 Well good evening and welcome to the New America Foundation on behalf of Anne-Marie Slaughter the president of New America and Peter Bergen the director of the national security program I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight and also welcome any and all of those who are watching us on on the webcast at home or elsewhere My name is Doug Alamant. I'm a senior national security fellow here at the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen wishes he could be here, but was unavailable tonight. So I am I am his stand-in We are thrilled and honored to have Anand here tonight. Anand is a fellow fellow at the New America Foundation as well, although he spends all his time in New York So we very very seldom see each other We're pleased to have him here tonight to talk about his new book No Good Men Among the Living which of course you should all go to Amazon and click buy right now and drive up his sales Anand in addition to being a New America fellow Spend a number of years in Afghanistan. How long total four years in total as the correspondent primarily for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor This is his first book. So we'll let Anand talk for a little bit And then he and I will have a conversation here on stage and then we'll turn to our audience for questions So without further ado Thanks, I will talk a little bit about the book give you a little background on how I came to it and some of the main themes in it And then we'll open up for a conversation I my story in terms of how I got to Afghanistan starts on 9-11 because I was living in lower Manhattan at the time and The attacks were very close to me. In fact, I lost a couple of good friends in the attacks I got trapped under a car for a few hours And you know like all of us it was a pretty traumatic event and it for me it jarred me out of my complacency And it forced me to start paying attention to the world outside of the US So I followed the war on terror the war in Afghanistan the war in Iraq as best as I could And I always felt somewhat dissatisfied with What I was learning just because you know, these are difficult wars to cover particularly in Afghanistan where so much of the country is off limits for for journalists and And so it was something that nod at me for many years and finally in late 2007 I decided to switch careers. I was doing physics and chemistry at the time switch careers and Move to Afghanistan And when I got there The war was in full swing at that time we were just beginning as a country to sort of recognize that Afghanistan was a war because we were so focused on Iraq for many years and And when I when I landed there, I got there without any contacts I didn't know the language. I didn't really know the first thing about journalism So in retrospect, it was a pretty bad idea in some respects, but in some ways it was actually it actually helped me very much because I didn't have the backing of a bureau or I wasn't working for a major news organization So I didn't have the money to hire a fixer or translator or somebody who can who can take me around the country Who can introduce me to Afghan and so I was forced to improvise and and so I learned the language in the course of that year Got a motorcycle and went around the country Ended up living most of that year outside of Kabul in various small villages And what I learned very quickly is Afghanistan is an extraordinarily hospitable place one could say this is why they got attacked in the first place and You know, I would show up in villages and and people would bring me into their homes And so this is what I did for most of that year of 2008 and I Also took the opportunity to embed with US troops as much as I could so that that year I spent time with troops in Kandahar and Wardak provinces. I lived with tribal elders in villages The one thing that was missing from that picture was Access to the other side the people that we were fighting and so I did spend some time in 2008 trying to figure out How can I meet the Taliban and then the problem? Of course the Taliban has the unfortunate propensity to kidnap the people that they interviewed who interviewed them And so you have to be very careful about this the way I was able to meet the Taliban and One of the main characters in this book is a Taliban fighter and I followed his life from 2001 essentially till very recently The way I was able to meet the Taliban was there was a main prison in near Kabul where a lot of Taliban Al-Qaeda fighters were kept and there was also a Major drug king pain who was who is in the prison? He's from Malaysia and he happened to speak Tamil, which is a language I also happened to speak and So through a Red Cross friend a Red Cross friend told me listen, you know, there's this guy. He's a drug king pin He's living in this prison. Why don't you pose as his relative and just speak Tamil in front of the guards and see what happens So I showed up one day at the prison and I said, you know what the hell? I'll try it. And so I started speaking Tamil to the guards and they didn't know what to do with me And I pointed to the guys name, you know, there's a list of prisoners said that guy's my relative and they said, okay So they let me into the prison And I met him and he was shocked because this poor guy hadn't seen anybody in like three years So, you know, he was just happy to have a conversation with somebody in a language, you know And so we spoke with each other for a while and it so happened that he was housed in this one block That was separate from the common criminals And and it was special because in that block everybody there except for him was either in the Taliban or in Al-Qaeda Okay, so they're all like senior senior level people And so I would go once a week sneaking into the prison and and talking to him and eventually he introduced me to Taliban bigwigs that are in the prison and in this through this process by by the end of the year I had gotten to know everybody inside the prison and And with only with their imprimatur was I able to then go out into the field Into the you know countryside and actually meet Taliban fighters who were actually fighting Otherwise, I probably would have been kidnapped. So through that I was able to go And that's how I met the Taliban commander who is one of the three characters in this book. His name is Mullah Kable He got that name because he used to walk around in the 1990s with a whip with a metal metal cable whipping people to get their weapons and to force them to pay taxes and so You know when I met him my I was very interested in just interested in what would drive somebody to Take up a whip and start whipping people. It seems like the furthest thing from anybody's experience that I can imagine and He actually was interested in telling the story which possibly because I was the first person to ask him about his story and so, you know for the next year we met pretty much two or three times a week and he was just telling me his life story and then You know tell me I went to this village. I thought here. I did this. I was born here Or you know, I knew this person I took everything down and then I would go and try to follow up And every single thing he said I would go to the villages. He mentioned I would go and ask, you know Did you know this guy Mullah Kable? Did he say this thing, you know? and For a while he thought I was a spy for doing that because you know the sort of Western approach to journalism isn't Isn't there in Afghanistan? They don't really Understand why am I trying to double-check everything he's saying? He took it as me not trusting him Which is to an extent true. I didn't actually trust for everything he was saying so I had to do this But you know it took a while for him to be convinced that this is actually necessary for the if I'm gonna take a Story down. I actually do need to go and do these sorts of things So that was a process in which I got to know a little bit about the Taliban and I'll explain a little bit about what I Think they're actually about why they're fighting soon, but that's like how I got to Understand a little bit about the Taliban after That I spent more time in villages in southern Afghanistan And my purpose there was to try to understand why people were fighting and why people even people who don't Support the Taliban who aren't with the Taliban Tended to be very dismissive of the Afghan government and be very dismissive of the US forces And I was interested in understanding why that was the case because you often hear that well The Afghan government is very corrupt and and so this is why people don't like the Afghan government. That wasn't there may have been a Necessary condition to being anti-government didn't strike me as being a sufficient one because Any of you who have traveled to that part of the world knows that many of these governments are corrupt You know, you have to give bribes in India. You have to give rise in Pakistan in Nepal, but not all these countries have a Major insurgency and the government controlling 50 or less than 50% of the country And so I spent a lot of time trying to understand what it is that was animating people and what it is It was pushing people away from the US forces and the Afghan government And the stories that they told me actually shattered my preconceived notions of what this war was about And I had come in thinking probably what many many of you think that this war was about the United States invading Afghanistan to fight a recalcitrant group of fighters who who did not want the US there because they believed in jihad and What it turned out to be the case is that it was actually very different When the US invaded in 2001 and 2002 The entire Taliban or most of the Taliban Surrendered or collapsed cease to exist of the movement and surrendered Al Qaeda had fled the country Most of them got into Pakistan some of them gone to Iran The reason the Taliban surrendered is not because they were peacenakes or not because they Believed that believed in the American project It's because this is what Afghans had done for the last 20 or 25 years when you're in a country that's been at war for for that long You will learn ways to survive when the Russians had left in 1989 a Lot of the Afghans who had previously supported the communist government all of a sudden shifted sides and said we now support The Mujahideen the holy warriors and they called themselves Islamists Dostom who was a big warlord in Afghanistan? He used to be a communist he was paid by the communists after the Russians had collapsed and the common and the Moscow-backed regime in 1991 collapsed. He switched sides and he called himself, you know, like a Mujahideen fighter islamic light This was this was a story of Afghanistan for the last 30 years And this is what happened in 2002 as well Once the the Taliban were defeated and they were defeated very easily and very quickly with a few number very small number of forces on The ground and overwhelming airpower most of their fighters rank and file fighters immediately surrendered by January 2002 pretty much the entire ranking file Had surrendered and the leadership of the Taliban had also surrendered if you go back and look at some of the news articles from that time You will actually see every single day There were public ceremonies in which the Taliban are going and and giving up their weapons to the new government This is sort of a performative action on their part because they were trying to show to the Afghan government Look, we're on your side. We don't we don't want you to kill us. So just leave us alone here are weapons This had happened when the Taliban had come to power themselves The people that they had displaced had done the same exact thing. So this is sort of the pattern for the last 15 or 20 years and so in 2002 the US forces were on the ground in the country without Al Qaeda because they had fled the country and without the Taliban because they had gone back to their homes and they had surrendered The problem, however, was that we were there with this idea fix, you know, this idea that the world was divided rigidly into Those who are with us and those who are against us and those sort of rigid categories couldn't be changed in any way And so when the US forces were there, they expected to find terrorists and expected to find people who would fight against them Into that environment Came a whole host of Afghan warlords and commanders whom we allied with and I detailed the case in the book of one commander His name is John Muhammad Khan and he was somebody who was a Mujahideen commander, I mean he fought against the Soviets in the 1980s Then he became the governor of a province in Central Afghanistan named Urzgan He was overthrown by the Taliban when they came to power in 1994 And so he spent five or six years plotting against the Taliban finding a way to get back at them Until he was finally arrested by the Taliban tortured very badly by the Taliban and kept in prison He was released because of the invasion and he became the governor of this province Urzgan Once he was the governor, he was driven by a number of things number one. He was driven by revenge Which I mean if any of us had gone through what he had gone through with the Taliban I think we probably would have felt the same way, you know the Taliban didn't even let him pray in jail And it's astonishing when you think about that the Taliban being this religious fundamentalist group didn't even let him pray They would beat him they would hang him from the ceiling and so on one level He was driven by his animus to get back at people whom he perceived as being Taliban So that's on one level on the second level US forces were there in Urzgan province saying listen, we know al-Qaeda and the Taliban are here and we know that they're Ready to attack us forces in US interests. So can you point us to them? We will pay you Money and we will give you contracts. We will give you whatever you want to do that so we incentivized His Targeting people who may not have necessarily been Taliban So what ended up happening in 2002 and 2003 almost and I went to Urzgan I spent many many many months in Urzgan and I was charting Who it all was who was it that was actually arrested in those years? Who was sent to Guantanamo? Who is sent to Bagram the main prison near Kabul? Who was killed and almost to a man? It was people who were not part of the Taliban or who had been part of the Taliban him I tried to switch sides and all of the intelligence was coming from John Muhammad So I'll give you a couple of examples and these are some stories that I detail in the book just to Give you a sense of how this works. So one was a baker and his name is Sharifuddin. I met Sharifuddin Because I lived across the street from his bakery in Kandahar city for a few months in 2009 and Sharifuddin was 82 when I met him. So the events that I'm describing which was 2002 He was like 76 or 75 or something and Sharifuddin was at his bakery one morning when militia men who were under the control of Gulagur Shorzai who is a provincial governor of Kandahar province Who was working very closely with US forces at the time when they showed up and they accused him of being a terrorist and He said, you know, I'm not a terrorist I don't know what you're talking about and so they arrested him They sent him to Kandahar airfield, which is the main American prison in Kandahar And there he was subjected to very bad torture including electric hooks in his mouth And then finally he was released from the US and you know what he told me when I when he was describing this and you know He went to the doctor after when he showed me medical reports about what had happened to him He said the Americans treated me like real guests Because once he was transferred from the US to the custody of this Afghan militias They took him to a secret jail, which was underneath An office building in Kandahar city and they hung him upside down and he was hung that way for 23 hours He was hung with a second man Who's a tribal elder who is from a tribe in which in the 1990s many people from that tribe had joined the Taliban So for that reason this person was also there. So there's two men they were hanging upside down for 23 hours and a couple of times a day these Afghan militia men would come and With thick cables would whip him and beat him By the way, the person who was responsible responsible for this torture is now living in the US is living in Los Angeles. He There's a Washington Post store. I don't know if you saw just the other day He's called like the torture in chief, right? He was responsible for this And he was a CIA ally for many years and now he's he's in LA It's unclear exactly how he got there, but he was the culprit for this So he was hung upside down for 23 hours a day He was whipped and beaten the man that was next to him ended up dying from his wounds And and Shafiullah he ended up Being released because he paid a massive bribe To the to the forces that had detained him so he sent home However, because he had paid the bribe that only further incentivized Torture so a few months later. He was arrested again. He was hung upside down again and he was tortured again This would happen every few months And so and you know, he used to joke with me and tell me, you know, look I used to put away money for this like, you know, like you may put away money for a car I used to put away money for this torture that would come every few months That's one story a second story is the case of Haji Burghat Khan somebody else I described in the book and he's a very important case He was a very big tribal elder from Kandahar province and he had he's from the Ishaq side tribe Which has millions of members in Kandahar, Helmand and in Pakistan as well In early 2002 he declared his support for the US government for the for the Afghan government and for the US forces Because he recognized that Taliban had done nothing for the economy and in fact the area he comes from is a poppy growing region And in the year 2000 the Taliban had banned poppy production And so the economy was it was devastated in the area So these people are very eager for the US forces to come in and ironically to allow poppy production to continue and so he He was Instrumental in getting a lot of rank-and-file Taliban fighters to go and surrender their weapons To the US and you can find the news articles about this These are very public ceremonies where there was truckloads of weapons coming to Kandahar city and you know They're being given over to the governor of Kandahar and there was reporters They are taking pictures and all in all this Nonetheless because he was the tribal elder of millions strong tribe and because He was a pretty prominent Drug smuggler of himself as were the all the tribal elders in that region The governor of Kandahar whom the US forces were working with very closely who was also a drug smuggler who was also a opium grower You know saw this guy as a threat and So from him came false intelligence of this person was a member of Al Qaeda US forces came in in May of 2002 and They killed some people they killed him and they rounded up 55 people from his village Which is essentially the entire male population of the village They brought them all to Kandahar airfield and I interviewed 47 of the 55 and the storage are unanimous that they were They accused us of torture of three people had broken ribs one person was forced on the ground and soldiers walked on their backs and and Eventually they were released and you had a situation in which this area had lost the most important tribal elder The person who was the point of access for millions of people to the government of Afghanistan and To this day if you were to go to this region Which is Western Kandahar and ask why are people fighting against the US and the African government? They will mention his name. Of course, there's many other reasons as well, but this was the starting point And I'll give a third example just to show If you if you fully buy this idea that the world comes neatly packaged into good guys and bad guys And that we need to fight who we think are the bad guys to its conclusion No matter what it can actually to absurd situations and this is the case with somebody named Abdul Rahim Al Janko Al Janko is a Syrian he grew up in an abusive home and in the UAE in Dubai and He got the idea. This is now. We're talking like 1997 1998 He got the idea that you know what if I go to Afghanistan and I declare asylum from Afghanistan then I can be I can portray myself as an as a refugee from the Taliban and People were doing this in fact right particularly Hazars from Pakistan were actually going into Afghanistan and then going to Western embassies And or going to the West and declaring themselves as refugees So he got on a plane and landed in Afghanistan in 1999 The Taliban was in control. Of course, he got out there and he was a 19-year-old kid or something immediately he got arrested and He was an Arab who was in Afghanistan and the Taliban said well, what does an Arab doing in Afghanistan? So they handed him over to al-Qaeda who had training camps in the country at the time He was handed over to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda was a very suspicious Who is Arab guy who had come into the country without our knowledge and sort of talking about asylum? And so they started interrogating and then they started torturing him they did simulated drowning the electrocuted him and Finally forced a confession out of him which is caught on videotape in which he said okay I am an agent of the CIA and Mossad and I'm sent here to kill us all the lot They got the confession and then they handed him over to the Taliban and Taliban put him in jail Fast-forward to 2001 Taliban is defeated the US forces sweep in now you have this prison in Kandahar which you have hundreds of prisoners and in particular, I think seven or eight non-Afghans, I mean mostly Arabs who are in prison and The locals didn't know what to do with them And so they went to the Americans and they said listen we have you know these seven or eight guys who are in prison What do you want to do all of them got transferred wholesale from Taliban custody into US custody? Al-Janco was then transferred to Guantanamo, and he spent a number of years in Guantanamo in 2002 or 2003 I remember the exact year John Ashcroft In a press conference released the video of Al-Janco the video of his confession at the hands of al-Qaeda, but with the audio off and He said look here. This is an example of how we're making progress on the war on terror And so even when they were even when we were wrong, we were sort of perpetuating the same mistakes I don't know and so through these types of Circumstances there became a real sort of sentiment against the Afghan government and against the US forces and everything I've described so far is About people who are not actually with the Taliban, but this is also happening Against people who are with the Taliban so I'll give one final example is a person named Mullah Ahmad Shah And he was a Taliban commander in the 1990s after 2001. He had surrendered There was again a public ceremony. We had given over his weapons and he had signed a document and Reported there and he was living at home the Afghan government Arrested him and said you have more weapons. We want we want that. Where are they? And he said I don't have any weapons so they they took him the hung upside down again. They tortured him. They beat him and They wouldn't let him go until he gave weapons And so what he did is he asked his family to go and sell all their livestock and sell part of the land To raise money to buy weapons in the black market So they bought the weapons and they handed it over to the Afghan government So he was released but of course the moment you you play their game and you say okay I'm gonna give you weapons. They're gonna keep arresting you and so that's what happened So every three months, you know, he was arrested and this procedure repeated itself until finally he fled to Pakistan He rejoined the Taliban and by this point 2004 2005 the Taliban because of these sorts of circumstances where we Constituting themselves as an insurgency by 2006. We had a full fledged insurgency on our hands Once the Taliban had reconstituted itself, you know and they were able to Talk to villagers and say look, this is what the US is doing. This is what the Afghan government are doing and it would resonate That doesn't necessarily mean that once they reconstituted themselves They didn't they actually did the same things that the US are doing. They were summarily executing people they were actually taking people and You know without trial killing them They were accusing people of being American spy there when it wasn't the case But you know once an armed group gets reconstituted once they have the weapons It's very very hard to turn that back and that's the problem That's really the tragedy of what's happened in the last few years is that now we have the Taliban on the one side Who's strong? They're not strong enough to take power, but they're very strong in large parts of the countryside You have the Afghan government and then you have civilians who are caught in between and that's the story of the third person In this book her name is Hila. She's a housewife She's from Kabul and she was born and brought up there and so she and she married somebody who was a communist at the time and so they were very Progressive and modern and they had ideas that are very different from what we may associate with Afghanistan During the civil war in the mid 1990s. Hila was forced to flee with her family to the rural province of Orozgan and Then for the next 10 or 12 years She found herself caught in between these various sides Caught between the Taliban caught between the US forces the Afghan government and trying to find a way to navigate Through that and survive and I think her story is important because it really encapsulates What the experience of so many Afghan civilians in the areas where the war is being fought actually is and and that's What I hope to communicate with this book Great. Thanks very much As I read the book what impressed me was the incredible Almost Byzantine like nature not only of the government but of the society as a whole Can you talk to me about how you went about unraveling all these various, you know alliances, you know families people that are married into your tribal ties Who's in charge? We have you know, it struck me as much more sophisticated than even those of us who were there Really fully understood at the time or maybe not sophisticated It's certainly intertwined it's very intertwined and it's a society that works very differently from the way our society works So it took me a long time to learn and I'm sure I probably still don't know it entirely You know But it is the case that when you go and you live in a village You can learn these things much more quickly than if you read it anywhere not that you shouldn't read the book but or that if you sit in in Kabul or anywhere else because you know when You have when you have to master the various tribal ties and linkages between families because it depends on your very safety You'll master it very quickly and I learned this a number of times, you know, I would be introduced to somebody in a village and I didn't know who he was and I'd have to sort of somehow garner from who else is in the room and who's talking to him, you know What size this person may be on and and the society is is this Byzantine not because of anything Untoward itself. It's because you know, it's been caught in a war for 20 35 years And the time I was doing it 30 years and and so Alliances shift often often alliances are weak because you know, you never know when the situation is going to change And so it requires mastering whole set of concepts about You know, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and that's something I try to do in the book and in my reporting As a retired military officer one of the passages I really enjoyed was your recreation of the battle of Terran cut I think you know the early battle Karzai, you know, the Americans are kind of here. I guess we're starting to bomb already Karzai comes in from Pakistan with some special forces advisors the Taliban learn that he's in country and come to get him And I think you do a very interesting job juxtaposing the two commanders on each side if you could talk about that a little bit So the battle of Terran cut to place in November 2001 and it was really sort of the last stand of the Taliban because at this point Kabul had already fallen and all that was left was the south and If you remember at the time we were allied with the Northern Alliance who are from Northern Afghanistan They don't really have the support in the south and so they couldn't march into the south of Afghanistan That's like that was a Taliban stronghold and so the US was desperately desperately looking for an ally in southern Afghanistan In order to kick out the Taliban from Kandahar city, which is their capital Hamid Karzai Who was somebody who's been plotting against the Taliban regime for a number of years? Decided to risk everything shortly after the bombing commenced get on a motorcycle with a couple of his friends and Sneak into Kabul and sneak into Afghanistan Sorry, and he decided to go to Urzgan province, which is really kind of like a random province in the central part of the country But the reason he went there is because a lot of the Taliban leadership had come from there So he he's thinking was if I can go into Urzgan and if I can spark a tribal uprising Then the Taliban will be overthrown and so that's what he did He got into Urzgan province. He ended up on a mountain. I described this in the book And he was surrounded by Taliban fighters and he called in the CIA and they sent in Special forces came in and they like picked him up and they brought him to Pakistan they went back into Urzgan province some days later with the special forces and The battle of Tirun coat is the battle of the city this capital of Urzgan province which had fallen the Taliban had lost this city And Karzai and US special forces were in this city and the Taliban were marching into the city to try to retake it and this is sort of a central battle of probably the whole war and So I had heard about this battle from Afghans because I had spent a lot of time in this area and so I was You know getting on a sort of interviews about like how did it feel like to be in this battle? And what do you think was happening? But I was sorely missing the American perspective And so I sought out Jason Amarine who was a special forces commander who was the leader of the US side of that And he was here in DC and I met him and we spoke and you know, he told me we were thinking about the The other side the Taliban like what were they thinking? Why were they coming in? Did they think they actually had a shot against the world's greatest military superpower? and At one point he told me, you know, I would love to to understand what my counterpart in the Taliban fighter was actually thinking what was he What was going through his mind as he was as they were coming in because what happens is hundreds of trucks are Driving in to Tirunco to try to retake this town from the Americans And so I thought, you know, I should see if I could find this guy The guy the Taliban fighter the commander who was actually on the other side who was leaving this charge The amazing thing about Afghanistan is that you can actually do this Because everybody's connected through networks, you know, you can find people through cousins and brothers and you know And so I spent some months and I looked around and lo and behold this guy who had led the had led the battle was Still there. He's still around. He's still fighting. He's still the Taliban And I just you know, I had to Call him a lot of favors and such and I finally got to meet the guy and You know, I had to tell him I'm not going to ask you anything about post 2002. I'm not a spy I'm not gonna ask anything. I just want to know what's something that happened 10 years ago. He's like, okay, fine And so I met him and and he started telling me his story about it Why he decided to go and retake this town and that's what's described in this book is the battle from both sides Is the battle from the side of the the US forces and the side of the the Taliban fighter An extraordinary thing the thing that I learned from all this is that The reason this guy was fighting even though I disagree with it Even though I don't think that his vision of what a good Afghanistan is, you know I don't think his vision of canis is actually a good one something we should strive to On some level, you know, he was fighting because he thought maybe it was misguided, right? But he thought that he was defending his country He he didn't he had never heard of 9-11 He you know ended the sort of propaganda that he was getting from the Taliban newspapers was that The US is just for no reason attacking Afghanistan because they wanted to convert everybody to Christianity They wanted to take all them, you know, whatever wealth there was in Afghanistan They want to take all this and you need to go there and defend your country and that's what he did You know, and so he he in dozens of other commanders like him get the gun on their trucks They drove up to this town and they tried to defend it Of course, they don't have airpower on their side and so they're defeated very easily very quickly and he Flood off to his home village and he had a crisis of conscience and he was like what am I doing with my life? Why am I in the Taliban and decided to quit the Taliban in 2000 right after this battle? And he spent three years as a farmer Mostly growing poppies because everybody in his village grows poppies He was doing that until John Muhammad Khan who was one of the characters in my book Started cracking down on poppy cultivation now. He had his own poppy fields But if you have your own poppy fields and you have the year of the US military The best thing to do is crack down on other people's poppy fields because that'll rise up don't drown out the prices That's what he did and his field that were one of the fields that are crab water were destroyed And so he went back and joined the Taliban Let's talk about a couple the criticisms of your books some some reviewers have said that You don't really address the role of Pakistan that you make this a totally internally Afghan internal problem crisis Events and that you you overlook the role, you know the shadowy figure the hand inside the glove That many people believe Pakistan can be talk to me a little bit about Your view of the role of Pakistan in the country and why it doesn't play a very prominent role in your book sure, I think Pakistan is very important in the Afghan insurgency But I think that a lot of the commentators who have been talking about Pakistan I've actually got it wrong and and what I mean by that is that there is a narrative out there about Pakistan Which is that Pakistan is sort of you know the person that's controlling the the puppet strings here And that the people in Afghanistan are fighting because pop Pakistan is telling them to fight I actually don't think that's accurate. I think that their local grievances and local problems rooted in the things that Sort of things that I've talked about which have actually set the stage For the insurgency once insurgency started getting steamed that is actually when Pakistan Shifted, you know, basically put their weight behind These various actors because if you actually look at the record in 2001 to 2003 Pakistan was on the fence. They were actually Supporting the US and a number of raids. They raided the Hukhani madrasa. Those who know Jalal and Hukhani is very Nowadays we think of Jalal and Hukhani as sort of the veritable arm of the ISI the Pakistani intelligence agency in 2002 that wasn't the case In fact, I have a piece out right now that describes this issue that you should look up in 2002 Pakistan Was conducting raids with the US military in Miram Shah of North Waziristan They had taken the control of the Hukhani madrasa away from the Hukhani family and given it to tribal elders in that area They had arrested Sirajin Hukhani who was who came who today is the leader of the Hukhani network at that time. He was in his early 20s and The reason they had done so is the same reason why they had arrested Haji Muhammad the same reason why they had arrested Mullah Zayeef if you know who he is a Mullah Hyderabad these are major Taliban figures that Pakistan had arrested in that period and had handed over to the US government And the reason is enough talk to Pakistani officers who describe this is that there was a moment in that in that period where they felt like They could there's another way in which they could influence events inside Afghanistan At that time they saw the afghan government is sort of open that They had a chance to influence things if they could convince the United States not to back the Northern Alliance to the Hilt if they can convince the United States Not to back certain political actors who are seen as being pro-Indian pro-Iran to the Hilt that they could actually Meet their objectives without having to support the Taliban by 2003 by 2004 That turned out to be not the case that in fact they saw that they can't do that And the only way they saw they can meet their strategic objectives is to back the Taliban And so the Taliban was already starting up as an insurgency at that time and so then they supported them the way they support them I think it's different from the way that it's been characterized and Some other accounts the towel Pakistan doesn't fund the Taliban or if they do we have no evidence of this There's no evidence anywhere that Pakistan funds the Taliban What Pakistan does it allow the Taliban leadership to live in Pakistan and to function and They exert the influence by by arresting certain people at certain times to sort of like push the course of the insurgency in one way or the other I didn't talk about this as much in my book because my book is really about why the war exists as it does today It's not why the war is perpetuating itself and Pakistan is definitely a Major case of why the war is perpetuating itself, but why the war actually exists. I think it's not actually about Pakistan It's about our policy and it's about African government policy inside Afghanistan Another critique of the book has been that you're maybe a little too sympathetic to the Taliban that you Softpedal some of their abuses Don't really you know don't really give full depth to you know Be evil that they're doing in the country as they you know research in 2003 to five or six talk about that if you could sure I Think that's actually not accurate I mean I have a whole chapter on the Taliban abuses in the book But I think there's a distinction to be made between the conditions in which under which the Taliban were able to reconstitute themselves Which I think we largely Play the role or play a role in and the behavior of the Taliban which is on them There's a these are two different things, you know And the real tragedy of what's happened in the last ten years is we have allowed the Taliban to reconstitute themselves All right, the Taliban don't offer a viable future for this country. They don't right But the problem is by pursuing certain policies and by by thinking about the war on terror in a certain way We've allowed these these this group which wasn't very popular Which was at the nadir of its popularity in 2001 to research and that's the story of the book This doesn't mean that I'm being soft of the Taliban It means that I'm being hard on us for allowing the Taliban to get to where they are following up on that there's a you know a popular you know trope or conception or saying in America that The reason that Afghanistan went bad in 2006 and 2000 is you know We took our eye off the ball by turning to Iraq that by late 2002 the entire US government was focused on Iraq the intelligence assets were pulled out and pushed to Iraq the Special forces of specialized in the Middle East and South Asia region were pulled out of there and focused on Iraq As I read your book it struck me that you kind of Problematized at the very least that thesis You seem to indicate that You know the counter that counterfactual really isn't true that if we had kept doing what we were doing in Afghanistan If at the very least it would have been the same or might have been even worse had we had more forces there to Do this in the wrong way talk to me about What you think about that and if you think that's an accurate characterization of what you're saying well This is actually one of those examples of where I've gone in with preconceived notions I have them overturned by actually going and talking to Afghans because I Don't think it's the case that we lost Afghanistan because you pay too much attention to Iraq We lost Afghanistan before the Iraq war even started. We lost Afghanistan in 2002 And which is during a period in which we had all of our attention on the country We lost the country. We lost the war in Afghanistan because we went in there with this idea of the war on terror of a rigidly distinct Set of categories of good guys and bad guys and that once somebody was a bad guy There was nothing they could do to come into the good guy category Which belied that the history of the last 20 or 30 years in which it was always shifting back and forth And that was a fundamental problem. And so that you know the Taliban You know and I chart this in the book of all the Taliban leadership who had tried to surrender in various places at various times and by December of 2002 After a lot of people had been killed after a lot of tribal communities had been Marginalized and after a lot of Taliban leaders had had their attempts at reconciliation rebuffed They reconvened in Karachi December of 2002 for a last ditch effort to try to figure out a way to connect with the Afghan government and again This is they didn't do this because you know They believe in the US project or the belief in the Afghan government did this because they were utterly defeated at the time they had no choice and So in in this meeting in December 2002 they took a vote and everybody was there except Molo Omar who was in hiding and Every single person who was like major, you know Military commander or cabinet member from the 90s regime was there in this meeting and and they said okay We know that the government is very hostile against us Well, let's take a vote and and let's see should we try to go to the mountains and fight Or should we try one last time to reconcile and the vote came down in the favor of one last time to try to reconcile And so they sent two emissaries to Kabul at the time But this is Kabul 2003 when everybody in the world believed that we the war was one There was no reason you only want to negotiate when you feel like you're losing. That's the problem Right in the and the everybody felt like they had one. So there was no need. There was no incentives to negotiate these Taliban These two representatives came to Kabul. They were rebuffed came back to to Afghanistan to Pakistan and Already you were seeing grounds for all the support For some sort of response to the predation of the Afghan government and to the US forces and the two sort of combined in 2003-2004 This is a story that's independent of anything to do with Iraq, you know, if we had paid more if you put more forces and more attention there I worry that we would have only had more night raids and more killings Thanks, but my last question before we we move to the audience question aside from noting You've got to be the first person who told me that, you know, the war in Afghanistan is because the Taliban or two hospitable That's that's great As you know, how much do you think this book is about bad policy and how much of this is about the fact that There's something in American culture the American that just doesn't lend itself to this I mean, I guess I'll prejudice my statement I've said a lot that you know Americans are really really good at this kind of thing except for the fact that we're Impatient overly optimistic monolinguists You know, how much how much of this is about policy and how much of this really is just about the Fundamental character of Americans, you know, we are we're a monolingual people We're that for a reason if you grew up in Kansas You can drive fun 500 miles in any direction and you can speak perfectly good English, you know, at least they get you know East Texas, but Sorry, I spent time there. It's okay So You know, how much of this is about America and its role in the world and how much of this is about policy at the 2001-2002 Well, I mean it's a really good question I think at the end of the day and I don't talk about this here But I think it's worth mentioning that it is about America that's role in the world and because that's what shapes and forms policy It's not just that we we didn't have the right knowledge You know, we were there we didn't have the right knowledge, but the question is why didn't we have the right knowledge? I mean the British and you know a hundred years ago had all sorts of knowledge about the countries that are invading Why didn't the US have the right knowledge? You we said something before about American exceptionalism. I think that plays a very powerful role in all this in the sense That there's this idea that what the US does if so facto is good And that's that's problematic in a number of levels But it's also probably because it shoots the US and it's put in the foot and as we see in Afghanistan, right? Because we ally with person X that means that person X is a good actor You see this discourse today even in Afghanistan because we're now in a debate about what the true presence is going to be in the country post 2014 and and you know if you look at the people that we've allied with and I don't mean the central government because I actually think the Central government is less important than the people in the countryside who are going to be partnering with the CIA and the special forces for coming years Their human rights record isn't any better than the Taliban's But that's not part of the conversation because there they are our guys and that's part of the problem and I think that's ultimately at the end of the day is what this is about and the sort of misperceptions and the failures of Knowledge etc. Are a consequence of those things Great. All right. At this point, we'll we'll turn to our audience Usually, you know raise hands. Please a wait on me to call for you to Identify yourself and if you have a you know relevant affiliation or experience and you want to add it that would be great and Three please make your questions brief and a question You know has a question mark on the end and usually ends in a raised voice Questions not comments commentary, etc. Ask real questions that are their guests can answer I know there's lots of experience in the room, but he didn't come to hear commentary. He's here for questions So with that where are right here in the front, please wait, please wait for the microphone Cynthia Schneider from Georgetown University. Thank you. It's really fascinating a couple of quick questions Yeah What could we have done differently that that would have been better beyond beyond you know Obviously thinking we're right and and everyone else wrong and doing that, but I'm thinking more I mean it's so ironic that we then pursued the policy of negotiating with the Taliban which Never seemed to me to be the right thing to do Would it have made a different could we could we instead have Supported civil society groups and supported youth and you know because obviously they're they're they're very strong as we've seen from From the election. I'm particularly interested in culture and media. I know we've done successful things supporting media I wonder what you think about that, but basically what? What would be your prescription based on this for doing things? Better and differently and where does the negotiating with Taliban fit into that? Well, you know the as I said before These political groups will only want to negotiate when they're beat So as willing as the Taliban was in 2001 and 2002 to negotiate I think they're a lot less willing today to negotiate There's elements of the Taliban that will negotiate because they recognize that there's no end in sight They're not going to march into Kabul and take over the country. It's not a realistic possibility But there's other groups in the Taliban who say you know what the US forces are leaving in 2014 over the majority So why don't we try and look and try to take take the country and try to revert it to things in the 1990s, right? And so but again, also, it's worth pointing out that what the US and the Afghan government are Proposing for the Taliban is not actually negotiations. It's actually surrender They're saying accept the Afghan constitution give up your weapons and then we'll let you live in peace That's just that's a surrender, right? That's not something that's not negotiation negotiations means you go to the table and two sides That's not happening, but I think it's unlikely to happen because the Taliban are stronger now They're not like in the position. They weren't 2002 What was your other question? Well, I think if the US was serious about counterterrorism it would have been serious about nation-building and There's a contradiction between the two that's been inherent in the US mission from day one What's happened is that the United States has supported warlords and strongmen and power brokers in the countryside Who've actually weakened the Afghan state as long as that's the case and the weak Afghan state ultimately is the reason why One of the reasons why we have this insurgency, right? So we should have gone in and tells the ones if we were serious about Building the Afghan state. We should have built the Afghan state We shouldn't have had a nominal state in Kabul while supporting these power brokers in the name of fighting terror That's been the problem and I think and unfortunately I think we haven't learned that lesson because that's still the problem Even after 2014 special forces in the CIA are going to stay in the country most likely and who are they going to? Who are they going to partner with they're going to partner with power brokers who are competing with the central state You know for resources and funds and and they have and that's going to contribute to the weakening of the Afghan state in the long run That's what's actually going to ferment in insurgency The glasses right behind her Hi, Sasha Kapadia. Thank you for this talk I spent the greater part of two years at the Fletcher School studying Afghanistan issues and did quite a bit of research on Disarmament demobilization and reintegration and so this is a related question I guess as as you know the DDR strategy only came about in 2003 and so if we had defeated the Taliban And granted leaders went off and found refuge across the border but there were a great many who wished to move on with their lives and give up violence and so But there was nothing for them to do there was no Alternative to to building a livelihood and so this question is you know Does DDR doesn't work? Does it work? What could have been implemented at the time that would have actually given people incentives? To give up violence and find new ways to live Did I think DDR which is the first? Disarmament program that was done by the UN and other agencies in the early years fundamentally doesn't work and the main reason why it doesn't work is because if you are supporting one set of actors who refuse to disarm and you Accept the fact that they refuse to disarm then selectively Forcing certain groups to disarm is not a viable solution And that's what actually happened from 2002 to 2005 2006 before DIAC right is that they were going and telling everybody to disarm Okay, but they were only and you know flexing their muscle for certain groups and not for other groups and you know there's a just the other day I was talking to a friend who is now the United Nations and You tell me the story about this warlord who is in southeastern Afghanistan. I write about this guy I just wrote about a piece about the Hakani Network the other day which you should look up in Tom dispatch and I talk about one of the reasons why the Hakani Network arose and is because we Not only rebuffed his attempts of reconciliation when we actually targeted him at a time when we could have won him over And the reason we did that is because we were allied with a different warlord named Pachakhan Zadran PKZ He was a major strongman in southeastern Afghanistan In 2005 he ran for Parliament and so one of the rules is running for Parliament is that you have to you know Give up your weapons, right? And so the UN had sent people to see him and they said listen We know you're running for Parliament But you have to give up your weapons because that's the law of Afghanistan You can't run for Parliament if you have all these weapons and militiamen under you And you know he said and he and as this conversation was taking place there were armed men standing around Okay, and he said well, you know, I don't have any weapons I don't know what to tell you I can go into Pakistan and buy I tell my son to go pop Pakistan to Darrell and McRail and buy weapons If you want and you know, I can hand them over you and guys like, okay, that's what you need to do do that That's fine. We just need to have you on paper saying that you don't have any weapons You know, this was how this occurred again and again The reason is because these people who we're trying to disarm are also valuable counter-terrorism partners You can't selectively disarm people and this is the problem and I think this generally is a problem with a lot of this Surrendering of the Taliban is that you know, there was a mood in the country very and you know I could I could totally sympathize with this mood Which is that you know, you have these people who are in the regime and a very brutal regime in the 1990s wanting to surrender Why should they surrender and send them to you know, send them to court There's human rights violations are committed send some of them to the Hague You know, I mean the problem though is that if you only send them to the Hague He sent them to human rights Send them to courts, but you don't send the guys that we're supporting to the courts Then it becomes a political issue Right, it doesn't be you know, just one of the Taliban told me justice selectively applied is not justice at all I do think that's that's correct in the sense that you have to send them all or you can't send them any of them And that and if you take the middle road and send the guys that we support You know sort of absolve them and some of the other guys then you're gonna create the siege for conflict and that's what happened Right here, ma'am. Wait, please wait for the mic Yes, Robin Raefel from the State Department This is a related question A lot of people now say that if at the original bond conference They would have included more Pashtuns and Taliban who were willing to come to the table and Participate in a discussion about the future of Afghanistan that a lot of this could have been avoided What do you think about that proposition? I think would have been the right move to include Everybody in the bond conference Every section of society including the Taliban Hikmati are You know the civil society right not that I necessarily think that not that I would want the Taliban's proposals to win the day Of course, but in terms of what had come afterwards. I think that we should have included everybody not just in the bond conference I mean that was the first step. Okay, but you know, okay, so perhaps that was the mood at the time This is about conferences of December 2001 So, you know, there was moving to triumphalism and the Talmud are defeated But we had many opportunities after that as well to do that and and we did not and that that's Great another question here. Yes, ma'am No way Hi Tatiana Maxwell. I wonder if you could spend a little time elaborating on the question of hospitality being You know how we got in this mess in the first place because I think that you are not the first person I've heard To put that idea forward, but also I think with regard to that If maybe you could spend a little bit of time talking about the elemental differences you see between the pre 2001 Taliban and the reconstituted Taliban Yeah, I was only has only half serious when I was saying that the Hospitality is the reason I actually think that I spent a lot of time thinking about this in the question Why did Mila Omar throw the country away for this one guy? Especially when you when you get into some of the and you've talked a lot of the Talmud leaders and you get into a lot of them Publishing memoirs by the way now of that period and and there was a lot of hostility towards bin Laden among the Taliban leadership, you know, and Mila Omar himself famously said that Some bin Laden was like a chicken bone, you know caught in my throat. I could nearly neither swallow him or spit him out And I think it actually I talk about us in the book I think it actually has less to do with hospitality and it has more to do with questions of legitimacy because the Taliban were really sort of Uneducated uncultured clerics that there were people who there are Parvenues, you know, they were there people who had not they were not You know not in Iraq where there's people who are like ayatollahs that are, you know, very important This is not the case. These are very like simple people and You know what you see again and again in the discourse and in the writings and interviews of the original Taliban is that they were very Cognizant of the fact that they had taken over a country that had just been a civil war in which by the way like Every norm of society had been broken down. You can just imagine like people are raping each other on the street You know every time you went to get like groceries you risked being pulling out If you had children they can be taken out and raped right in front of you you can be killed I mean this is this the level of the breakdown we're talking about and so a lot of these guys are saying You know what? We need to boil things out to the bare essentials But they are very simple students. They were not what we call in the region Malawi's they were not like educated clerics They were just religious students many of them hadn't even completed their education and Somalia Omar displayed throughout the course of his reign a very acute Sense of the fact that he was not The truth he was not a religious leader in the in the traditional mold He was somebody who was under qualified and so what ended up happening is that every step of the way in which Something could have gone in two directions something kind of gone in the sort of like more sane way or like blung of the Buddha's way You know he went in that direction to try to shore up his Islamic credentials Obviously that backfired on them, but I think that's actually at the core of why They were supporting the lot and there's a great book called delivering Osama by one of the Taliban insiders I don't know how much if it's true. Okay, because it was written in 2006 But he paints a compelling picture of the fact there was a consistent block within the Taliban who recognized strategically that holding bin Laden in the country is Going to bring ruin upon their own movement and so they had done many things to try to avert that but Mila Amaro is always balancing these two sides bouncing on that side versus balancing the clerics in the country and His imagined umma who he thought would actually be upset that he was handing over a Muslim to a non-Muslim country I think that's more important than the just a question of Pashtun Wali and hospitality pre pre 9-11 and reconstituted Taliban Right, you know because of the breakdown in the 90s the the Taliban had a heavy emphasis on What they would turn and I think you know like Tala al-Assad the social theorists would call like virtuous practice in the sense of like Doing certain Activities that were that were good in and of themselves in terms of they were worried about like, you know How you care a beard? How you know how big is Turban, you know music etc etc? If you look at the post-2001 Taliban, they're much more diverse and they're coming they're responding to a different set of Circumstances not responding necessarily to the breakdown society. So the the imperative is not to boil things down to the Islamic Essentials the imperative is Nationalism or what they think of as nationalism or defending the territory So if you look at a lot of the Taliban ideology a lot of Taliban propaganda It's about defending their country against invaders. Of course, they're still an Islamist But you do see circumstances across the board There's a great documentary that Al Jazeera just put out where a reporter went and embedded with the Taliban in Logar province Where you know the guys have none of them have beards They're very different from the pre 2001 version. They're still oppressive. They're still, you know, there's still a lot of group that we want in power But they are different in that respect Okay In the very back Thanks Can you hear me? Thanks. It was a great book. I read the book Kevin Pettit from George Washington University I have some time in Afghanistan As a matter of fact, I have some time with Doug Alvin Afghanistan and I think we were there in the same time Although if you had a beard and you were riding a motorcycle, I'm just glad you didn't shoot me, right? Because that's what I thought that's what I didn't shoot me either Interestingly that You know, I one of the reasons we went there is is we wanted to Encourage and incentivize defection and we tried to do that in the same way that we did that in Iraq and and it sounds from the book that That that there was that impetus. I mean certainly there was that feeling but somehow we never got, you know, we never Organized to do that. Can you can you talk about that? Sorry, which were affection? Defection defection you want to encourage right clearly there was defections from Al Qaeda There was defections from the Taliban. There's defections, you know, very rational actor there And in Afghanistan, and so, you know, obviously we're trying to Create a nice soft landing for all those folks and it never happened I think I won't talk about Iraq. I mean Doug's an expert in Iraq So you can ask him about that but about Afghanistan You know the question of defection is interesting because and again I refer to you to this piece about Jalal and Hakkani Hakkani's were for a period of time the biggest foe the biggest enemy of the United States probably in the world Jalal and Hakkani Had been a US ally in the 1980s and in 2001 when the US invaded they remembered that and they Reached out to Hakkani to see if he could defect and the terms of the deal were at the time that He would You know denounce the Taliban and he would submit himself to the United States and you know Don a orange jumpsuit and be in prison for a couple of months at three months or six months and then he'd be released and be free to live right and You have to look at that from the point of view of some from from an Afghan point of view particularly from somebody who like Hakkani who's a very highly respected Essentially, he's a tribal man. You know, he's very highly respected person in his area and to You know don a orange jumpsuit go into jail and be there for three months and then be released It's very humiliating and and so he didn't Concede to that, you know, those were the terms of defection at that time There were some people who did ultimately even though they didn't realize that's what they're doing Well, I'm what Matawakil for example the foreign foreign minister had done that right There are people who did do that but for the most part most people this is this ran against Afghan culture This is something very humiliating and embarrassing They didn't want to subject themselves to I mean Hakkani and these people wanted to be dealt with as Conventure it with their stature, which is that, you know, we'll come to a deal You'll give me part of one apactia, which is the area that he had controlled previously And you know, we'll call it you'll call it even that was what he wanted We we come in with a very punitive idea of what defection meant, you know We that there's a case which is just gone my book of mullah over a doula who is a defense minister of the town of them He had surrendered in January 6th of 2002 Him the head of the religious police Molotowabi who he's the guy who was like telling people to go with people they had all surrendered They'd all had a public ceremony where they went to the governor of Kandahar and said we Submit to you. We cure our weapons here are people. This is where we live come and check in Check in on us every month. Just leave us alone. Don't kill us. No sense to you know, Guantanamo or whatever and That's what happened for and so the deal was inked and so they went to their homes and Romsfeld heard about this a couple of days later because it hit the press and you can read about this and He said how dare you let these people live at home? They need to go and they need to be arrested and they need to be you know process etc That's what defection meant at the time and that that was part of the problem Anyway, he by the way fled to Pakistan and rejoined the Taliban and he became one of the leaders of the insurgency for six years We had another question the back of you right here John Mueller from Ohio State and from Cato. I would like to go back to the first question I came in a bit late many of you already covered this but the When the question is what could we have done differently? You make a very good case for the point of what we did is a Spectacular failure, but you come up this idea basically you should have built a stronger government and then sort of expanded it out Which by a country that can't basically get the bushing to DC schools to work? So the question is in the correct answers what we should done differently is just simply not go in the first place Well, you know the mom used to say that if you can't say something nice and say it all I think it's something similar to here if you can't they made a country and You know helping it then you shouldn't have it at all Well that that's done No, but you care to expand on that a little bit. Well, I mean I'm skeptical that we could actually that we could actually Implement all the things that I'm saying that we should do because there's so many levers to pull in DC I mean I'll give you an example One of the fundamental problems of Afghanistan moving forward is the fact that the national government cannot actually accrue its own revenue It is a government that can't actually tax its own people. It's utterly reliant on a foreign power for its very existence okay, this is problematic and Profoundly problematic on many levels one least of which means that we will be funding the Afghan government in perpetuity There's no plan in place to Allow the government to be sustainable, right? I Think what would actually need to happen is we'd have to think about what would it take for the Afghan government to actually Get to that stage where it could actually accrue its own revenue and we have to look at history What happened in the majority of post-19th World War two, right? There's other countries perhaps not as dysfunctional Afghanistan, but there are other countries that are emerging for colonialism We're emerging from all sorts of situations One of the things they did was that they allowed the state to become or they enabled the state to become very very strong through nationalization of the industries through You know having the state be the main sort of source of political and economic capital In the country and so this means a paradigm shift away from our idea of thinking of a privatizing everything of having contracts Let let the Afghan state be the main employer of Afghan people let the Afghan state actually be the most important Political and economic institution in the country then you'll see like how the country will change You know people will shift because out of choice Even if they were sporting Thomas shipped out of necessity because you have to deal with the Afghan state if you want to make a living If you want to live in the society, right? I'm skeptical of that kind of thing nationalizing, you know all industries in Afghanistan and you know Putting all money into the central state cutting off all funding for these various actors outside the state, you know Do you know de-emphasizing the periphery for the center that runs counter to everything we've done in the last 13 years But also runs counter to the ethos of the world the last 20 years, I think so I think it's unlike it happened I think that's what should happen. I think that's the best shot at working I mean who I don't know if anything's gonna work, but I think you know I think what needs at the end goal needs to be a strong Afghan state It means you'd be an Afghan state that can stand on its own without the US propping it up That's the first it's a necessary but not sufficient condition to like, you know Afghan Switzerland or whatever right that needs to happen and so we need to think seriously about what we need to do to make that happen and Continuing to fund warlords and commanders and you know having two parallel systems of the CIA and the special forces having These power brokers in the countryside and having a weak state in the center With no end to sight. I don't think that's an answer Up front. Hi, my name is Ali agree, but I'm with the nation Institute So this book is I Mean, I know that you Wrote this book because you saw that there was a space that need to be filled that told the story of this war from Afghan eyes and from people, you know With a few notable exceptions and then some books about kind of biographies of major figures and so on there hasn't been much narrative or long-form journalism About actual the lives of actual sort of you know, I Hesitate to say ordinary Afghans, but let's say not, you know major major national figures that you would be reading about on a regular basis in our newspapers here and I know that you Well, yeah, I know that you set out to write this book in that way Mostly because you've told me about it as you're writing the book But if you can just talk about You know, you I don't want you to like Name names and shame your past editors and colleagues and country there But just talk about the media environment and the way the war was covered I know we've talked about how it was this and you alluded it today to it today about how it was covered mostly from Kabul and it was tough for expats to get out and never not everybody had the advantage of kind of the olive skin and the Ability to grow a killer hipster beard like you and so just talk about the media environment in the US and how it looked at the war and What some of those struggles have been and that that breach you attempted to fill with this book? well, I think there's two There's two challenges that they have press corps face when they're covering Afghanistan one one of which is that So much of the country particularly the most interesting areas for us, which is where the war is being fought is not accessible This is the Taliban's fault because they have this propensity kidnapped people who come into the areas So that this is the broad sort of structuring factor, which keeps a lot of Afghan journals Sorry, foreign journals in Kabul The second issue which I alluded to before is also I think a structure in the factor is that most people who are there are there because they're with major institutions and bureaus and So there's no not a real impetus to speak the language And I think that makes a huge difference, you know if I had shown up in 2007-2008 and I had I could afford a hundred fifty dollars a day for trailer or fixer I probably would have done so as well, and I would have never learned language And I would have missed out in a whole set of experiences that I actually got you know And so I don't think that's actually the fault of the journals were there With that being said, I think there is an unfortunate tendency amongst journalists, and I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself Which is to to be too Critic too uncritical of official sources because and not recognizing that official sources also have a dog in this fight, of course right And you see this all the time when you know people are reporting from Kabul and there's some story about 22 Taliban killed in some village somewhere And we have no idea and I learned this like the hard way first-hand is I have a very good friend of mine named Subar Alal and Subar Alal I had met him when I first landed in Afghanistan in 2008 because I was in a bus station and you know practicing my very terrible Farsi Dari at the time and he he walked up to me and he said what are you from what are you doing and And I explained to him I said I'm a journalist from the United States And he told me how his dream was to visit the United States and how like he loved the American culture And he had he had like you know, he was reading he had watched the Hollywood movies He was a big fan of American movies What he didn't tell me the time is he had spent like four years in Guantanamo That came out later. I learned later, but the reason why he had gone to Guantanamo is because His commander I was and I talked about him a little bit in the book his name is Rahula Wakil. He was a major Tribal elder in the Quarangal Valley Quarangal Valley was for many years the most dangerous Part of Afghanistan probably for a time the most dangerous area in the world for Americans The movie called Restrepo if you ever see that it's about the Quarangal Valley and this tribal elder Wakil was for many years a member of the Northern Alliance, which you remember with the guys that we were supporting in the 1990s and What happened was after we invaded in 2001 we had a group that have gone to the Quarangal Valley or to that area and Set up a base and you know when you think about what it means to set up a base You get there you actually need to get the gravel on the ground. You need to get the Heskos up Right you need to get some kind of structure it up. So how do you do that? Well the modern paradigm of doing it used to be that the military would do it themselves But the modern paradigm is you you outsource that And so they've gone there and they tended to contracts to local Afghans saying, you know Whoever can build this stuff, you know, we'll give you money to do it But it wasn't just any afghans. It's not like there was a internet or something You just put up in the middle of Quarangal to say rather You know, they connected with people who were able to come to them quickly, right? And so there's two groups One was Wakil who was related to my friend and one was another arrival group Both of them were vying for contracts But the arrival group had a son who spoke English so they got the contracts and he was worried about Wakil and my friend Subramanla and so he said those guys are Al-Qaeda. So both of them got sent to Guantanamo That's how they ended up in Guantanamo So anyway, I had befriended him and we had spent a lot of time together He'd taken me up to Kunar province up to Quarangal He'd taken me to Nangarhar to all these parts of he took me into Pakistan We had a lot of great times together and then one day I read in the news that he was killed he's killed in a night raid in 2011 and I read it in the New York Times Not the New York Times I mean New York Times done great reporting But sometimes like like I said, even I'm susceptible to this but this This tendency to accept official sources I think is really pernicious and is an example because I read it in the New York Times And it said an Al-Qaeda fighter had been killed in Nangarhar province on this day And I just read it like you know you read these reports all the time and then all of a sudden it got to the name It says Subramanla and my heart dropped because it can't be the same So I called the family and I couldn't get I couldn't get a hold of them And so I actually got up and went to to Jalalabad, which is near where he lived Which is like a four-hour drive from Kabul and I got there I went to his house and I saw the people in a morning ceremony for him And it turned out that some kind of I suppose, you know, I can't believe this person is Al-Qaeda I mean like how could he be friendly with me and we'd hang out all the time me, you know And all of a sudden they were accusing him of Al-Qaeda I suspect it was part and parcel of the same rivalries that had continued earlier that had ended that had sent him to Guantanamo But if you look if you google his name if you look at his name in the New York Times or anywhere else in Lexus, Texas You won't find any of these mentions. You'll find it says this guy was an Al-Qaeda fighter Or he just suspected Al-Qaeda fighter There's no other side to defend him because you know his family are illiterate They're not people who could go and talk to who can contact journalists and tell his side of the story And that's entered into the record If any of the my colleagues had gone there To job out they could have talked at least they could have brought another side to it And maybe they wouldn't have been in a position to judicate between the two sides, but they said okay There is another side to this But the overall lines and official sources I think is really here for them Okay, one more question Hugh Gustafson, I'm an anthropologist at George Mason University I'm curious to know whether in the State Department the military the CIA There were any people who understood the mistakes of interpretation the US government was making in real time or was the US National Security State? uniformly misreading the situation In real time, I think most people are misreading the situation now. I haven't talked to everybody So I don't know I don't know better than this but like in retrospect I know that people had after the book has been released people will come to me inside actually You know, I thought this or I thought that you know There's a lot of people I spoke to who said they suspected as such During the time, you know, it was 2002 was a difficult time and you think about the zeitgeist in this country It was retribution. It was you know, the world is it comes neatly packaged into two camps And we need to prosecute a war based on that idea I Would this is some a question that I would actually like to fight understand better myself And hopefully I can meet more people through the course of this book who can much Put some light on this because I don't know but from my perspective it seems that it was more of a uniform idea I don't know I can't talk about the early days. We can have a comment there in later years. There were certainly some internal debates I can't speak to the you know early years in Afghanistan. I wasn't there With that I'm going to uptake Moderator privilege asked the last question actually want to follow up on your I'm assuming friends question here on on the state of journalism You know when I talked to other people who were in Afghanistan the same time you were words like crazy nuts suicidal Come up frequently You know, perhaps this is just you know jealousy from Kabul But on the other hand, you know riding around, you know with a beard on a motorcycle and Urus gone Since you're sitting here, I'm assuming you didn't do that in the Tangi Valley Despite reporting on that but Okay, yeah, don't don't try it at home. Yeah, so I'm shocked that you're like still here to tell this story How How does a journalist go about getting these stories in places that are dangerous? I mean, I'm assuming you would not counsel a you know, nephew or young cousin of yours to go do this That you know, you know his you know his mother or whoever that might be would have a serious difficulties with you Were you to advise that? So, how do you suggest the journalists go about covering this in in these war zones in places where access is difficult? You know and how much at risk is an incumbent for a journalist to take to get this story, right? Well, I think a large dose of it in my experience in my history was stupidity because If I had known what I know now, I probably wouldn't have done a lot of the things that I did Yeah, but it wasn't the smartest doing you know, you shouldn't try to do that, you know, I landed in the country 2008 I knew nothing about the place and So, you know, and I didn't know anybody I didn't know other foreign journalists So I got the motorcycle had an African friend. He said let's go and we went You know, it's it was it's not about as well. I don't do that now I live with the Taliban for like three weeks to like report on them in 2008 I would never do that now. I think the conflict has actually changed quite a bit since then it's become much more Disarticulated since then, you know back back in 2008 when I went with the Taliban at that time in the Tangi in fact I Had a letter from at the time the person who was a leader of the Taliban saying this guy's journalist Let him go, you know, don't kidnap him. What's that? Whatever. So I had this letter portrayed everywhere or showed everywhere I went and and so I was fine today that letter wouldn't get me anywhere because the Taliban are so Fragmented they're so divided that you know, fine. I can show that letter to one guy, but another guy might kidnap me but generally speaking I think speaking, you know learning the language and Taking time to get to know Afghans or wherever the country may be Can yield enormous dividends as I found, you know I used to have once a week in my place in Kabul used to invite trouble others from various places and Feed them lunch, which is a very Afghan thing to do is you know, it's like a few people lunch and have everybody sit around just talk and You see what comes out of it. No, I wasn't even interviewing them at the time We were just hanging out as such and they would tell stories and I'd find interesting things and think You know that sort of approach. I think you will be surprised what you can get you see be surprised where you can go Safely perhaps not as safely as I had actually been in 2008, but you could still go a lot of places that you couldn't have otherwise Great, but you picked up Dari. Did you learn Pashtun as well? Conversational posture, but I prefer to do interviews in Dari. Okay. Yeah, great Once again on behalf of Emery Slaughter and Peter Bergen We want to thank Anand Gopal for coming once again The book is no good men among the living if you're here physically there are copies outside that I'm sure he will Be happy to sign once you purchase them if you're at home We recommend the buy now button from your favorite electronic bookseller. Thanks very much. Thank you