 Good evening, everybody. Welcome to CSIS. My name is Juan Zaradi. I'm a senior advisor here. Really honored to be hosting the event this evening with a good friend and frankly legend of the intelligence community, Bob Grenier. Want to welcome you all. Thank you for taking the time to join us. A lot of interest in the event. A lot of interest in Bob's book, 88 Days to Kandahar. For those watching online and can't see the board behind me, it's a great book, a wonderful read, and a great sort of chronology and telling of some of the most important events in the last 20 years of our history. And in many ways, it follows the arc of Bob's career, where Bob has been at the center of some of the most important, controversial, and thorny issues that the nations had to confront. For those of you who don't know Bob's bio, obviously it's available in the book jacket and as well as our materials, but Bob was the chief of station in Islamabad on 9-11. And so both before and after 9-11 had responsibilities for what was happening both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan and ran the Southern Campaign and ultimately the takeover of Kandahar from the Taliban, hence the title of the book, which I think is a great title. He was also the director of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA at a time of great change both within the CIA, great controversy, and also change within the US government in the counter-terrorism world. That's when I got to know Bob well and had the honor of working with him and watching his handiwork both within the bureaucracy and in challenges to it. And finally Bob was also responsible for the Iraq portfolio right during the invasion and in the aftermath of the invasion in Iraq. And so you can imagine the breadth and scope of Bob's work, which is not just confined to that period of course, but really is seminal in terms of the history of the CIA, history of US counter-terrorism, and our work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. And so welcome. This is a real honor for me to host Bob and certainly for CSIS to host Bob and his book event. Bob, I just I wanted to start by asking you generally why did you write the book and sort of set the table for us in terms of the story that you wanted to tell with 88 days to Kandahar? Yeah, I did have occasion numerous times to ask myself the same question. Why did you want to write the book? But I guess it all began for me on the 7th of December in 2001. That was the day when both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fled from Kandahar. And that afternoon I had occasion just to reflect a little bit on what had happened in the previous weeks. And I actually got out a calendar and I counted the days. And it was precisely 88 days from 9-11 until that 7th of December when both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fled. And we thought at the time that we'd won what I now like to refer to as the First American Afghan War. And I thought about the fact that at the outset immediately after 9-11, I was very, very concerned to say the very least. I was very concerned that this would go very, very badly. And I thought about the fact that the Northern Alliance had broken through the Taliban lines and had taken Kabul, our two key Pushtun tribal allies in the south, Hamid Karzai and Gulagashirzai had not only survived but actually with American help had ultimately driven both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from their capital in Kandahar. We had managed in sort of perils of Pauline scenario to save a small group of missionaries who had been detained by the Taliban just before 9-11 and who had somehow managed to save as the Taliban structure was collapsing around Kabul. We had managed to get to the bottom of what we thought was a serious conspiracy on the part of a group of Pakistani scientists to provide nuclear materials or God forbid a nuclear weapon to Al-Qaeda. I don't have to underline for you just what a tense situation that was before that was all resolved. There were so many things that could have gone so badly wrong and instead they had gone right. And I felt that at some point, someday I was going to have to tell that story, the story of those 88 days. And I knew then what the title of the book would be. It's been a while and coming for this book. And actually I'm very glad that it has been. If I had written this book immediately after my retirement in 2006 or 2007, yeah, the core of the book would have been essentially the same, that adventure story as I sort of lived it during those 88 days. But there was so much at that point that we didn't yet know. And now at the cusp as the United States is essentially withdrawn from Afghanistan, we're down to a very small number of truths as you all know and as we're planning for what we all expect to be the end game between now and 2017. There's so much more that we know now about how this whole thing has turned out. So in the book what I've tried to do is to write an accessible story for people who are not experts in this field. But then what I can do now that I wouldn't have been able to do had I written it say immediately after my retirement is to wrap it up in a broader story, the geopolitical story of how we won the first American Afghan war, how we if not lost certainly did not win the second American Afghan war and how the decisions that we're making now may yet set the stage for what may yet be a third American Afghan war in the future. And Bob, I think one of the one of the great values of the book is precisely what you've described, which is not just a historical telling of these key events, your role in it and the key actors in this time, but it's the relevance of the policy debates currently on all of these issues. And I want to get back to that because I think that's critically important as we look forward. But can you as we look at sort of that pre-911, post-911 period, talk just a little bit about your relationship for example with the Taliban. Because you were interacting with the Taliban, there were concerns about the housing of the Arabs, the need to move them out, the potential for further isolation of the Taliban in Afghanistan and certainly post-911. So can you talk to us a little bit about that and then also your relationship with the Pashtuns and in particular Hamid Karzai who figures so prominently in your story and obviously then in Afghan history. Yeah. Well, when I first arrived in Pakistan as chief of station in the summer of 1999, our involvement in and concern with Afghanistan was very myopically focused on Osama bin Laden himself. And we had a presidential finding to try to track down and arrest Osama bin Laden. It was a so-called lethal finding, circumstances under which he could have been killed, required several lawyers to walk you through. So while it was a legal finding, unless anyone would like to have a little seminar afterwards, I can sort of explain to you that the circumstances under which we were tracking down bin Laden. It's hard to explain to the partners as well, right? Absolutely. So the people who were tracking him down and who had certain ideas about how he might meet his maker, who had to be dissuaded from doing what they proposed to do, were very, very confused by the laws and the structures that were surrounding what it was that we were trying to do with Mr. Bin Laden. But it occurred to me about six months into the tour that even if we, against all odds, we were successful in arresting or killing bin Laden, that that was not going to solve our problem, that we had a significant terrorist problem with all the number of what we then referred to as the Afghan Arabs who were rushing into Afghanistan, were receiving training, that even if bin Laden were to die of natural causes, that we would still have a serious terrorist safe haven problem in Afghanistan. And so we began to spread our aperture more widely and to focus much more on the Taliban itself. It seemed to us that the only real solution to this problem was to deny safe haven to these international terrorists, which meant driving a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And it appeared to me that there were opportunities to do that. There were substantial players in, among the Pashtun society from, whence the Taliban was drawn, who were fed up with al-Qaeda. They had no time for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was operating as a state within a state. There was a tremendous amount of resentment about that, including within the Taliban leadership. And so it seemed to us that as we gathered more and more intelligence on the Taliban itself, as we gained more and more penetrations of the Taliban structure, both civilian and military, that there was a real opportunity for us here. And that if we could organize a tribal rebellion against the Taliban, under circumstances where it seemed to the Taliban that one of the drivers of that rebellion was the fact that they didn't want these foreigners operating with such impunity in their own state and paying a price for it in terms of international sanctions, while at the same time on the diplomatic side offering that the Taliban some inducements. There were certain things that they wanted. They wanted to get the sanctions off. They wanted to be recognized as a legitimate government. They wanted the UNC, that those two things in combination might actually convince Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership to change policy. So that's what we said about trying to do before 9-11. And in the context of that, we were reaching out during those days, particularly during the 18 months to one year before 9-11, as Juan is just alluded, we were reaching out to push-to-unit tribal leaders, most of whom were former commanders during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, most of whom had a good impression of the United States and the aid that we had given them, and most of whom were deeply resentful of the Taliban, who in many cases had pushed them aside, either into exile in Pakistan or even if they remained in Afghanistan, some of them even fighting for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, clearly wanted to get back in power. They were looking for an opportunity to do that. And we suddenly had that opportunity. Obviously, when 9-11 happened, we started to say, now is your chance. If you will turn against the Taliban now, you will have the full weight of the American military with you, but almost to a person, they demurred. They wanted to make sure that the Americans were serious. They wanted to make sure which way this struggle was going to go. You don't survive very long in Afghanistan as a tribal leader if you come in on the wrong side of the fight. So they wanted to find out which way this thing was going to go before they committed themselves. And so they were only two push-to-unit tribal leaders of any significance who were actually willing, even before the U.S. had entered the fray, to stick their heads up, take the chance of having them cut off and lead a tribal rebellion against the Taliban. That was Hamid Karzai, whom we all know and love. Can we go to slide two? There we got a great picture of Bob and Hamid Karzai in that period. That was, and the other significant tribal leader was Gulag Ashurzai, who was the former governor of Kandahar, had the dubious distinction of being the first provincial governor to be driven out of power by the Taliban when they organized themselves in 1994. And Hamid Karzai in particular had a very rough time of it. He was literally being chased from mountaintop to mountaintop before we rescued him in Andorra's Garden Province. He later reinserted this time with a combined team of CIA and special forces and made his way southward down to Kandahar and with the help of the U.S. Air Force, did fairly well. And Bob, you give great detail. I just love the book because it's great detail and pace around sort of the march toward Kandahar, the survival of your key allies, the interagency work with the military and the JSOC operators. Can you talk just a little bit, because so much of the book is focused on the march to Kandahar. Can you talk a little bit about that? And we've got the maps of the route that Hamid Karzai took and that Gulag Ashurzai took as well. Can you talk a little bit about sort of how you were thinking about the Southern Campaign and how that meshed with what was happening from the north, the Northern Alliance movements toward Mazar Sharif and down toward Kabul? Yeah, to back up just a half step at the outset, before hostility to start, before the U.S. bombing campaign began on October 7th, there was a tremendous amount of debate, as you might imagine, in Washington about how we were going to marshal this campaign. And in fact, I received a phone call. It was a Sunday morning, early Sunday morning, my time on the 23rd of September. It's 12 days after 9-11. And I got a surprise phone call from George Tenet. And it was early Sunday morning, my time, late Saturday night, his time. And he said, look, we're going to meet at Camp David tomorrow. We're going to be discussing the war plan for Afghanistan. He said, the Pentagon is telling us that they have very few military targets at all. They could probably hit them all in a matter of days. He said, we know we're all the terrorist training camps are, but they're all empty. Terrorists have all fled. And he literally asked me, he said, should we bomb empty camps? So I said, well, Mr. Director, I'm not sure we're thinking about this the right way here. This is primarily a political problem. We need to think about this in political terms. And so I start to walk him through it. Ultimately, he asked me if I would put it all down on paper. I did. It was circulated to the other members of the war cabinet at the time they discussed it. In fact, it was adopted by the president as the template for how we should move the campaign forward. It became the war plan, in essence. It became a war plan. Now, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. And this one was no exception. But the thing that I stressed and that in fact, we did adhere to throughout the campaign was that this must not be a US invasion. This must not be perceived by the Afghans as a US invasion. They must not think that we're coming in to seek permanent bases, territory that we must never allow ourselves to be seen as an occupying force. We have to keep the actual American military footprint very, very small. We need to present ourselves as coming in in support of Afghans who are trying to liberate their country from the Taliban and from Al-Qaeda. And that while obviously we have an obvious ally in the North, the Northern Alliance, who have been fighting a civil war with the Taliban for some years, that we must not, for the benefit of the Pashtuns, make it appear to them that we are simply entering the civil war on the other side. That will be disastrous. We knew that there was a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction among the Pashtuns with the Taliban. In fact, their political situation, I think, was worse than we appreciated at the time. It wasn't obvious to us until until some time later. But I feared that if we simply came in on the side of the Northern Alliance that the Pashtuns would recoalesce around the Taliban and the problem of the terrorist state of heaven would actually be worse rather than better. And so that's why as we were moving forward with the Northern Alliance, we stressed that it was so critically important that we first identify and then support Pashtun Tribals who were willing to turn against the Taliban. And we found precisely two of them. There were others, but none who were as significant as these two. And so the plan that we followed was that these people must establish that they do in fact have a tribal following and can marshal their tribal elements and raise up their heads in rebellion against the Taliban. And then we will come in and support them. And all along the way you had sort of a test of will and capacity with everybody you were dealing with, right? You've got to show us that you can marshal the troops and that you can defend a position in the whole. Exactly. So Hamid Karzai goes into Afghanistan, he and three others riding pillion on two motorcycles rode into this this is how our rebellion started and he rode right through Kandahar. They then traded their their motorcycles for a taxi cab. They drove up into Orozgan province at the at the border between Kandahar and Orozgan province, which was where where was the center of Hamid Karzai's tribal support. He was a Durrani Popolzai and that that was the home of the Popolzai. So it is as he's driving in this taxi into Orozgan, they're stopped at a at a check post. And so here's this, you know, guard is probably about 15 years old, can't even grow a beard. He's inspecting their vehicle and he sees this bag. Well, it's the bag that had the satellite phone in it. He says, I want to I want to look inside your bag. So they said, no, no, you can't look inside our bag. And so one of his companions went into the guard post to talk to the man in charge. And the other ones, they had a couple of weapons between them. And they said, we're not going to be taken captive. These people come out to inspect the bag, we're going to kill them, we may die right here, but we're not going to be taken captive. Well, the officer in charge didn't care about them or their bag, and they just drove on up to Orozgan. And obviously, I'm not going to, you know, take you step by step through the whole process from there. But he went up to Tyrene Coat, the the provincial seat, and began to organize the tribals. He found that there was a lot of support for him, a lot of dissatisfaction with with the Taliban. But the Taliban very quickly discovered that he was there, and they sent a force north to track him down. And the tribal elders who were supporting him said, look, we're very sorry, we don't have enough men under arms to protect you. And so take some people and go up into the mountains, which he did. And he was literally being chased from mountaintop to mountaintop. He was telling us, you know, breathlessly about the numbers of people who were attracted to his banner. I think that he was optimistic, I think, is probably to put it mildly a good term to use about the number of people who were with him at any given point in time. Ultimately, we had to we had to evacuate him, then reinsert him. At no time, frankly, did he ever have more than 350 people under arms and with him, as he made his way down to Kandahar. And they were very nearly wiped out very early on after their reinsertion at the Battle of Tarim Coat. And it's I didn't realize at the time just how close to annihilation that they actually were. I was sitting in my office in Islamabad and a special forces representative came rushing into my office and said, my God, this is a turkey shoot. Once all these American pilots who were there in the in the area of operations realized that you had Americans who were under attack by the Taliban, they all rushed there and they were literally being stacked up like airplanes at LaGuardia to try to make bombing runs against the Taliban. The Taliban suffered very, very heavy losses. And that was probably the critical battle of the campaign. He then made his way south. There were a number of other skirmishers, including one where he was very nearly killed by the Americans by an American JDAM at a place called called Shawali Coat just north of Kandahar. In the meantime, Gula Ghashirzai was managed to organize a much larger force in the Shinnarei Valley, just along the Afghan-Pakistan border. That was his home area. He was a Barakzai tribesman. And as I say, managed to organize a large force. The number of skirmishers, a major battle at a place. Slide four, please. Sorry? Yeah, no, not you. Slide four. Yeah, the map. There we go. Perfect. Yeah, that's right. And so it, he went through a spin bull dock. And then when you reach the main highway to go into at the Kandahar fought a major battle there, fought another major battle. First with the Taliban and then with Al-Qaeda at the Kandahar Airport. Spent about five days there. I was on the telephone at this time with the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Taliban, who had been a contact of mine, not a recruited source, mind you, by any means, but somebody with whom I was just talking from well before 9-11. And he told me that they were actually encouraging Al-Qaeda to fight with the Americans at the airport. And he said, we hope that you will kill as many of them as possible. They're getting in the way of our negotiations. So much for Taliban Al-Qaeda solidarity. Ultimately, the Al-Qaeda fighters, about 500 of them or so, realized that they were fighting a losing battle at the airport. And they organized themselves and fled Kandahar on the same day that the Taliban fled as well. And it was actually Gula Ghoshersi, who was the first to reclaim the old governor's palace in Kandahar. He saw his opportunity and he rushed inside. And it was only two days later, in fact, that Hamid Karzai actually made his way into town. And there was a little bit of a bit of a kerfuffle as to who was going to be in charge here and who should take what parts of the city. At one point, not only were the Afghans fighting between themselves, but their CIA sponsors were fighting between themselves over who really ought to be in charge here. So it took a little bit of refereeing to sort this whole thing out. We said it's entirely too soon in the process for Afghans to be killing each other. And it was going to be time enough for that later on as we all saw. That's great. So Bob, take us forward then. December 7th, take over Kandahar. Now you've got the problem of the Arabs, al-Qaeda, the hunt for bin Laden. And this in some ways takes us forward to your role as head of CTC as well. Talk just a little bit about sort of the hunt for bin Laden, how you are thinking about the fight against al-Qaeda, not just in those immediate sort of days and months, but even longer term. And you know, if you can touch a little bit on the story of Torah Bora, because I think that holds a lot in the imagination of people's minds. And if we can go to slide five, I think there's a good picture of you with some tribal forces on the Pakistani side. On the Pakistan-Afghanistan border way up in what's called the Parrot Speak, the far northwest of Pakistan. Those mountains that you see in the background are called by the Pakistanis the Safed Co, called the Spingar Mountains by the Afghans. And just on the other side of those peaks is Torah Bora. And at the time that I was up there, I got an ISI general with me who's escorting me. We've got a number of members of the Frontier Corps, the current militia who are providing an escort. And the general and I had gone up there to see what was the state of the Pakistani border presence, because we were very concerned that as the American bombing at Torah Bora was continuing, that significant numbers of al-Qaeda fighters would come through the passes onto the Pakistani side. We wanted to make sure that they were intercepted, they were intercepted while they were there. And just a few days after our trip up there and after the general filed his report, the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province held a meeting, a jerker with tribal elders in the area, and they agreed that the Pak Army could move up into those mountains and try to set some sort of a trap for the al-Qaeda fighters as they came through, as they came through the peaks. And ultimately, that's what happened. How many of them managed to safely get through? We will never know. They probably captured about 130 of them. At the same time, when I mentioned on the 7th of December as the Taliban al-Qaeda were fleeing, I actually had one of my officers sitting on a little hill just east of Kandahar and with a radio that they had captured from the Arabs. And he was listening to them that they sounded like a bunch of tourists as they were organizing their vehicles. And in fact, he actually heard somebody say, make sure don't forget your passports. And unfortunately, our special forces, 18, which is only 12 individuals, they were off fighting with Gulagah at the airport before they realized that the Arabs had actually fled. And so there was nobody to actually call in an airstrike. And he actually watched as 300 members of al-Qaeda in about 50 vehicles just drove on out of Kandahar and disappeared up the Kandahar Kabul Highway. And we don't know. But we suppose that many of those were the individuals who were later fought by the US military at a battle called Operation Anaconda, the Battle of Shahi Khot, which took place in March, April of 2002. That fight did not go very well, but the Arab fighters fled again further off to the east this time across the border into Pakistan. And so this this began what was for us the second phase. First was driving al-Qaeda and the Taliban out of power. As al-Qaeda fled out of Afghanistan, we were very concerned about intercepting them on the other side. And during those early days in 2002, first six months or so of 2002, we were doing a land office business. We were we and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI were mounting raids on almost an at the basis. It was US intelligence that was determining the safe houses that were being employed by the Arabs, as we refer to them in those days. And capturing them, many of them were immediately turned over to the US Air Force and found new homes in Guantanamo Bay. But as the spring wore on, we began to realize that a significant number of these al-Qaeda fighters were finding safe haven, not in the subtle areas of Pakistan where we could catch them, but in the tribal areas of Pakistan. And I began to import tune the Pakistani military to move into those areas to verify the reports that we were getting the significant numbers of Arabs were hiding in various locations. And that was where we saw the beginning of what was to become a long, twilight struggle between ourselves and the Pakistanis, trying to get the Pakistanis to take effective action against al-Qaeda members in the tribal areas, the Pakistanis for very understandable reasons being very reluctant to do so, because as a then little known major general by the name of Kayani, later became the chief of army staff, most powerful man in Pakistan. At the time that I first knew him in the spring of 2002, he was the director general of military operations. And he was saying to me, look, I can do what you're asking me to do. I can move forces into this area. It's almost guaranteed that I will touch off a tribal war if I do so. And he said, we can deal with that as well. But if I, if the Masoods and the Waziris rise up together against us in south Waziristan, it's going to take me three brigades of troops to put it down. And those troops have to come from our border with India. And at that time, the Indian army was fully mobilized and on the border with Pakistan, threatening to invade. He said, I can't afford to pull those troops off the Indian border. And therefore, if I can't deal with the consequences that may arise, if I do what you ask, I can't do what you ask. And so instead, he launched a much lower profile effort to try to, to try to, to root out the, these al-Qaeda fighters. And as he feared, in fact, he did touch off a tribal war. The Pakistan army did ultimately have to invest south Waziristan, occupy south Waziristan. And in the subsequent years, they were very, very reluctant to reprise that process and move into north Waziristan because they knew that was going to be a much tougher fight. And in fact, it's only in the past few months, as we all know, that the Pakistanis ultimately have actually moved into Waziristan. And they've gotten bloodied when they've done that. They, they have lost many thousands of troops during this, this whole process. And so it's been a very, very painful thing for the Pakistanis. Bob, can we stay on Pakistan for a second? Maybe go to slide six, because we've got another great picture of you with slide sixes with Tommy Franks, General Franks, and the Pakistanis. There's a lot of skepticism, of course, about the Pakistani military and the ISI, the intelligence services, a lot of questions as to whether or not they knew about Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, and whether or not, to your point, they were as aggressive. We could see the roots of the disagreements and the misunderstandings that we have suffered through with the Pakistanis ever since, and that still haunt us to this day. And with regard to Al Qaeda, the Pakistanis really never had any brief for Al Qaeda. They certainly were never supportive of Bin Laden. They weren't willing to cooperate with us against Bin Laden in Al Qaeda before 9-11, not because they were supportive of them, per se, but simply because they were very peaked with us. When we no longer needed them after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, they we sanction three ways for from Sunday for their nuclear program, that their missile proliferation programs, other things that we found highly problematic. And so they had no incentive to cooperate with us. After 9-11, they were very, very clear that they were going to support us against Al Qaeda, unless and until the price for them was going to be too high. And that was the issue that we ran up against in the tribal areas and something that still haunts us right up until the present day. With regard to the Taliban, there was a very quick evolution. In the very early days, immediately after 9-11, the Pakistanis were very supportive of our efforts against the Taliban. Obviously, they provided us with a base of operation. The ISI was providing me with facilitation so that we could get Afghan fighters across the line to attack the Taliban. And they were very, very supportive. But within really a matter of weeks, certainly by early 2002, it was very clear that the Pakistanis had pause and that there was a large element of ambiguity that was creeping into their policy. They could see that even though Hamid Karzai had been elevated by the UN to be the interim ruler of Afghanistan, they could see this was going to be a Northern Alliance-dominated government. They knew the historical relations that the Northern Alliance had with India, in particular, the Russians, secondarily. They could see that the Indians were moving to start opening up consulates in various parts of Afghanistan where there wasn't a very large Hindu population to minister to. They were very, very suspicious about what was going on. And they were very concerned lest they unilaterally break the last ties that they had with the Taliban. Now, mind you, before 9-11, there was already a great deal of distrust between the Pakistanis and the Taliban. This was not, this is a very wary relationship at best, although clearly as a matter of national security, the Pakistanis were unambiguously supporting the Taliban. You can imagine how distrustful that relationship was after 9-11 and as we got into 2002, given what the Pakistanis had done to the Taliban in support of the American effort. Nonetheless, the Pakistanis did want to retain at least the option of a future relationship with the Taliban against the day when that might become important for them in dealing with a government in Kabul, which they saw as hostile to their interests. So in those days, in early 2002 and even more so in the years subsequently, as the Americans and the Pakistanis were cooperating very, very effectively to capture and or kill members of al-Qaeda when we would provide them with information concerning senior Taliban members, members of the Taliban Shura, somehow mysteriously those investigations never turned out very well. And it didn't take very long to figure out that there was a pattern here and that maybe the Pakistanis were a little bit ambivalent and hedging about those and engaging in hedging behaviors. That became even more pointed in later years, starting particularly in 2005, as we saw increasing numbers of Pakistani base militants crossing the border to attack US, NATO and Afghan forces inside Afghanistan. And there, I think it was a matter, I think, frankly, there was a lot of misunderstanding on the part of the Americans. And you can imagine your American military, including some right here in this room, I know, and you're watching militants as they're going right past Pakistani check posts to attack your positions inside of Afghanistan. Well, to you, that's going to look like collusion. To the Pakistanis, that was looking like somebody else's fight. They were very, very vulnerable out there. They were having a difficult enough time with militants who were turning against them because of their support, because of the militant support to Al Qaeda and Pakistani perceived support to the American effort to track them down. They didn't want militants who were focused primarily on Afghanistan to turn against them as well. And so as far as they were concerned, they knew that they were very vulnerable. They knew that if the local militants in a particular area decided to interdict their supply convoys, they could do so very easily. This is an area of Pakistan where every boy above the age of 12 has an AK-47. They didn't want to fight with these people unless it was absolutely necessary. And so you can imagine the sort of sort of mutual suspicion that rose up around all of that. Bob, let me ask you two more questions. One is sort of a thematic question that implicates Afghanistan, Iraq, and just our foreign policy. There are a number of great themes in your book, three that I think are interesting. One is this theme of abandonment that you talked about that was sensed by some of the Afghans, the Mujahideen, some of the Pashtun tribes, obviously a core theme from the Pakistanis, and at play to a certain extent in Iraq currently. So if you can talk about sort of the theme of abandonment in our policy and the way we've interacted with various tribes and groups over time, that would be I think important. The other question is you did battle often in the interagency, and this was both in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq, with this question of light footprint, heavy footprint, and the perception of US occupation or not, and how we went about doing what we had to do. Because in many ways you don't argue against the policies, for example, going into Iraq. It's how we did it. And so can you speak to those two themes, which I think are really interesting because they translate both in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq, and translate frankly moving forward in South Asia and in the Middle East? Yeah, well, I think obviously the theme of American abandonment has been a very strong one in the dialogue between the Pakistanis and ourselves. And looking at it from a Pakistani point of view, you can readily understand why that would be. In fact, I was just talking to an old State Department colleague the other day who was in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time, analyzing the growing body of intelligence that the US had during the 1980s, during the anti-Soviet jihad, when we had a very close relationship with the Pakistanis about the growing Pakistani nuclear program. Somehow or other, we managed to overlook all of that evidence, which once we had accepted it was going to trigger automatic sanctions under the Pressler Amendment that had been passed in Congress. Somehow we managed to overlook all of that evidence until the Soviets withdrew. Suddenly it was staring us right in the face and we had no choice but to sanction the Pakistanis very heavily. Well, this was not entirely lost on the Pakistanis. And when after 9-11, President Musharraf made the strategic decision that, you know, when he was given the offer, either you for us or you're against us, he decided to be for us. As far in the Pakistani mindset, this was just another turn of the same cycle. Great. Now we're going to be strategic allies of the Americans. But we know full well that when we are no longer useful to the Americans in Afghanistan, that is probably going to change again. And so all of their behaviors, all of their calculations were made on that basis. It's not the way we were thinking. It was very much the way that they were thinking. And it helped to presage much of the difficulty that we've seen with the Pakistanis in subsequent years. And I think that we are seeing similar things play out with others with whom we have cooperated on a tactical basis. We perhaps were not thinking of it tactically. We probably weren't thinking of it tactically when we were cooperating. So we CIA were cooperating with the mountain yards in Laos during the course of the Vietnam War. And yet they paid a very heavy price when we decided to leave. There are parties in Afghanistan, now as we speak, who I'm sure are paying a very heavy price for their former association with us when the U.S. has decided to substantially scale down its presence there. And the same is true with a number of parties, particularly Sunni tribesmen in Western Iraq who threw their lot in with the Americans and who were not able to sustain that relationship then with a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. So again, on different levels and in different ways, this theme of American abandonment is one with which we have to grapple and one which haunts us. And frankly, I'm almost surprised that we have managed to convince over the years as many parties as we have to cooperate with us, knowing full well that at a certain point it may no longer be convenient for the Americans to cooperate with us and we're going to have to defend for ourselves. With regard to this whole idea of heavy footprint, light footprint, as I just mentioned before, I felt very strongly at the outset in Afghanistan that we needed to have a very light footprint that although the war against the Taliban would not be prosecuted anywhere near as efficiently using or supporting Afghans who were operating on their own account and with their own motivations, then it would be if we simply went and invaded the place, I felt that if we simply went and invaded the place that we would repeat, the very bitter history that had been suffered by the Soviets and the British before us in the 20th and the 19th centuries, respectively. It was a very different situation, obviously in, well actually maybe before I leave Afghanistan, let me just sort of fast forward a little bit to 2005. Like much of the US command structure, if you will, I checked out of Pakistan, Afghanistan in the summer of 2002, quickly found myself the Iraq mission manager of the CIA for about a two and a half year period and by the time I came back to focus once again on Afghanistan and Pakistan, this time as the director of the counterterrorism center at CIA, I, fairly early on in the spring of 2005, I made an extensive visit out both to Pakistan and to Afghanistan and you could begin to see, we didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but you could begin to see that the situation in Afghanistan was starting to slip away from us. You could see a growing number of militants based inside Pakistan who were coming across the border and attacking American and Afghan check posts and facilities there. You could begin to see that the Taliban was regaining traction in certain pushed-in areas of the country and it was in the period subsequent to that that I believe we made first incrementally in the Bush administration and then in a very organized and strategic fashion in the Obama administration the decision that essentially we were going to take over this fight. It seemed that our Afghan allies were simply not up to the task for all the reasons that you're very familiar with. They were corrupt, they were ill-organized, their army had not yet developed sufficient strength that it could impose its control over the entire country and essentially we decided that at least for an interim period until we could bring the Afghans along, Afghanistan was too important to be left to Afghans and essentially the Americans had to take over the struggle at its height. As we all know we had a hundred thousand US troops and additional forty thousand from NATO. We were spending a hundred billion dollars a year. Frankly we just completely overwhelmed this small primitive agrarian country and in a way that didn't rebound very well for them or for us, particularly when President Obama realized what the price tag was going to be and decided that wait a minute we need to rethink this whole proposition and maybe scale back our aspirations for Afghanistan. And in my humble opinion I think that was that was a big mistake and that we should recognize much earlier on that the principles that we followed the first time around were ones that we should continue to follow in the future despite the fact that it would mean that in terms of our aspirations we were going to have to be much less ambitious than in fact we were when President Obama rolled out his first plan for Afghanistan in March of 2009. In Iraq we had a very very different situation. We weren't talking about you're working through Iraqis if we were going to defeat Saddam's army it was American forces that were going to have to do it. And I stated then I will still state now that I supported our effort. Obviously you know many people think now that that was a colossal mistake. We don't know what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam. It might have been a whole other history that might have been equally as painful in fact maybe even more painful if you think about the fact that had Saddam ultimately as we feared he soon would cast off the sanctions regime and been able to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction programs as we were quite sure he would what kind of a situation we would be facing right now in the Persian Gulf. But that said I think this is wanted alluded that the big mistake that we made in my estimation at least was not in invading Afghanistan it was the way in which we tried to go about politically reconstructing Afghanistan. Iraq I'm sorry I keep seeing Afghanistan I've got it on the brain. But politically reconstructing Iraq and there as I agree with many that we made some very very serious mistakes and formally disbanding the Iraqi army formally banning that the Barth Party. Once again I felt that we should sacrifice a certain measure of control in order to have a legitimate political process that ultimately would throw up genuine leaders in Iraq that had genuine local political support. Instead we opted for control and again I think that that was a very big mistake and it's what again in my estimation touched off the insurgency and everything that's come since. I think I could ask you eighty eight thousand questions so I'm gonna I'm gonna reserve and I'm gonna hold the final one maybe for the end. But let me just one point of privilege before I open it up to the audience and start getting your questions ready we've got a microphone. One thing I wanted to note is that our former colleague our noted Borsk Robb who recently passed away was the head of the Transnational Threat Project legendary journalist legendary member of CSIS knew Bob Well. Features in the book there's a story of Arnaud appearing to track down Bin Laden and others at the time and Arnaud was incredibly courageous and intrepid in his work and Bob and he formed a good friendship and in fact the three of us were on a panel a few years ago at the Global Security Forum so I wanted to pay tribute to Arnaud and note that Arnaud is with us in spirit certainly. So let's go with questions yes right here and if you could identify yourself please and ask a question thank you. John Rothenberg long time Afghanistan specialist I have two questions I hope I can do that my first one is that I'm halfway through the book it's great but it seemed to me that you felt that negotiating with the Taliban to get the al Qaeda handed over was a better option. Do you think if you had more time and flexibility that that would have happened and what would have been the result. My second one is that I was part of the civilian surge I was on a base in the capital of Pactika and doing capacity building with the Afghan government and one of the things and I've been around since 88 and one of the things that I felt why the Taliban came in and why the the Pashtun provinces like Pactika do not support the government is because of the corruption of players like Shersai and that and that we brought back a lot of the problems that they didn't like to start with and I want to just want to know what you thought about that. Yeah well as you've noted already I'm given to over long answers but my answer to your first question is very short it's no the question again and tell me if I've got this right is you know I did try to negotiate with the number two figure in the Taliban at the time Mullah Osmani to see first of all if he could convince Mullah Omar to change policy and to turn bin Laden and his key lieutenants over to us and then failing that in a second meeting with Mullah Osmani I tried to persuade him to move Mullah Omar aside and do himself what Mullah Omar clearly would not and he actually agreed to do that briefly I think he thought better of it as soon as he got back to Kandahar and we continued to talk on but by satellite phone with him and Kandahar me and Islamabad even after they're the US bombing and so the question is you know what was there ever a real opportunity for a negotiated solution with the Taliban if we had some more time would is it possible that that might have succeeded and you know as much as I would like to say that you know with my persuasive brilliance if I just been given a little bit more time somehow I could have brought them around in fact I don't think I don't think it was in the cards to a it was only later that I realized the extent of Mullah Omar's hold on his people there was no way that that Osmani was actually going to lead a rebellion against Mullah Omar for a whole lot of reasons organizational psychological and others and Mullah Omar I'm convinced is a very singular Afghan is a very in their in their context their culture is is a very impressive individual so no I don't think that that would that would ever have worked had we as we we tried at my instigation that the first target that we hit in Afghanistan at the start of the air campaign on October 7th was Mullah Omar's compound we missed him by 30 minutes had he been killed in the first wave then something might have been possible and then this relationship that I built up with Mullah Osmani might have actually born fruit who knows where things would have gone from there even then I think it would have been highly problematic with regard to that the second issue and that's this whole issue of the governance in in Afghanistan and on the one hand you know should should we have been focusing as in fact we did on you're trying to build up a highly centralized government structure with a large army and police force that would be able to impose its will on the country and and establish good governance and marginalize the the local warlords who had actually brought Afghanistan to grief in the period after the Soviet withdrawal and that and who's who's rapacious and this actually led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place and I guess my view on that is that we've never really had that sort of a highly centralized highly effective Afghan government I'm not sure that in our lifetimes it would have been possible to construct one particularly particularly with the the competition from from the Taliban on the other hand what about these warlords who as you say I mean you know far better than I do having spent the time there that you did the extent to which corrupt local leaders and mind you that this this centralized Afghan government was essentially establishes a vertically integrated criminal enterprise where all of the the positions of authority even at the local level the district level were were made those improvements were all made in in Kabul and essentially in many cases they were licenses to steal with the ill-gotten gains flowing back up that the chain to the people who named these individuals to those positions in the first place not not a good basis on which to establish good governance and so what then is the alternative knowing that things are never gonna Afghanistan is never gonna look like Ohio well I guess what I had thought at the outset was that we ought to continue to work with warlords as we had at the outset that we should have CIA State Department other American agencies working in conjunction with one another and in and and closely with these these individuals who did have local weight whether tribal or otherwise and try to help them to be the best warlords they could be and I'll just I'll just tell you a small story this is probably something that that you've heard of a Pacha Khan Sadran who was again the warlord in eastern Afghanistan shortly after 9 11 and as it as it became apparent that these different areas were beginning to slip away from Taliban control Pacha Khan comes across the border to Islamabad and rolls up and says I'm your man and this is the area around host in eastern Afghanistan and he said you know if you want to rule that this area I said I'm I'm the guy you need to deal through me so we said oh interesting you're a Zadran we're the other tribes in your area come back to us with representatives of all those other tribes and then we'll talk and you know in my view if we had had the right people Americans with the right background the right basis of knowledge the right temperament to deal with individuals like this in various key areas of Afghanistan to condition our support for them on their subservience for lack of a better word to appropriate local authority establishing sure is with some sort of a link to that to the central government including some sort of a link between their local militias which I thought we should be supporting and the local government and the sort of the model that I had in mind was something like the frontier core in Pakistan we have local forces that that have nonetheless a link with with the with the central government that we might have been able to build something which wouldn't have been pretty in all places at all times but might at least have been viable and might at least have been able to keep out the the Taliban and I think that in having in most cases refused to support these individuals for a highly understandable reasons in favor of building up a very large and unsustainable Afghan military that we allowed a vacuum of power to arise which in conjunction with the factors that you've just mentioned created space for for the Taliban and led to the problem that we're dealing with right now would another policy have succeeded where this one is failed who knows but I feel that we went down the wrong path another question up here please continuing on what you just said about the right staff or the right you quickly just identify yourself quickly Al Vil Singh independent researcher so going back to what you were saying about like the right staff the right people at that time would you then say so I have a two part question one is that the CIA did not have the right staff at the right time meaning we're we're we're taking this outside of the scope as an HR issue in terms of recruitment homeland security and I say everyone else has this issue right now so go back we're not talking about two thousand you know nine eleven we're going back a decade where the infrastructure was a cold war mentality and at that so juxtapose that with the hiring strategy and every the entire mindset of the intelligence agencies and the entire government so what we're seeing right now is the CIA restructuring to deal with the current conditions on the road had you had the right staff and the right capabilities I think you would have done a lot more on the ground in terms of let me put it this way as a CIA station chief my skin color would do much more than what yours is right now and my the second part I won't but okay that's a great question and particularly folks below the level of the station chief you know it's fine to have the station chief as a figurehead you know I'm not being with Pakistani officials it's the folks it's the folks who actually do the work on the ground they're the ones who have to be able to Bob if I can piggyback on this it's also a continuity question do we have too much shifting right yeah and and also just maybe sort of the code into this you know this is the subtitle is a CIA diary right right what's the future of CIA in the context of this are we are we positioning ourselves properly for the threats and the the challenges to come yeah I think that the CIA did a pretty good job of pivoting from the cold war to deal with a world where the threats were going to be quite different that did it did it do that well enough did it have enough foresight to know where the greatest challenges were going to be well no absolutely not did I know two years before 9 11 that essentially you know a little over two years later we were going to be taking on a quasi-colonial project in Afghanistan for which we would need appropriate people well absolutely not I didn't know that that said I think that with the people that we had with the with the Dari speakers that we had with people who had who had dealt in analogous situations in the third world had a had a feel for tribal politics had we been able to keep all of them focused on that particular coal face I think we would have done a great deal better as we all know we had to pivot again this time to Iraq and so we had to divide up very scarce resources very rapidly which I think made it much more difficult but you know we could spend an awful long time talking about you know sort of from from an HR point of view how do you poise an organization to enable it to do what it needs to do and to sustain that effort as as one says when people need to develop their careers you know we have an organization that says they know you have to get different experiences you've got to move from from a worker B level up through different levels of management when in point of fact maybe you want to keep those people working at the tactical level and for their whole careers and how do you incentivize them to do that and that that's been that's been a tremendous challenge in CIA as it has been in in other organizations State Departments has a challenge FBI others yeah absolutely you have a demographic thing I know and one you may know a whole lot more about about this than I do and this gentleman here in the back may know still more about what the military has attempted to do in and putting together what was referred to as the Afghan hands program where they were trying to build up a significant number of individuals with real expertise in Afghanistan and Pakistan who would work out in the in the war zones come back to continue working those issues and improving their skills at the Pentagon level go back out again and you know again I haven't seen this from the inside but you simply did not have a structure within the U.S. military that would facilitate that everything was working against their ability to do that over time and I think we have similar challenges throughout the bureaucracy let's go with one more question we're running out of time this gentleman here saying up Hi, Paul Hobbes duty active duty military and as such just wanted to mention thank you very much for your service and for the service of your former colleagues who you know working in the shadows don't get nearly as much public accolades as my military brothers and sisters in uniform mentioned earlier about big footprint little footprint in Afghanistan and just from my reading and open source books and that kind of stuff the position of our much more lined vice president was my as I understand a smaller footprint emphasizing special forces in drones versus a large footprint which we end up going with your comments please thank you very much yeah did you all hear the other question clearly yeah okay okay yeah yeah I think within tell me if I get this right I think the question revolves around this whole issue of a big footprint small footprint and the fact that we are told that in the interagency debate leading up to the first afghan plan and the obama administration which was rolled out in march of 2009 and then subsequently thoroughly revised in december of that year that during that time vice president joe biden was arguing for I think what he what he referred to as counterterrorism plus that is a much smaller us footprint not having 100,000 us troops and an additional 40,000 from nato but rather keeping it a much smaller footprint and in line with that greatly scaling back our aspirations in terms of what we could achieve and essentially making sure and focusing instead on is that pretty much what you're focused on and rather than trying to pacify the entire country instead looking at it sort of from the other side trying to make sure that the the regime in cobble wasn't overthrown by the Taliban so making sure the Taliban couldn't succeed as opposed to defeating them outright and then in that context maintaining that platform so that we could do counterterrorism as much more narrowly defined using special forces and drones et cetera et cetera sort of I guess my view on that is I guess my position and there are an infinite an infinite number of positions that you can take along that continuum I think my position is certainly much closer to vice president biden's and would have been at the time then the decision that was ultimately it was ultimately taken I think I probably would have been a little bit more muscular than biden however because I felt that in addition to doing counterterrorism as narrowly defined and supporting the buildup of the afghan army that we needed to be prepared again using special forces not not jsoc special mission forces but but green beret forces working with indigenous elements to take the fight in those places where we could find effective afghan allies in areas that that fell within the the ambit if you will of the taliban to help them engage in an insurgency against the taliban so counterinsurgency on behalf of the central government insurgency with with viable elements in the areas that would otherwise fall under taliban control and if it if it were I had my way now that's that's what we'd be attempting to do now which I think that we could do on a sustainable basis and with a relatively small number of forces but clearly more than in fact we have now I'm going to ask for everybody's indulgence for over time I'm going to do one more question we had a lot of hands go up young lady in the back please last question quick please and Bob this will be the last one oh hi there and I'm all right with the christian science monitor and general hr mc master so one of the big pentagon counterinsurgency practitioners was in town a couple of weeks ago and he said he felt like one of the big mistakes that the U.S. military made early on in Iraq then again in Afghanistan was to empower the wrong people you know we we had a bunch of warlords that we gave a lot of resources to it went awry and in a couple of different ways and so I just wanted to see you know if you had some thoughts on how do you avoid empowering the wrong people as we look forward into Iraq and whatever operations we're going to be doing there and then Syria as well especially dealing through proxies against ISIS and other right and and and actually to to make the link between some of the things that we've talked about in the in the Afghan context and the challenges that we're facing right now in Syria and in Iraq with regard to ISIS once again I would be very much in favor I think the administration is is smart to try to maintain a very small footprint frankly I think I would be a little bit more aggressive than they are I would be more willing to put special operations forces in harm's way than this administration apparently is but I think that's the way that we should go it should be U.S. supporting indigenous elements on the ground and where those elements are difficult to develop or unavailing practicing strategic patients and not getting out ahead of ourselves and taking over fights that only local people can sustain over the long term but with regard to your question and yet well how do you how do you choose the if you want to deal with warlords or the equivalent of warlords in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and a bunch of other places you know how do you choose the right ones and how do you make them the best warlords that they can be well that's hard it's easy I can I can speak very glibly and a great length about you know how you should go about doing this but but at the point of the spear it's really really hard and it takes people with a real feel for the culture with a knowledge of the languages a real deep understanding of the history in those local areas and and with great force of personality and that is very difficult to do on a wholesale basis and that's essentially what we are trying to get you know our intelligence and and military forces to do and it's difficult under the best of circumstances but I guess one of the the main points that I would make is that we we should not be afraid to fail and I think that that's one of the things frankly that has bedeviled the current administration particularly in Syria I feel maybe wrongly that if we had been far more aggressive early on in dealing with the so-called moderate opposition in Syria that they might have been able to gain traction much earlier and and we would not have seen the space created that has now been filled by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and some of these other extremist groups I think the reason that we didn't do that was because we were very much afraid of and many of these of these of these members of the the so-called moderate opposition frankly are local thugs I mean that in the most positive way possible no offense taken by you're right you're right you're right you're right you're right you know you know I I grew up in Massachusetts where there were lots of local thugs but some of them were my friends but we've been very much afraid of backing the wrong people we've been afraid to provide them with military support lest that support end up in the hands of terrorists well if your main objective is not to make a mistake you're not going to get very much done at the end of the day and I would be willing to take a risk of weapons falling in the wrong hands and knowing inevitably that some of those weapons are going to end up in the wrong hands but if we do if we want to affect the course of events from the margins as we have to in fights that essentially are not our fights but where we have a strong interest in the outcome we've got to be willing to take those kinds those kinds of risks and knowing that some of our of our warlord friends are going to disappoint us badly along the way and that we may not be in control and that we certainly will not be in control right the best that we can do is try to influence we're certainly not going to have control if you want control then you send in the third infantry division well Bob let me let me take this moment to thank you again for being with us tonight a real honor for me to be able to host you here thank you for your years of service I had the privilege of watching a bit of that from the inside and thank you for writing a great book 88 Days to Kandahar a CIA diary encourage you all to read it to buy it it's available in the back and join me in thanking Bob for his presence and his service