amounts of money off of all of the criminal activity in the region. we heard numerous reports of financial representatives from al qaeda, the i am new -- imu 18 extremist group in eastern afghanistan routinely meet usually in pakistan and the southwest in the tribal areas we have heard about other meetings, they meet routinely to divide up the funds. it is like one of those things to see if the sopranos where they get together and similarly i should add another reason why i find it very similar to the idea these groups being like a crime

family is like the new york crime family is sometimes they fight over the spoils. we hear reports of fighting that takes place between the imu and the pakistani taliban. what happens all the time and usually if you start looking into it they are fighting over money. i will come back to the idea. the top smugglers from the cartel is usually the intermediary between corrupt officials in the afghan and pakistani and every the government. what is ironic when i find most surprising is the extent to which insurgents were actually cooperating with government officials and we even heard cases of the police pretending to lose a district

to the taliban because they have been paid off so much to lose the district so the drugs could get through. the smugglers tend to be the intermediaries for another person who is often said to be v the intermit -- intermediary is, made karzai who lives in kandahar and wishbone intelligence indicated he is the man who helped to coordinate the overall network. that perhaps i think is the most complex issue of all. because we not only are fighting an enemy that is making hundreds of millions of dollars of of the drug trade but our allies are also making hundreds of dollars for millions of dollars of the drug trade every year so there is a perverse incentive to create stability in the region

i do not want to bore you too much but the minutia of the criminal groups but to give you a brief talk about where they are coming down here, i will point* down in this area in southwestern afghanistan that is mostly criminal groups that call themselves taliban -- taliban this area is the core taliban if you get up into this area, you get into a group that is run by of a leader that has operated there since the early '80s, up into your and you're into the of a group run by a nasty character who many say got his start by throwing acid in women's faces when they started to attend college in afghanistan. negative a pakistan you have

people like one by the operates in this area they all involved and gun running, drug smuggling, he meant trafficking, -- human trafficking and as they move into this direction and every step of the way everything they do is establish a mechanism for earning money. it is usually a listen funds. united nations estimates the taliban earns about $400 million per year off of the drug trade. i put that number closer at half a billion dollars per year but that is because the u.n. office of drug control does extensive surveys. they do great work. they don't count the donations of commodities, trucks,

motorcycl es, telephones, they actually only count the taxes that are taken nine refineries, protection money, i put the number closer at half a billion dollars per year but either way it is an astonishing amount of money and far more than it costs them to run their operation. nobody has any idea how much al qaeda and the imu are turning off of the drug trade it may be as much as 400 million or more. they come into the drug trade right at the moment where the drugs leave the region and that the farm gate level a kilo of 0:00 p.m. cost about $75 in afghanistan. by the time it reached pakistan border is done of 12 times by the time it is refined into crystal heroin and moves toward the west of has gone up 200 times so of

fewer moving it out of the farm you're you're making a bit of money but if you are moving it to other parts of the world you are really making a killing 9/11 only cost $500,000 so i think people often say the last thing we want to do is get involved in another messy drug war columbia has been a disaster, mexico is looking messy why should we bother doing this and getting sucked into this and afghanistan? i will agree the things that need to happen to turn this around will be extremely expensive and complex and will take a long time, it will not be easy, take a lot of quarter nation which is something the coalition operating there has famously lacked since 2001. but i think the consequences

of not fighting this could be astronomical, absolutely unimaginable. so on that happy note too. [laughter] i am open for questions [applause] >> if you have a question please wait for the microphone >> can you talk go little bit about how you collected the evidence and what your field research was like? >> sure. some of the work, a lot of the interviews i did myself like

collected about five years, hiding some of my work in my trips for abc and i also did a report for the west as a kid of peace which gave me a grant for $38,000 which i spent mostly on local researchers who helped me. resurveyed 350 people that may not sound like a big people but reaching 350 people who work in or alongside the drug trade controlling by the insurgents was no easy matter. resurveyed them then went back based on those results and a dozen more interviews. the process of collecting information was complicated by the fact that i had two children during that period and also it has become hard to bounce down to afghanistan

lumbar crushing highways when you are six months pregnant but also became so dangerous over the course of my research that a lot of these places i could not go any more. local guides refused to take me i was a liability i would get them killed or us kidnapped so that means i had to send them by themselves which in some ways it was an advantage because i use researchers that were from local journalist from the areas where they operated. they had tribal and family connections able to get terrific information but sometimes they had different ideas about what was important and interesting. one example, i have a chapter of the biggest drug smuggler of the region was recently arrested and is here in new york at the sec prison on the lower east side.

and i was getting really frustrated parlayed through the research because i had not got 10 an interview with anybody who physically knew him. i was getting all second-hand information and it was frustrating. i said, researchers with an order to find people who knew him, met with him, what is he like? there are such colorful stories apolo escobar and his incredible temper i wanted to know what he was like with a person's a comeback with color i waited for about two weeks and finally sent me email that said his favorite food is check-in. [laughter] which is really what i was looking for so sometimes it worked to our advantage and other times the struggle to

get the affirmation that i wanted. and i was sorry i could not do more field research but it had just become too dangerous. >> could you comment on the international banking in terms of processing all of that money? howl in terms a process that amount of money? >> i have a chapter on the the money trail in the book and i researched this. that is when things get scary. of lot of the money that is connected to the insurgency basically comes through pakistan some of it is parked in real-estate. anybody here who has been to afghanistan and pakistan recently has seen the explosion recently of a huge

being mass buildings with green windows and ghastly sculpture real-estate seems to be a place they park their money and once you have made a few real-estate deals your money is clean and has a trailer park and other place is through the hawala network. there are efforts to regulate the hawala trade but anyone who spent two the hawala network knows how hard that will be. another place that i visited that was very, very interesting is down and the karachi, the karachi stock exchange has grown 250% annually. so if you go down there and there are four or five stockbroker's came out of nowhere. one was a bookie for the cricket games.

who appeared, the head of the stock exchange, there is a terrific head of the karachi stock exchange resigned in disgust and and demanded they be interviewed he said of of this drug money bid is definitely dirty money. they are flipping stocks and you do a couple of stock trades and the money comes up cleans of that becomes the kse is a way that it enters the western banking institutions and it has been interesting to watch a lot of western banks have opened and finance companies have opened branches despite all of the dangers because of the money coming through. the other is the real estate and do by the city with 20% of the world's grains. people say it is a royal rich

sheikdom what a better place to park your money? that is something the that nobody is examining this provided some of it on my own for one chapter but with the u.s. government i am not sure what our intelligence dollars are going for but when i asked people about this they say really? if this and do buy? [laughter] it is kind of spending that nobody has bothered to work on this. >> do you see any hope for afghanistan any time soon? he has different ethnicities and why not breaking it up

that makes sense for local populations? >> i always think of afghanistan as being more unified as a nation that pakistan the afghans are always fighting for kabul and did pakistan they are always having a separatist movement. yet any number going on. i can see a way out of the afghan problem nation-building has become a dirty word in washington basically all of these committees need lot and order if we could establish governance we certainly would not get rid of the taliban and al qaeda to kill them all it is like the doritos ad they just keep making more. [laughter] but if we actually make them irrelevant by giving people a good alternative, i think that is the exit strategy for the reason. people talk about that being

expensive, complex, taking years and i do not disagree but we're already spending $2 billion per month on our military operation alone and surely that is not sustainable either. even the nation-building is a dirty word it is one that i will keep saying because i think it is the only way out of that region. for me the bigger concern is the speed with which the insurgents are moving across pakistan which i do see a tremendous risk for splitting into different parts and there is then all state department joke because the pakistani is all believe secretly washington's plan is to split up into four different countries and the state department says of one pakistan gives us this much imagine what we get from four of them lot. [laughter] i was sitting around and talking about the taliban just

before i left last year we were saying for the first time i can actually see pakistan disintegrating. viet nwfp along the afghan border and the western province, what most of those are virtually uncovered there is no governance whatsoever either some form of rebellion or the gang controls the area. that is a pretty scary situation because that is more than half of the pakistan land area so that is the biggest worry now to me. >> [inaudible] i am just wondering the pakistan government or isi if they are falling dirty trails? >> that is another super

aspect of the whole story that it is quite clear and i trace this in the history chapter up to the president coming it has been very clear that we talk about drug corruption in the afghan government of the pakistani government has been just as corrupted if not more so by the drug trade and nobody more so than the isi progress was very well known that during the days of the soviet resistance that isi officers were profiting richly that would continue while the taliban were in power and many people believe it still goes on today. with british intelligence documents indicate for example, the isi station chief in the western city where most of the drugs move through that one the cartel was paying

$2 million every year just to make sure the shipments got through produce to the idea of the amount of money you are talking about is pretty scary. >> one question i have spent thinking about i am doing a documentary called who was wearing the emperor's new clothes and a lot of things we find in the government is things are not what they appear to be. and the trade of kings was then war and i wonder if around the world may be there are people we look that we pay for it but maybe we're not seeing the whole picture? maybe there is some benefit. you mentioned karzai brother and maybe it is the chaos and what you think about that? >> there is a small population

of people with iran and dubai and value 82 profited enormously and imu but it is a small population and of lot of r names are well known to western officials prefer a few examples there is a terrific report recently in toronto globe and mail about the fact there is documented evidence the deputy counter narcotics minister in afghanistan is deeply involved in the drug trade for everybody hears the story for everybody hears about karzai everybody hears about the pakistan government that we hear about being involved in the drug trade yet nobody ever goes and investigates there is never

the investigation there is no reason we could not set up a truth commission working with afghan and pakistani officials if the charges prove to me accurate which i think they usually are they could be extradited and tried this summer. certainly the judiciary system is not equipped to deal with them at this point*. >> but the fear adds that maybe they want the elements in place and the powers that the because the element of fear gives them more power? >> it certainly benefits those in power. overall we see what is happening in both of those countries. >> so for the average person's

income is there something we can do to help? is the boating, taking a trip? don't use drugs. [laughter] >> for all if you are really depressed and want to go home and smoke a joint. [laughter] afghan drugs do not tend to get smuggled into the united states though you do not have to worry that the drugs you are taking will not support osama bin laden. i do think the obama administration has the right idea but the question is do we have enough money and can we get enough support from other allies within notes -- nano and a coalition? it will take not only an enormous amount of troops that we send out another 17,000

soldiers but it will take an enormous number of civilian officials, law-enforcement officials, the people that our agricultural experts, they can help train lawyers and get the judicial system working, this is a nation that is badly broken. that will require an enormous force of people to help them get back on track. if you're one of those people there will be work for you in afghanistan. [laughter] is that all? >> i am just 48 -- wonder about the justification on their and whether or not is it justifiable to them? or is it the aspect of their

war against america or outright hypocrisy? >> that is a good question the taliban has a bogus justification that they explained two farmers that they persuade or force to grow poppy which is that is lomb of course, bans any use or traffic or trade in narcotics or alcohol. so the justification is that it is okay because this is a jihad against the infidels and they go to the west but very little afghan heroin actually reaches the united states. and is about 70% of the heroin sold in europe and the u.k. comes from afghanistan but the vast majority of the drug crop and up in afghanistan or pakistan, iran, central asia comment kazakhstan have huge

teheran problems. is a bogus argument that is totally hypocritical. good question. >> i am curious i have been looking at this book with the cia complicity with the national drug trade and i am curious about the continuity of your work and your debt to him. and at two weeks ago there was a former at npr journalist and i do not remember her name. but she was billed as the adviser to general mccarron. >> sayre of chase. >> yes. one day after her interviewed general mccarron was forced to resign i cannot help of wonder there was a relation between that interview and his

resignation? >> i have no idea about that. i do not even know how the pentagon makes decisions nor did i see the interview briefing sarich ase has done a lot of great work in southern afghanistan but in terms of the rumor of the cia involvement, this is something i heard all the time over and over one of the reasons the u.s. was not stopping the drug trade was because our agents were secretly involved. i even had a governor, no less than a governor he was not even a bozo he was a very serious individual tell me he thought there was a deal between the bin laden family and the bush family to move drugs out of the reason -- region because not only is the u.s. doing so little to stop its attacks the resisting efforts to stop it. that will be one of the great

conspiracy theories from the region sort of like who shot kennedy? >> i do not want to sound conspiratorial. >> buydown either i avoid getting sucked into the theories but it is fascinating when you start seeing pakistani is in senior positions that are convinced there is a grand conspiracy going on between the cia and drug smugglers i never found anything that proved it but you see a lot of stories. >> it sounds like to see an increase of the year when as you get further away it speaks to the idea that i have heard from the media to plans to appeal of the peripheral taliban with financial incentives. >> i think there are a lot of

communities that are involved in a growing poppy in afghanistan that could be peeled away from the insurgency. one of the misunderstandings of the west is the idea that afghan farmers grow poppy because they are greedy. there are a small amount of huge farmers huge land owners or making a lot of money off of the poppy trade but the vast majority that work on the ground and in afghanistan are not only barely eking now a living but victimized by the traffickers who have implemented the predatory structure which means those to plant poppy can sell their crop and the fall and get paid for its but then the way the infrastructure works they own more by the time the spring harvest comes along and you hear appalling stories of farmers and give up their land and having to sell their daughters to the traffickers who work with human

trafficking rings and so it is a misunderstanding that is common that people are getting rich off of the poppy trade there is a very, very small amount of people who were making money. they're very powerful but there is the attitude that you get i hear a lot from u.s. officials that afghan farmers in the south are greedy. and they just want the money and poppy sells 12 or 10 times more than other things that they grow. in my research and it is backed up by people who have done other research on the farmers themselves that i have but it is absolutely untrue. people's lives are being chewed up by the criminality and extremism. and i actually think very similar to the way the suni awakening brought