 We're here with Rajiv Chandrasekharan, who is the author of the wonderful new book, Little America, The War Within the War for Afghanistan. Rajiv, I wanted to start with a basic question which your book, I think, provides a very comprehensive answer to, which is, did the surge work? Well, it did and it didn't. And I don't mean to vacillate here. It worked tactically in places where we sent additional U.S. troops. With additional U.S. civilians, diplomats, reconstruction workers, we saw changes, we saw changes, profound changes in parts of Helmand Province in the south, Kandahar Province, and even in some pockets of eastern Afghanistan. When you get additional force on the ground, coupled with American reconstruction dollars and all of the other elements of American power brought to bear in small Afghan districts, yes, you start to see changes, improvements in security, but that's only half the puzzle. The surge was meant to create broader stability in Afghanistan. These individual pockets of improvement were supposed to be stitched together to create you aggregate impact. That, I don't believe, has happened as U.S. commanders, as diplomats, as senior officials had hoped. What you don't, you see security improved in areas where the troops are, but the neighboring areas, no, it still hasn't really changed. What you haven't got is the Afghan government stepping up to do its share of the work, either in terms of really bearing down on the development of its security forces and particularly with regard to the Afghan government, getting out and providing meaningful services to the population at the local level. The whole point of the surge was to create white space, to create security so the Afghan government could come in and start helping the people. That hasn't really happened in a meaningful way. Most of the assistance to date is still provided by the international community, and part of this, Peter, gets to a fundamental issue with the surge, which was there was an assumption back here in Washington that if you could provide that security and you then connect the government to the people, the Afghan people would be grateful for that. They would stop supporting the Taliban or get off the fence and say, ah, my government's doing something good for me. The problem is in many parts of rural Afghanistan, as you know so well, there are very mixed feelings toward their government. They may not love the Taliban at all, but when they look at their government and they say, ah, these guys are corrupt, they're scoundrels, you know, it's that we don't want the Taliban, we don't want our government either. And when the Americans came in and said, we're here to bring your government to you, many of them recoiled and said, whoa, that's not what we want, we just want to be left alone. You spent a lot of time in Helmand on the ground, which when you first went there was quite dangerous. How would you assess it today? I think Helmand has undergone a remarkable transformation, remarkable. Places that were once far too dangerous for even Afghans to sort of walk around are now relatively peaceful, schools reopen, bazaars thriving, people who had fled their homes have come back. But the question in my mind is, how does Helmand fit into the broader picture of Afghanistan? And this is where I think the picture is far more complex. Sure, we improved Helmand, but at what cost? Did we devote too many resources to making Helmand, you know, as good as it is, at the expense of fixing Kandahar, at the expense of fixing districts in eastern Afghanistan? And some of this gets back to the rivalry between the Marine Corps and the Army, which I detail in this book. You know, I believe that some of the troop increases ordered by President Obama were misplaced as a result of tribal infighting, not in Afghanistan, Peter, but in the Pentagon. The Marine Corps, which accounted for the force that went into Helmand, wanted to operate as an independent unit with its own helicopters, with its own logistics convoys. What that meant was that they couldn't be placed in Kandahar or in other parts of the country where they'd have to work more closely with U.S. Army units and NATO forces. That meant that we took a big chunk of our troops and we put them in a part of the country with relatively few people. The Marines should probably go to Kandahar. They should have gone to other parts of the country that were more strategic, more at risk of a Taliban takeover. And so as we now step back, as these Marine forces start coming home this summer, yeah, Helmand looks really good, but the rest of the country still seems to be in a tenuous state. Richard Holbrook is obviously a key character in the book. And you basically say that if he had been sort of listened to or there had been less international conflict between him and the White House, there might have been a better and earlier chance for Taliban peace talks and reconciliation. Yes. But Holbrook, as we all know so well, was a larger-than-life figure. He had a big ego. He had sharp elbows. He could rub people the wrong way. He loved the spotlight. And some of his traits, some of his characteristics just rubbed senior members of Obama's national security team the wrong way. Then national security adviser Jim Jones, Doug Lute, who was handling Afghanistan and Pakistan policy for the National Security Council. And the disputes between the two camps, between the NSC and the state, became very personal, very acrimonious. And as I detail in this book, it really foreclosed opportunities to pursue peace because the key players in this were more consumed with one up and one another than trying to present sort of a common front and a common strategy. The U.S. eventually did get to a point where we articulated to the Taliban through a speech given by Secretary of State Clinton sort of a changed U.S. position with regard to trying to spur on peace talks. That came about in a eulogy she gave for Holbrook after he died. Nothing had fundamentally changed to get to that point except for Holbrook's death. Do you think that message was heard and why do you think these talks are right now? I think the talks are pretty much dead in the water. They're not really any talks to begin with. The problem was we demonstrated our interest in this and our seriousness too late. The time to have done it was as we were putting more troops on the ground, increasing our leverage. By the time we were ready to do so, we were looking toward the exits. Is Joe Biden right? I think Joe Biden surfaced an awful lot of concerns that proved to be prescient, particularly with regard to the Afghan government's willingness to be a partner in the coin effort and the Pakistani government's willingness to crack down on insurgent sanctuaries. On the latter, we know that Pakistan has done very little on that front. On the former, I think the record shows that Karzai has been at best a very reluctant partner in American counterinsurgency efforts. I think part of it is we fail to understand that Karzai never believed in counterinsurgency. He sees the principal problem as being the infiltration of militants from Pakistan. He doesn't see the problem as malign governance as corruption down at the local level. He thinks everything we're doing at the district level, in the south and in the east, is essentially mucking around with a self-regulating system of ethnic Pashtun governance. So he sees all that subnational governance stuff, civilian and military that we're doing, as essentially making problems worse and undercutting his influence in the districts. So if he had his way, he'd redeploy the bulk of U.S. forces to the border and say, get out of my districts. As a result, when we then say to the Karzai government, you need to send more people down here to the district level to do governance, to do security. He says, okay, fine, but then his government never really delivers. We think it's a lack of capacity, and yes, that is true. There is a lack of human capacity, but there's also a fundamental lack of political will because the Afghan elites never bought in to our strategy. We'll receive congratulations on a great book. Pleasure to talk to you. Great.