dying. a lot of new american and nato soldiers getting killed, the whole country with i e ds from fertilizers from pakistan's factories. it is out of control and extraordinary. i agree with you. why is america doing this? their argument was if we didn't engage, if we didn't try to persuade it would be even worse and the idea is more radical people and possibly a osama bin laden types who get ahold of nuclear-weapons, that is sloppy and i think it is time diplomats, i am from britain and europe and nato are just as guilty, much smarter way of dealing with it and using leverage by national assistance programs to get better results. [inaudible] >> exactly what is being done now? consequences of pakistan breaking up. >> which military r-utah king about? the american military should not be making policy. this is very important. [inaudible] >> the international security council. >> it turns out -- and pakistan for is this. they are the best bat and if something happens and -- the military needs to unwind the talks. >> we are not run by the military. that might be the military thinking but it doesn't have to be -- >> what i -- [inaudible] >> they are not really the people -- [inaudible] >> okay -- very disappointing. as a reporter it has been difficult to get stories on balochistan into my own paper. occasionally i will do a reporting trip and i will get the story in but i can't go down there very often because it is one of those very forgotten places, very forgotten wars. the same comes with the administration. it is something -- they mentioned occasionally. i know when they have talks and such but it is very low down a list. >> what one caller was saying about the crimes being committed against the people living there. all around the world when those crimes are reported by the enough and attention is brought to bear on them. typically outside parties, the united states or european union will feel obligated to be involved. one of the strengths of pakistan's military and intelligence has been to control that information flow and to minimize these debts. these thousands, thousands of kidnappings of ordinary people for the most part and many of ended up dead and their bodies being found almost every week now. the idea of that being widely reported and also to get access means it is less likely outside powers will intervene. >> yes. >> the priority list, so many things we are more concerned about. it includes the relationship with the ministry we talked about here, includes policies on drone strikes, continued presence of u.s. forces in afghanistan. they have to worry about that more in some ways than the people of balochistan. >> able to impact the change in that, what per the consequences for the rest of the region? >> it is an unstable area but if pakistan changed its policy of supporting the taliban we would suddenly have peace in afghanistan. the taliban is not popular. the election shows that, the uprisings happening in various provincess shows that people i sick and tired of the taliban and they want a prosperous normal democratic life so they really would reject, that is why they all tell you, why isn't it, why are we going to the source of the problem? the money stopped, the porche stopped the taliban and then of course you still got guns and lots of young men who are unemployed, you have got to do a lot of post conflict work. afghanistan has huge problems besides that. support itself, i. running these proxy >> do you have photographs of balochistan nationalist leaders? some of the traditional ways they deal with these issues? people of varying life and just find it? making people -- see if they're telling the truth or not? internal issues that were going on in balochistan? >> balochistan and the balochs our tribal society. and the more remote regions. the more remote regions tribal leadership still controls many aspects of people's lives and the lot of these tribal leaders have not been kind to members of their own tribe. there's a huge amount of underage marriage. the treatment of women in more remote regions is pretty despicable by our standards at least and i do talk about that in the book, about the authoritarian way they control their own people. this is one of the main arguments advanced by the pakistani central government and the military about why balochistan requires a heavy military presence to protect the people from their own historic leaders, tribal leaders. many of the people in the less remote regions reject that wholeheartedly and it is difficult to generalize. there is a contact situation at play between the old tribal allegiances and the more modern self identification of the baloch nation if that makes sense. [inaudible] >> women being buried alive? [inaudible] >> other things that go on. >> one of the more famed leaders carlos interviewed in the book with the photographs, we try to show quite how much fealty exists in his particular area, before the pakistani military, a minor deity controls the aspect. the decision relating to property rights, their marriage, their kinship arguments. we try to explain that in the book. [inaudible] >> have you covered the relationship? one of the sponsors? and the interest it has in the territory? talking of the army with all the trouble going on in the country with militant groups killing people, thousands of military officers, citizens of the country and today, is the world going on? and the people in the country, justifying, supporting elements which are against the state. >> going into ingrate detail so of problem in afghanistan. i don't go into the funding. we go and find on that whole thing. the original sponsors of the taliban. what was the next question? >> the force for anti state elements, is that a fair -- >> the taliban i would say it is very through the years. in the beginning the taliban actually came back and came back with such force, they came back and about 2,006, they have a message that foreigners are leaving. and so there was a sense among the people that okay, they are back and we are going to listen to them. that sort of movement and that failed and turned into a big fight and the taliban became much more rigid in how they forced people to support them through intimidation and threats. it is quite clever propaganda that the foreigners are here. and cable to aid and education. the sort of foreigners, they are infidels, some of that worked but in the end what was most interesting was the region's, against the taliban but they have been a angry at the danger and security created by the taliban but they realize the -- ostracize and not getting the aid. they start to resent the taliban because the taliban make it so insecure the agency's do development. and the -- they are angry because the taliban -- one of the men i interviewed had eight sons, and it was just in 2013. they have been living through the taliban area, in the 20. they should have all been in schools this time and none of them went to school and in an area of constant taliban american control. they are really angry about that now. said over the years became a very important part of the push and pull. they are starting to see that the taliban was highly international. >> a couple more questions. >> i am a bit long winded. [inaudible] >> has been involved in the region. in your reporting did you get a sense that there was any truth about that? >> asking whether it the baloch nationalist federal -- received support from the indian government. one of the accusations leveled against them by the pakistani authority. in all instances where i met with these groups there is no evidence of that. these i not guys who have gotten a great deal of money from anyone. they are living in difficult basic conditions in very remote mountains, valleys and often many miles from nearby settlements, they got very old, very basic weaponry and living off of maybe some other things. i don't see any evidence of that at all. i would posit that quite frequently in pakistan when there are problems the easy way to assign blame is to the indian authorities. >> i certainly -- no doubt about it but from what i understand there is enough baloch diaspora to channel money and that is why mostly they get their help. >> any other questions? >> is it mostly on the other side of the enemy? [inaudible] [inaudible] >> the way i see it is more that pakistan understood how it could run an insurgency. they learned and did it with america so well in fact against the soviets. they nurtured the mujahedin, funneled all the money from saudi and american and it was very successful. the soviets have a hard time and eventually withdrew and then i see the pakistani saying let's continue, we are on to a good thing. is working. they moved into kashmir, some people and i met a militant leader who was training people from all over both in kashmir and afghanistan and even went to chechnya, bosnia, he was training, on this trip to train mujahedin and that was all sponsored by the pakistani military. so they thought we were on a good ticket and find other places to do it. that is where it got out of control. the civilian government would have said hang on. what are our aims. but from military thought let's keep doing it. we are good at this. we know how to do it and you can see they kept going with the taliban and couldn't stop and couldn't bear to give it up even when 9/11 happened. they wanted to see them to seek and still do. that is how i see it more. >> you remember is that? take more questions? >> how are we doing? >> other questions? >> in pakistan and volusia -- >> in my experience there is the huge amount of interaction in the border region between the baloch on both sides of the border. many of them have tribal ties, immediate family and actually in the vicinity of the border people live on one side as work on the other like commuting from new jersey to new york in some ways. some of the larger tribal groups have a presence hundreds of miles apart because it is said the nomadic people and other tribes, in a major iranian city in the provinces in balochistan and other members of the tribe, a pakistani provincial capital so there's a great deal of interaction. in terms of the militancy there is not so much. the movement by baloch nationalists, strongly reject the ideologies of the pro-iranian baloch brethren and militants who tend to be a lot more religiously inspired in their motivations. a group that has taken on a few iterations in the last 7 or 8 years, and they see themselves from a sectarian standpoint in the predominantly shia iran so that ideology is very alien to a lot of the baloch nationalist who are more secular minded. >> one more. >> we discussed it the other day. how the iran government is confirming disappearing from the right and also that others -- what do you think there is a pakistani connection? and how it will affect the process of reconciliation? >> i am not sure everyone understands. the afghan government, the afghan taliban, we just heard, i was in kabul recently and hamid karzai was complaining that america was intervening, trying to present his people with the afghan taliban, the main character in these works was a man called simms who seemed to be detained. i think he was detained by the united arab emirates. he had some sort with afghan officials. i don't know much more than when we were talking but everything seems to point to the fact that it was not the americans. i have to talk to american officials and wasn't america that -- the united arab emirates to detain him whereas people point out that pakistani did ask to meet him when he was in dubai and were aware but at this moment the opposition that they were behind his detention. i know a lot of afghans who are very -- and pakistani us who are concerned about the close relationship between pakistan and the united arab emirates. they're very insecure people who are on the run or people who are worried about arrest. i wouldn't put it past but i don't original note. as for the peace talks i have never thought they were going anywhere quite frankly. certainly the taliban who were cut off of peace talks, i don't think, i think they are controlled, i think they are under difficulties because their families are still in pakistan. they can't really act as independent actors but also in afghanistan all of the new people running for president, all the front runners on not interested in peace talks, they want to fight the taliban and most afghans want to fight the taliban. they don't want to see the taliban come back and start getting them a great deal of influence all i don't think the these peace talks a going to progress very quickly this year especially with these new elections. i don't think it is going to happen. that is my $0.02. time for a drink. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> does anyone wish to buy the book? [inaudible conversations] >> all over the developments. nice to be here. very good. >> i will leave you. >> the biggest challenge especially in the house where we are redistricting, that is where it hurt. in the house the biggest challenge a republican is going to face is from in a primary from somebody more conservative than he or she is and almost every district that is the case. that is what they're worried about, being challenged from the right. in their political interest to make some compromises. we have gotten a system we need to design as a country. when we created -- i am not sure people who created it realize exactly how profound the implications could be. some democrats particularly minority democrats have been in on this too. in some states african americans who want to be sure they have reliably african-american, not democrats but the ones that has a large percentage of african-american voters to be sure they have representation in congress. >> this weekend on c-span from the anti-defamation league changing demographics, redistricting and the republican party. this morning just after 11:00 eastern. later on c-span the white house correspondents' dinner. president obama and joe mchail headlined the event before celebrities, journalists and the white house press corps. that is live at 6:00. live sunday on booktv former gang member, community activist and political candidate louis rodriguez will take your calls and comments in-depth. at noon on c-span2. on american history tv history of hawaii and the sugar industry. sunday night at 9:35 on c-span3. .. >> this is a highly nuanced portraf the late 1800s. we follow the lives of mark twain, brett hart, charles warren stoddard as they help birth a new wave of literature that was to leave a permanent mark on the american literary canon. ben's portrait

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