antiquarian book trade, we're a tiny minority of increasingly the population of this country. .. presents portions of author talks on afghanistan and the u.s. war. you will hear from a historian, journalist tjournalists who covr and medal of honor recipient dakota. you can watch all of these programs in its entirety on our website, booktv.org. we start with the author of games without rules. in this clip, mr. ansary gives an overview of the history and the conflict of external and internal the afghans experienced over the years. >> i'm sure all of you are interested in what's going on afghanistainafghanistan right ns contesting for the presidential seat in the elections next year, what happens after the nato forces withdraw if they do. but as a historian we can get into all of that with questions and so on but what i'm interested in is how we got here and i feel how we got here is part of the question of where to go from here. in this book i've gone back to what i consider the origins of the afghan nation state with just two and a half centuries ago and i traced the narrative of that country, that emerging developing country which is still not quite developed and i would note that the origins go back to about the same period that the united states was taking shape. what i see is this territory that we call afghanistan was populated by many tribes and different populations but it was also permeated by a sense of uniformity by culture of which islam was the most important factor but they are also values in common and a sense of common history and something about the social structure that you would find. there were various levels of power that the people in the villages and cities and the rulers and the poor and the rich, they might have conflicts that they consider themselves to be part of the same world. then in the course of history whahistorywould have been just y different cultural entity. suddenly it appeared on the afghan seat and it was pressing him on this area and these were the global powers whose culture was basically western and whose all the territory as an important spot because of strategic considerations in their contests with each other globally. so now for the afghans for anybody who was part of the ruling elite in afghanistan or wanted to rule the country it was necessary for them to negotiate with different entities. the war of clerics and elders that came from the grassroots and the villages and the networks and the tribes and that world is still had the old culture that characterized the life in this area. so, what i find is that over time in the way that, you know, if you put a liqui liquid in a centrifuge that heavy stuff separate from the light stuff, there is a sense in which the afghan society also separated into two different societies and there was an urban westernized elite known as this other, you know, inward looking country that was afghanistan. and these are both afghan, you know, these are both aspects of afghan society and they are in contention and have been in contention for the control of the identity in afghanistan saio this is a story that has been going on from the beginning, partly caused. it fails without clockwork and about every 40 years some global power has tried to come in and dominate the afghan scene and control it and use it for its own purposes. there've been periods of afghan history when the rulers of afghanistan have taken advantage of the geographical position of afghanistan to play a sort of neutrality card using the favoritism towards one global power, playing that against the possibility of leaning towards the other global power to keep both of them somewhat at bay, and this has been the diplomatic strategy of the successful afghan rulers whenever there have been many. and the cold war, for example, was a notable period. they both were competing to enlarge their influence in the country and somehow he caused the counterbalancincaused theco, there was a period and the afghans were in control of their own destiny and during the period you saw the modernization and the change in afghanistan that was more rapid or more sort of dramatic then you have seen anywhere. that's period ended when the pendulum of trying to swing back and forth in the afghanistan and the outer world it's going so fast and so far that it finally crashed and the country succumbed to the coup by the small communist group which would then quickly follow by the soviet invasion and i would contend from that day until this we are in the aftermath of the soviet invasion. the soviet invasion pretty much the story to the fabric of the country. the 6 million refugees that it drove out of the country, the destruction of the villages, the tearing apart of the tribal structures. the old traditional afghan systems for generating leadership gateway to the new system which was in a state of chaos. for thaso that brought into beia whole other class of afghan leaders who are commanders, now they call them warlords and that's entered the fray. they tour the cities apart and then in the wake of that came so now we are in the country and i think that we have come in with something of the same idea that the soviet pact which was this is a primitive country in a lot of trouble and if we can restore everything and produce material benefits for the people they will be grateful and they will come over to our side. there's more to it, however. afghans are interested in material benefits like anyone is but there is a question of the reconstruction of the afghan institutions that the society, the family structur structure, e reconciliation of all of these contending factors on the afghan seat. the caliban business is not completely separate from the contingents within the afghan society over dominating the identity of afghanistan. how much time have i used? i can keep going. i was so efficient that i said almost everything i had to say. [laughter] >> so, now i could go back into all of that at great length, but i would just say this, that i went back to afghanistan in 2012 this last year and part of my mission was to help the group takes a different villages and planted them and so we went to some distance. we didn't go to the war-torn areas because they were war-to war-torn. but we went where we could and we went for example to my home near kabul and then we went out to some further districts and i saw things in afghanistan that were interesting for me because what i saw was on the one hand there were aspects of the modern world that to me were permeating to the furthest reaches in rural afghanistan. actually, i went to central afghanistan where they might give you could use to be and you might remember them they were destroyed by the taliban. and then from there, we went out and we wanted to see something someone told us about that was a rock structure so that was like a couple of hours driven out of the little town, so we were really way out in the middle of nowhere and they are i look out and i see a little village clinging to the cliff and i see something glimmering and i said what is that, you know, so we looked closer and what it is is access to the solar panel. even in those distance plan plas they know about solar panels and next to the solar panel, would yowhat doyou call those, satelle dishes. [laughter] so this village has at least enough electricity to run at least one television set. [laughter] probably not more than one because that is expensive and they would have that one television set and a common area that everyone would come together but that in and of itself is a permeation of the outside world into afghanistan. and you might say well, what can you get on a television set in central afghanistan? you can get programming from kabul. there is so much programming coming out they had like 20 tv stations. now it's true that those are a motley crew of tv stations. some of them are owned by dare i call them warlords. so there is a certain element of control of public information that way but at the same time some of these tv stations in kabul are putting out such investigative news that you would be proud of. they go to the places where these, you know, where these suicide bombings have taken place. they find video and broadcast it and that has an effect on the public opinion. if you hear some place was bombed in the uk and manipulate the spin on that information in a different way than you see people. so, that is one aspect. the other is they have aggressively called to the carpet afghan officials who are involved in the punitive corruption and they bring up the documents in question them. not that that stopped any of the corruption that i think it's important that media exists and even people in the distant villages can see it. on the other hand, you know i will tell you that i went there and i stayed with a relative of mine and he is someone i never met but closely tied to the village. but, you know, he is a second cousin or something, very close and afghan terms. it wasn't clear that i was close enough to the family to be admitted to the inner circle. and then i would also report to you that after that it was like okay he is family. and then our dinner shifted from just him and me and the children to the family dinner and so then we were all together there and so, now you will say to yourselves it was kept in the back room and she was oppressed. well i tell you once we were all together i was saying i want to go there and do this. to the shrine of our great ancestor i don't have time. you're going to make time. so there was not anything squelched about this woman. there was a structure that was characteristic of afghan society and distant past in my day in afghanistan and its still there over the country. succumb to the negotiations of the old afghanistan and the culture of the outside world is very deeply mixed up with what's going to happen going forward. i will just stop there. >> we continue to look at afghanistan with a "washington post" and cnn. the authors appea authors appeae annapolis book festival in 2013 to talk about their books on the afghanistan war. here is a clip from that event and a reminder you can watch the program on our website, booktv.org. >> the book focuses on what happened when president obama decided to search american surgs into afghanistan starting in early 2009. and what i tried to do is comical the decisions behind that and the impact of that decision both on the ground but also back in washington. i spent about two and a half years writing about this for the post and i split my time between the deserts of southern afghanistan and the world inside the beltway going back and forth about 15 times to try to understand how the decisions made in washington were being implemented on the ground and where the breakdown of the policy was and what was happening on the ground was and was not being understood in washington. but the tale actually begins not with the 9/11 attacks were the soviet invasion of afghanistan that led to the support for the mujahedin that the beginning of america's engagement in afghanistan, which i think to many americans might be surprising if actually started in the 1940s so the rates actually go back to the holocaust when jews fled europe and many of them came to the united states. among them were jewish for traders who needed a new source of cults to make coats and hats and with their traditional markets in europe unavailable, they turned remarkably to the landmark nation of afghanistan whose hills are bound with sheep and in the late 30s and early 40s, afghanistan exported between one to 2 million a year to the united states. the sale of each one but a few more billion dollars in the treasury said 1946 as europe was digging out of the rubble afghanistan was sitting on the windfall with $100 million of gold and silver reserves and so the old king who had been impressed with what the king had done in the tennessee valley decided that he wanted to modernize the deserts of southern afghanistan to create a bread basket if you will by harnessing the water so he hired the world's best construction company at the time out of san francisco to adult the hoover dam to build the irrigation canals and build the dams and in the late 40s there were legions of american engineers that defended on southern afghanistan. it wasn't a foreign aid project initially but was soon turn into one as the efforts to build this farmland turned out to be more troubled and complicated and wound up starting in the 60s for the international development and turning into a large endeavor. i opened the book with this story because it hopes to explain america's involvement in afghanistan but when you go back and look at the history that involved an american contractor fleeting the afghan government to do things that were impossible to do where you have afghan government officials who had been educated in america and wore my suit and spoke english telling american officials this is how you fix our country that these people knowing as little about the world parts of the country as we did back then when you have american officials going out and failing to really understand the cultures and traditions of the places in which they were operating it is a history in the opening parts of the book if you change the dates and the names you could be writing about today. and i just found it completely remarkable. fast forward to the substance of civilian population that was going to be to try to establish in many cases for the first-time institutionfirst timeinstitutiot and connect to that. well, it was great in theory, the problem was that karzai never believed in it because if we succeeded in that endeavor if what disrupt the efforts and the cuts with the warlords and power brokers to essentially keep a hold on power and for the cronies to continue to enrich themselves accountable so they set about to foil that effort. other key strategic miscalculations occur us owning that pakistan was enough u.s. financial incentives as well as a little bit of a stick now and again would actually start to crack down meaningfully on the taliban and on its own soil. that never happened. another miscalculation was on the domestic political side. that the american people, the american congress would have an appetite for the continued substantial effort to try to stabilize afghanistan. and unfortunately as our economy has failed to rebound as quickly as many would hope, the cost of the war it costs about a million dollars per year to keep one service member in afghanistan. that means in 2010 and 2011 it was north of $100 billion. that became a bigger issue even a few months after obama signed off. so there are other issues but i sorthat isort of look at all ofe reasons why it was a strategic miscalculation and just last what the book also seeks to do is to look at how it was implemented. put aside the miscalculations. there were things that had to be done. we needed to send troops to areas where the town the band were the strongest to beat them back and protect the power population. there was a kiss to be a surge of diplomatic workers to implement the counterinsurgency strategy and in washington it was supposed to get its head around the process to try to potentially get the taliban to negotiate in the table the reason that you were not going to be able to kill every single last one of them. and quickly in each of those areas we really bungled it. back in the summer of 2009 when the first troops were heading to afghanistan, the part of the country that was most at risk was the southern city of kandahar the second largest population center. it's the spiritual capital for the past two in population and it was the prize for the taliban if they could have seized it and they were on the gates of kandahar if they could have seized the city they would have a springboard to take over much of the rest of the country as in the 1990s so you would think that we would send that first wave of the troops in and around kandahar but we sent them off to the deserts of the province where the american engineers were in the 40s and 50s but that's part of the country was home. our strategy was supposed to be the population counter insurgency. why did we do that? the tribal rivalries and the pentagon. the first brigade of troops was comprised of the marines. i love the marine corps but they insist on bringing their helicopters and logistics unit and they wanted their own corner of the sandbox and so we squandered the surge because we set a great marine brigade to the wrong part of the country and the surge unfolded a year or two late in the bubble of those new diplomats ended up staying in the very comfortable embassy compound instead of getting out into the field to work side-by-side with military commanders and we've had way too much money into that country. afghanistan is deserving of our assistance. they needed help. we tried to spend $4 billion on reconstruction in 2010, far more than the country could absorb. the last point before i turn it over the subtitle of my book is the war within the war. i discovered back and forth that there was a second war going on that weekend the beltway and one of the nastiest was between the state department and the white house over the topic of the potential reconciliation with the taliban, not over anything substantive. they both wanted to get to the point that you could maybe negotiate with some elements. the problem with personalities. hillary clinton appointed the diplomats to take charge of the process for the state department. holbrook was a qualified guide in 1996 he brokered the courts to bring peace to the balkans that he had a big ego, sharp elbows, first for the spotlight and he was a personality run by the nickname no drama obama. the national security staff scheduled meetings when he was out of town and prevented him from using government aircraft and undercut him in front of the leaders of afghanistan and pakistan. again the consequence is that we wasted the first 18 months. the key moment when we were sending the troupe's been to try to chart the path. the story of the outpost kind of found me. i have done a little bit of reporting and then in the baghdad bureau earlier before in the 2005 and 2006 but i've never been to afghanistan before i took on this project. i covered the war as a correspondent from the lawn at the white house i covered it with the squabbles between the pentagon and the white house and so on and how much it should, how many troops should be sent, etc. but it wasn't until my wife and i had our son in october of 2009 and i was sitting in a hospital recovery room holding jack and i looked up and this small tv in the recovery room and i saw this report on the combat outpost i never heard of. the combat outpost being attacked. october 3, 200953 u.s. troops were in this vulnerable camp of the compound outpost and the bottom of the mountains just 14 miles from the pakistan border and they faced an almost insurmountable attack by almost 400 television and insurgents and all of them had the high ground. you don't have to be norman schwarzkopf to know that high ground is good and low ground is bad and they were outmanned and outnumbered and people in this country may be sometimes tend to think of the tablet and as primitive and backward and whatever you think of their ideology they know how to fight and they are very strategic and they want to attack the camps exactly as the men feared they would targeting first operation center, targeting the observation post top of the mountain and for me it was one of those moments in life you don't realize you're having until you look back on retrospect it was a life-changing moment i was holding my son hearing about eight other sons of american troops killed that day and there was something in a moment that changed my life and said the only course to find out more about this combat outpost into these eight men were and what it was like for the 45 survivors to face the fire fight and why anybody would put an outpost in this incredibly vulnerable place and the truth of the matter is if somebody else had written this book that would have been the end of that and somebody had done some in-depth study or explanation, but we don't cover it as much as we should and i don't fault them for not writing this first. they are covering the day-to-day quite often so i never got the answers and i ultimately became the writer of the book. it started out i reached out to some of the soldiers who were there that day in october 3, 2009 and ultimately i got a book proposal together and i got a contract with the little browning company. it is going to be a bout the truth in 2009. after the word got out in a small notices that i was writing this book, some other soldiers that had served reached out to me. first was a young intelligence officer who had helped set up the post and he wanted me to know why they set up the post and wanted me to know who the man was after whom the camp was named. he wanted me to talk about lieutenant colonel mike howard and others who had served and other troops who served after that intelligence officer reached out. they wanted me to tell their story. the book became a bigger project than i had originally planned on and ended up being the history of this one outpost from 2006 to 2009 around the time the troops start searching into afghanistan so this is the period in which they are undermanned in afghanistan and the reasons are decisions made at the white house and pentagon at the time which was in 2007 there were 20 times as many troops in iraq as in afghanistan and writing this book was an education for me on a lot of levels and decisions made by bush and rumsfeld and leader obama directly had an effect on what would happen to an individual private in a forgotten corner of the world. when you don't send enough helicopters to a country like afghanistan that means that decisions have to be made around of a lack of helicopters and that means for example that an outpost will be put in the part of the world i'm writing about which is right next to kunar in eastern afghanistan in the hindu kush mountain range. in this part you are either on a mountain or in a valley and because they didn't have enough helicopters, the decision was made they had to put the outpost in the valley next to the road to the camp could be supplied by the convoys. when people ask why was it there one of the main reasons is because there were not enough helicopters and 2006. but the book came on to take a special meaning for me beyond the intellectual exercise and understanding of how much i covered as a white house correspondent was related to the troops and our ability to win if one can win this war and the common sense of the word when. it also became an awakening about something i knew in my brain but i didn't understand in my heart which is what it is exactly that our troops and our families go through. the book doesn't take a position on the war. the book doesn't take a position on the surge. at the book takes a position that these are people that have volunteered for the service and the d's are better for us in terms of civilians. you know, we talked a lot about the 1% and the 99% but for me the 1% and the 99% is the one person that served the country and sacrifice for the country and the 99 who don't and are able to not think about afghanistan and iraq were the sacrifices that are made. >> that was a short clip of our coverage from the an apple with the festival. you can watch the whole event on the website. we go from the journalist's description of an outpost in afghanistan to the first-person account of the war from the afghanistan veteran and medal of honor recipient dakota meyer. he spoke at an event in chicago in 2012. >> by now everyone has heard of me. whether you know of me as a small-town guy for the sergeant the medal of honor recipient more than likely you have heard of me by now. i will start off as a typical high school student 17-years-old walking through my one true and i knew everything back then. i was walking through and a recruiter waindierecruiter was r and he had his dress blues on and looked like he could have been the president of the united states. i went up to him and started asking questions like what's this for, how did you get that? i can shoot and hit a deer at 100 yards. not impressing him at all. so he took it for a minute and said what are you going to do when you get out of high school and i looked down and i put my chest out and i said i'm going to play football somewhere and he said that's what i would do because there is no way that you would make it as a marine. so quickly i realized and i sent myself up. my lunch. i was over so i came back and for those of you that don't know me i don't take a challenge very easily and if you were one of my commanders and would note that for a fact so i went back to my room and i started thinking about it and he had challenged me. i said if you pack your stuff right now i will sign the paper. he said all right let's go. so i didn't tell my father. we signed the papers and the only thing in my father's way is the signature so we ar were sitg in the living room or my kitchen table and my dad walked in and he is sitting there saying what have you done now. so i said i want to go to the marine corps. he said you were going to play football yesterday and i said i'm ready to go. he said have you really thought about this and i said yes in the hour drive there and back i'm ready to go. so in mustard in the marine corps june 18, 2006 which i will let you know it's a day that i will never forget. this is where i would spend my 18th birthday. my 19th birthday i was in sniper school i and 20th birthday i was in the hell week in announcing training in bridgeport california so i had a lot of good birthdays. but i shipped off to north carolina in the infantry training and after that i went to hawaii where i would be stationed for the next four years and this is where i also attended the sniper school so after attending sniper school i quickly shipped off to iraq. i didn't get to complete the tour because i was bit about my hand by eight spider and suffered nerve damage but i want to let everyone know the enemy will stop at nothing. the injury and their spiders to bite us. soap two years of additional training and working to get my hand back and i became in charge of five other marines and we were out training to go back to iraq when the sergeant walked in and said we need five volunteers to go to afghanistan and i said what is the mission packs he said we don't know yet we just need five volunteers so i said okay i'm ready to go. so i ended up being assigned a small team advisor and we were going to act as advisers to the afghan national army and this is different because i'm not used to normal missions and this and that. we would live with the two marines one navy corpsman. you want to talk about a complete shock i can tell you right now i've got one. we did everything from eating to drinking too volleyball courts to the mission planting to hearing the stories about their lives and it helps us to become a solid unit and we learned to depend on one another and rely on one another and i want to talk about the afghans later on because of what the current events art but i have to tell you one of the best lessons this talking was not to look at the world and the judge people by their religion, their skin color, their financial status or anything like that but accept them for who they are because i have to tell you i'm guilty of having what i like to call the small-town complex. coming from a small town i've got it. that's where you think the world is only this big because that's how you were taught. i'm 24 and i know that is not the case anymore. but really we always do that. we are so fast to judge one another without getting to know one another for what they are. so i definitely think it is something that we can all listen to. anyway we were stationed in northeastern afghanistan in the kunar province right on the pakistan border. and this is where i would be stationed with lieutenant johnson, the sergeant. now, he was a navy corpsman but if anybody knows anything about the navy corpsman they might as well be marines so i'm going to call them marines here on out. [applause] so we would get together to develop the team and this is a group of guys i would learn to call my brothers. the advisor team was put together and they take different skill sets and they don't ever ask about personalities or anything like that. they just put you in there and expect you to get along. when i met johnson they were totally different than me. i was the only infantrymen in the group. so, i didn't really care about them at the time i was just so excited at the thought of going to afghanistan it didn't really matter to me. but what i learned more and more every single day is that they are the most important people in my life. each of us share the responsibility to take care of one another and to protect one another. and it didn't take long before the personality differences and without a doubt that there was never any doubt in my mind that they would sacrifice their life at a moments notice and in the end they proved it. some of you know the details of 2009 so we are running the mission in the valley and this is the only mission they unleashed the plane and took me out to the gunnery sergeant named sergeant johnson. he looked like a typical marine and a fitness guru who always love to workout and i can tell you right now. but for what reason i still ask the question today. so my assignment was to sit back in the position and while my team entered the valley, which i was uncomfortable with, that being in the united states marine corps, you don't have much of an option to follow the orders. so the mission was that they were going to renounce themselves to a stopping the freedom of movement and to stop terrorism. so that is what we were trying to do on this mission. it was an ambush and it was big. and it didn't take me long to realize that it was not a normal ambush. it's at the first of any firefight bust comes in and you try to figure out any situation. you try to figure out and your training kicks in and you start doing your job after ten to 15 minutes but not in this fight. one thing after another started to fail us and everything started to fall like a house of cards. everything that we relied on to support us was not happening. it was like the mission was falling quickly like a house of cards. the enemy was seeing it and they were taking full advantage of it. after a period of time we were sitting in the vehicle and we found out that we had to do something. we could just sit back and watch anymore. each time we were told no. we finally looked at each other and we said we have to go in because that is what brothers do for one another. and we knew that the situation wasn't as bad as we thought it was that we were going to have to answer for it. but i can tell you this. i would rather be here answering the consequences for my team being alive today and it not being as bad as it was then standing here today knowing i didn't give anything because i was worried about my team. he starts calling in and it's spot on. it's perfect. the response he got back was that the location was too big to the village. he said if you don't give me these right now, we are going to die. and the response back was try your best. a few minutes later i hear the sergeant come over the radio. he said he had to call in a medical evacuation and he kept getting cut off because of all of the confusion of the radio traffic going over the radio. it has frustrated voice he finally said get off of the radio, trying. so everyone did. so he started giving giving starting to write on the humvee because if i can write it down i could locate the position on the map and i could find where amazing team is. with a sharpie in my hand we got the first and he stopped and that is the first time that i ever heard from my teammate. after afghan soldiers and searching for the missing the helicopter spotted their lifeless bodies in the trench. and when i got there i immediately knew that they were all gone. certainly it can't be all of them, it can't be true. so i checked each one of them and i confirmed what i already knew. and they all fell together doing the job that he had sworn to do as every man and woman does when they end list. they paid the ultimate sacrifice. a couple of questions for you. i was curious how you got the agent report to the secret and my hats go off to you but also generally do you think the reason was a success and if so, does this make it harder for the televangelist that the afghan government and its out in the alleged [inaudible] >> i'm going to disappoint you on the source because the wording is very carefully posted and it's the safety i cannot go further than that. i am sure that you all appreciate to help me work on that sort of thing. and i've been very careful how i raised it. there's more i know but that's all i can put in because they said that it would be stable so i'm afraid i'm going to stop there. except i trust and i believe in the source and the motivation. as for the elections it's very exciting as the afghan policy always is. i had to go on a book tour before it happened, but i was there in the run-up and it was very exciting. a lot of people i think now they realize they were not really stepping down and they were going to have the chance to choose someone new and so there was a great deal of debate even in the groups all over the country. i even heard coming to know, i talk to people in kandahar who said that there are long lines of people coming out and people that didn't want to vote. it was so disillusioned with the security situation with karzai and the way the country was going that they did come out fine. and at the same time, we had all of these dreadful things happening as many of you might have heard that got shot before the election. the back was an area where obviously the security is not 100%, and they went to see how the election would go. what people turn out, would people be too intimidated by the telegram, or whether they look forward in a sort of vacuum so that was the great fear. i think, what i am hearing things is that it was a great success in the city. a lot of people turned out and a lot of people showed that they believe that the way forward is democracy. and it's quite new to the afghans because they are really embracing it. but we are hearing also the world intimidation and the places that they didn't come out and vote because the security is so bad the community is there between the taliban and the government forces or the american forces that they just say i don't want to vote, i don't want to go out, it is a sort of disaffection, and that still exists in the big areas. i'm worried some people will feel disenfranchised so we need to see. the good thing is the two front-runners and i think that is really good. >> [inaudible] their province is being used in the taliban and how does that affect? second come in the government setting that is going back what option does that leave? [inaudible] it was about the impact of having to thailand president for all of the people that want the people to be a separate entity and the second question was about the concerned given the afghanistan election. the province has a sort of dividing line between the ethnic group and that tends to cut through the city. the president of the town of van has been a pretty significant one over the last seven or eight years and they have been enforcing on that. the nationalist from don't like the fact. is on account of the liberation army and it's led by the nationalists. and that has to neighbors we are going to let them go. that shows you the difference on the happy relationship these days >> i would say the tribes are very good at together, and they cooperate. but what i think the tribes don't like is the sort of islamist in possession of the old tradition. so if the tribes are left together i think they would live find together. i think the problem is the militant islamist agenda has created problems. on the election it's something i'm very worried about and it's in the last chapter of this book that i can see some hope in that icy afghans rejecting the cameraman and there was an uprising that followed a year ago in kandahar which i think shows the feeling in the provinces about the taliban. at the local people rose up and threw them out at the same time i went over to pakistan and i found a great deal of preparation and planning for a resurgence after the troops leave in 2014 and i've often seen people reporting it all gearing up to retake the territory in afghanistan and reestablish the presence and influence and i think they would love to return to the training camp and the whole ton of an era. one of them was the islamist wave. they are set on that so i think it is very dangerous because they won't support that. the isi will continue to push because they see that as their way of securing the area and they see it as their backyard. >> [inaudible] >> i think it's slightly different. what they would like is for the taliban took control the route and creative chaos so that nobody else can come into the pakistan area of the entrance. i don't know if they will actually stage an attack on jalalabad. they might be a bit closer this time and try to do it through i think -- they are trying to do it for the underhanded flippancy and they've already started threatening people in the cities including the northern alliance is telling people it's in their interests to cooperate or defer the assassinations to try the actual campaign rather than the in those days they staged the offenses against and they mightt try to get more surreptitiously thabut they are definitely makia big pitch to gain their supremacy over afghanistan so they see that the western forces are leaving. >> you said isi is basically behind at the top of -- behind the taliban. my question is are you saying the pakistan army is the right enemy? number two, whether they are the right enemy or not does that leave behind the chaos of what is going to happen again not like there strategic. so understanding on that, why the u.s. government keeps the army and by the dialogue with the army and not the government. so i don't understand this reason. >> this is also why i wrote the book because there is still a lot of debate particularly between the parts of the american government. the military mostly know because they are on the ground they know what's going on and when you talk to them they are the most frank. the cia has their own opinion and the diplomats tend to say no, no there is no proof. so you've got this model inside of the american executive that is troubling in this foreign policy but we've also got this argument they all come out with that we must engage pakistan rather than impose the sanctions and cut them off because in the '90s we didn't impose the sanctions and the nuclear weapons and they would cut open the sanctions and that is seen as a disastrous decade in which there was no military contact and there was very little even financial aid going to pakistan and pakistan went more in the opposite direction and was uncooperative. .. >> you are right. i agree with you that why is america doing this. their argument is if we didn't engage and try to persuade it would be worse. and more radical people and possibly even bin laden type would get ahold of the