 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to New America. I'm Peter Bergen. I run the international security program here. It's a great pleasure to introduce Steve Cole, who of course was the former CEO and president of New America, and is now the dean at the Columbia Journalism School. Steve is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Ghost Wars, and I suspect he may be a third for this book. We're very lucky to have him here at the beginning of his book tour, and Steve is going to make some opening observations about the big themes and stories in the book for about 20 minutes, and then we'll open it up to a discussion for you, and also Steve will sign books afterwards, but he has to leave here at 5.10 so to get the train. So thank you. Great. Well, this feels like a formal setting with a very informal group, like a lot of friends and people I know very well, Andrew and Robin and so many Mark and so many others. I want to embarrass one person. If those of you who have books open to the author's note and take note of the first name there, Christina Setkowski, who is sitting there in the third row. If you put your hand up, please. So she was at New America when I guess we sort of, I was starting down this road. I don't think I'd signed the book up, but she started helping me and then became a researcher, a full-time researcher on the project for at least a couple of years and based out of Washington. It just did so much amazing work that is in the pages there, especially that chapter outside of Kandahar, Lives and Limbs Couldn't Have Happened Without Her, so I'm so glad she was here. I just want to celebrate her work. So yeah, it's, you know, there's a kind of plusage about this subject for a lot of us. I was thinking about it in reference to New America because I came to New America in 2007 and I was at the New Yorker and I was sort of working for myself and I wasn't sure I wanted another position like this and they were looking for somebody and they weren't sure that I was the person they wanted. So we said, well, let's have a seminar and I'll give a little talk. You'll see what I'm like and I'll get a feel for who you are. And my subject was ISI's role in the Afghan War. We sat around in some other building up on Connecticut Avenue and talked about it. So this book is, you know, the product of a really ten years of work and it starts, those of you who haven't cracked it open yet, you know, it starts with Ghost Wars which ends essentially with the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on the eve of the September 11 attacks. It sort of starts there, right there, kind of replays that event and then moves to September 11th and then follows the story of American policy making and struggles in the war as well as Pakistani decision making and perspectives about the world, about the war as well as Afghan perspectives and decision making pretty much through the present day, the epilogue it set in 2016. It's a long book and I can't possibly summarize it in 20 minutes but what I thought I would do is just give you a taste of some of the themes that recur and some of the episodes that sort of give kind of flavor to these themes across this long and very complicated history. So Directorate S refers, of course, to the covert action arm of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. It's a form that the U.S. sometimes uses in its cables to describe the covert action wing in Pakistan itself and not as S-wing or just S and of course these sorts of units change their appellations for various reasons at various times but this was not this organization and this aspect of ISI was certainly no mystery to the United States after 2001 because the CIA had collaborated with ISI during the 1980s in a covert action to challenge and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. It was sort of a three-way partnership with ISI on the front lines providing the training and the weapons and the contacts and the money to Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas, the CIA providing technology, sophisticated weapons, supply lines, logistics and funding and then Saudi Arabia doubling the U.S. funding so that was kind of the structure of the history that the United States had with S-wing and so when the Taliban insurgency started to revive it was sort of remarkable that the United States was as slow as it was to recognize what was happening but of course this was a time around 2006 when the United States was very heavily bogged down in the Iraq war and distracted by the deterioration of that war. During the 1980s during the original collaboration ISI grew into the state within the state that it notoriously is today and it's I think important to recognize that it's commanded by the top army general in Pakistan. It's not a rogue organization. It is an instrument of the military services in Pakistan and the army of course has held power directly or indirectly for much of Pakistan's existence. So one thing that really unfolds in this history after the fall of the Islamic emirate and the return of the Taliban gradually in 2004, 2005, 2006 is a theme that continues right through the end of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration really a question which is why was the United States and NATO willing to accept or tolerate ISI support for the Taliban even when that accommodation and passivity about the Taliban sanctuaries and Karachi and elsewhere undermined U.S. interests and eventually started to cost American lives. There was certainly a view as reflected by CIA leader named Chris Woods who was a station chief and Kabul a few times and a lot of Congress people went in to visit him when they visited Kabul and there's sort of an account of his briefing that he would give around 2011 and his line was fairly stark. It said we either address the sanctuary the Taliban enjoys in Pakistan and we win the war or we don't and we lose the war. It's that simple. Now you might argue about whether it's that simple but that was the kind of debate that was recurring in these strategy reviews year after year. Despite the centrality of this argument and this analytical problem of how do you defeat an insurgency that has such a deep sanctuary not to mention some self-financing capacity. Despite the centrality of this neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration could find the will or the means to change the equation. So why did we fail to achieve our goals and why are we still in Afghanistan. So I want to just kind of pick out four themes that recur in the narrative and maybe give you a flavor of some of the episodes. One is the problem of our war aims at various stages of the war. The second is the failure of our relationship with Hamid Karzai and the fragility of our investments in democratic Afghan politics more broadly. Third is the illusions that built up in our counter insurgency war in Afghanistan. And finally the failure of political and diplomatic strategy to sort of compliment all of the investments in military strategy. So I'm just going to do this really quickly so we can have more of a discussion based on your questions. War aims. Okay so toward the end of this project one of the sources that I was fortunate to be able to rely on said I think it was during the fact checking said something like you know one thing I'm really glad about is that we probably won't get the Pentagon papers about this war for a long time but this is probably the closest thing we're going to have as to exactly how all these decisions got made and got missed you know at least for a while. And I hope there's some value about the comprehensiveness and the kind of sequencing of this. I felt aware as I was writing you know as a narrative writer you don't like repetition but a lot of the failures were so repetitious that I had to kind of keep coloring up the atmosphere to make it feel like it was still moving forward even though it sometimes felt circular. So you'll see in the narrative that the Bush administration, the Obama administration carried out more than half a dozen secret or classified interagency reviews of why they're fighting in Afghanistan and how to achieve their goals, how to define their goals. And one thing that happens in the book is that almost all these reviews happen in the same fourth floor conference room at the Eisenhower executive office building. They keep coming back you know the intelligence community comes over in the morning keeps briefing the white papers about you know here's what the order battle looks like here's what the demography looks like. Here's our analysis of the politics on both sides of the border. You know here are pathways to negotiation. Here's what the military equation looks like. The CIA would produce these colorful maps that were a big hit in the in the community the so-called district assessments. They were updated every six months and they color-coded each of the approximately 400 administrative districts in Afghanistan as to whether they were under government control, Taliban control, independent control or contested. And they're very colorful. Everyone loves maps but especially colorful maps that move around and so every six months they bring them back and roughly between 2007 and 2014 the proportions of control really didn't change despite the presence at the peak during the Obama years of 150,000 international combat troops trying to roll the Taliban back. Part of the problem was in this area of war aims was exemplified by what happened in 2009 during the Obama administration's pair of reviews one in the spring and then again in the fall which is the fundamental question when you're sending young American men and women into harm's way what are the vital interests in Afghanistan that justify our escalation there our fighting commitment there. And the reviews identified too one was al-Qaeda international al-Qaeda which was still very active out of the at that time reaching across oceans carrying out attacks in different places. The second one was less publicly announced typically because it's sensitive was the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons more than a hundred nuclear weapons in a country with dozens of militant groups. But neither of those problems in 2009 was actually in Afghanistan. They were both in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda had migrated to Pakistan to the tribal areas but also to the cities and hooked up with local groups and were in the midst of the worst terrorism inside Pakistan that the country had ever known destabilizing it which of course raised intensified concerns about the security of their nuclear weapons in the midst of a insurgency that was so intense. You remember that spring of 2009 when the Pakistani Taliban rolled out a swat to Buna'ir. People were worried they were going to march into Islamabad. Tens of thousands of Pakistanis died in that period of time between 2007 and 2014. Really only last couple of years has it returned to a level of 500 civilian deaths a year which is still high compared to where Pakistan was before 2001. This same dilemma was surfaced in the last Bush administration strategy review. Last month of 2008 president receives as he's going out of office a 40 page classified review about strategy in the war and President Bush notices that what's being recommended is an increase of U.S. investments in Afghanistan on the basis of analysis that locates almost all of the vital problems in Pakistan. He says at this meeting, can't we do more in Pakistan? The CIA at this point is leading the drone campaign. The strikes have been stepped up in that summer of 2008. President says, well, yeah, but you're telling me that the Taliban's leadership, the real sanctuaries are in Quetta, maybe in Karachi. Can't we go in there? Michael Hayden who's running the CIA points out he says sir, buildings blowing up in the midst of one of Pakistan's major cities is a lot different than an isolated mud hut getting struck out in the mountains somewhere. The point is they were stalemated. They were constrained by Pakistan's own instability even as they surged into the country next door. I think for President Obama you know he could not figure out how to resource the war against the Taliban enough to win it or on the other hand to define his war aims narrowly enough to focus only on al-Qaeda so that the Taliban problem could be avoided all together. The White House really didn't want to fight a war against the Taliban but the Pentagon in for the most part was more interested in such a campaign to stabilize Afghanistan and support the constitutional government. There's a scene in the in the book from one of I think the late Obama 2009 review in the situation room where they get into an argument about whether the United States has ever really pledged defeat the Taliban in the past because the original formulation was we will attack al-Qaeda and its affiliates and they got into all these arguments about whether the Afghan Taliban was really an affiliate of al-Qaeda after 2001 and so there was a sort of sense of well we haven't ever really said that we're going to fight the Taliban to the end of time and the Pentagon got so spun up about these claims that they they went back and the next day they came in with a powerpoint deck and they put up like all the statements by American presidents and political leaders basically saying we're going to defeat the Taliban. They say you may not like it but we have said that this is what we're going to do but in the end even Bob Gates you know hold over from the Bush administration someone with a fair amount of professional experience in about the Afghan war you know he's they all knew that the goal of defeating the Taliban on the timelines and with the and at acceptable cost was infausible and Gates said you know the Taliban are part of Afghanistan and so they ended up coming out of that review with war aims that were you know to degrade the Taliban or to reverse its momentum you know this very subjective and loose language you know as an editor you would say I'm sorry can you be more specific and this was language that was sending American men and women to war so now you can say there was something more coherent than that we were going to hand off the war to the Afghan forces and that this kind of vagueness in the interim phase was just a kind of time building exercise but it wasn't really very clear to the American to the American people I don't think it's one other thing I'll mention and then maybe we can do the rest with your questions the relationship with Hamid Karzai he's a big figure in the book and the deterioration of his trust in the United States and his relationship with the United States is a is one of the you know seven or eight stories that kind of recur in the narrative you know I think sort of a beat reporter like Peter in the sense I was doing magazine stories I was out there pretty regularly after 2005 or so I interviewed him a couple of times I felt like I understand I understood where he was coming from but when I went back for this research and tried to go down a layer get as many records and and you know well sourced accounts of private discussions with him as I could at different stages of the of the conflict in the history I was really struck by something I did not understand when I was out there at the time which is that basically every time an American came in to meet with him he said why aren't you doing more to pressure ISI why aren't you doing more across the border with Pakistan that's where the where the war is located now of course this was an evasion a way to evade accountability for his own problems of governance and his own his own cabinet's performance and and a lot of other ways that you could describe it as an evasion but he was absolutely clear and convinced and consistent across many many years that that this was the number one priority for his relationship with the United States and he took it for granted that the U.S. of the world supreme superpower you know could force ISI to stop aiding the Taliban if it really wanted to and since the U.S. didn't do this since we didn't take decisive action that he could see eventually he came to the conclusion had to be some other explanation and he sunk into conspiracy thinking he said you know well you must want ISI to destabilize Afghanistan so that you can justify keeping military bases here for you know for an indefinite time and of course the Americans tried to persuade him that he was wrong but you know when Obama sent Joe Biden out to meet with him you know he said Karzai he told Karzai you have to do your bit you have to address address corruption and the drug trade and Karzai says well Mr Vice President well you should do more about Pakistan you should do more about the sanctuaries and and Biden answers you know Mr President Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States and the next day Karzai is with his aides and that's when he starts with this you know the U.S. can just leave what they're talking about is unacceptable I'll declare jihad and go to the mountains this is the kind of loose talk of I'll bring the Taliban back he became so convinced that the U.S. was engaged in a complicit conspiracy with Pakistan to either influence or destabilize Afghanistan in order to have a long-term presence in Central Asia that it got in the way of almost every other negotiation that the U.S. attempted with him right down to the to the end with the you know the kind of strategic partnership there's this during this period Karzai goes for a walk in the Ard Palace gardens with one of his ministers he says to this minister you know if we can't run the government we should bring the Taliban back to punish both the Americans and the panchiris Karzai's young son Mirwise happens to be with them the minister asks him do you want this boy to grow up under a Taliban regime I don't want that for my son the minister goes on you know Mr President I believe the United States was not fair to you they first they called you an Afghan Mandela Mandela now they call you an Afghan Mugabe that's not fair but we should take some responsibility too for the things that have gone wrong and then he went on you know if the Kabul government collapses the U.S. will not be threatened but we will be wiped out and that was the reality that kept Karzai on side increasingly bitter increasingly resentful that he was unable to influence the United States in the way it fought its war that he was unable to change the equation that he saw across the border in Pakistan James Dobbins who many of you will know has been here before was a late special envoy in 2013 when the things got so frustrating and this this kind of recurring position that that Karzai took was getting in the way of a bunch of things so he goes out to visit with Karzai at the arg and he says to him you know Mr President by now you have the snowed materials you have millions and millions of wiki leaks cables to look through can you see in all of these documents even the trace of evidence for this conspiracy that you're crediting Karzai paused and looks at him says maybe you don't know about the plan he says there's a deep state in America as I understand it so anyway I'll just finish with you know one last contradiction about political strategy which is such a broad subject and reconciliation lots of other things we can talk about when we turn to your questions but you know one of the repetitions that was I think evident to any of us who are out there as kind of beat reporters but then becomes more explicit in trying to excavate this this story and put it together in one place is that at every phase of the escalation really from 2007 until 2012 2013 when there are debates about the extent to which military action or troop increases should be resourced versus political strategy regional negotiations direct negotiations with the Taliban at every stage of this debate and it recurs again and again the the generals who rotate out to command this you know to command the NATO effort ISAF they all say quite explicitly in public you know there is no purely military solution to this war against the Taliban ultimately this war is going to have to end politically and yet and I think it was you know David Petraeus who said you can't capture and kill your way out of an industrial strength insurgency but despite this acknowledgement again and again it is military action that is prioritized it is military action that is resourced and it is political action that is trailing you know you have election efforts that do get some attention though not successfully not they don't produce successful results but overall there was a huge contradiction between the acknowledgement that this kind of war requires extraordinarily active and persistent political approach and the actual facts on the ground which you know even today prioritize military action expecting a different result from this stalemate that we that we have you know it is I'm afraid at the end of it all we're doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result so thank you for listening about Karzai was was there an inflection point where he the 2009 election the Holbrooks maneuvering around you know to kind of sideline Karzai was that a big inflection point for him to turn against the United States yes I mean I think he was drifting in 2008 in the last year of the Bush administration he was disturbed by civilian casualties he was disturbed by the special forces raids he kept complaining about these things but you know President President Bush did achieve a very successful relationship with Hamid Karzai you know he he kept him on side had him on the conference and Karzai was very loyal to Bush and reluctant to break with him fully and it it's sort of dispiriting having been present at the time that this happened and you know sympathetic to as many people as I could be in working this forward you know there's this habit that we have that I think you know it's evident today in reverse this way which is maybe it's because our politics is just so polarized or maybe it's always been this way but when the new administration comes in they come with this very powerful instinct that everything the old administration did was wrong and needs to be fixed because they've spent the whole campaign saying this I guess rhetorically and so it's necessary to to kind of believe it and internalize it and in this case one of the things that the Obama administration came in you'll see lots of scenes in the book you were present at one of those scenes where they come in and they just say we are going to break this relationship this dependency with Hamid Karzai they assumed that Bush's kind of engagement with Karzai the bi-weekly VTCs and so forth was a form of dependency it was a you know