launched against al-zawahiri who was believed to be in that village. we didn't get him on that occasion we have since struck that same village another four times since 2006. so this is the classic ancestral homeland of the accidental guerilla. one of the reasons they don't like us is western powers have

been blowing their village up for 150 years. [laughter] >> and if you're worried about the collapse of pakistan more than you're worried about killing al-qaeda senior leadership, i think you would have to say that continuing the drone strikes in pakistan probably has more negative consequences than positive. so on balance i'm against it but i think we should reserve the right to strike number one and number two if we see them but that's a pretty short list. >> yes, please. >> i focus on pakistan's counterinsurgency at the university. i want to stick with pakistan and uav as a tactic but also talk about new strategy announced by president obama president obama. it seems like a slippery slope you've got all the seven agencies in six frontier regions but then you have the swat valley and then you have other areas where they're moving so if i'm al-qaeda i would like to move away further away from drones.

secretary gates, holbrooke and even president obama has said the u.s. troops in pakistan is a red line u.s. government does not want to cross but it looks like a slippery slope but if they move and drone attacks are extended but are not very effective where does that all lead to and eventually if u.s. troops do come in, what would be the backlash? >> there's already been a very substantial political destabilization as you know resulting from the presence of the pakistani army in the tribal areas and from the drone strikes as they already exist so i kind of agree with the administration that putting u.s. troops into northwestern pakistan or any part of pakistan would be just an incredibly destabilizing event. i want to back up a little bit because one of the things we did in iraq was we stepped back and

we said, what's our political strategy, okay? let's just hold off for a second on who we're going to kill and let's figure out first what kind of political environment are we trying to create and what's the end state of what's the political state we're looking for and how do we get there and how does that have in the political process and there were some who were very firm on that process. i'm not sure we've done that in pakistan. i think we're striking targets 'cause we can find them. not because we've decided that we have a political strategy and that's the means to achieving it. you know, this but i'm not sure if everyone in the audience does. the fatah is governed under the frontier crimes regulation written in 1849, amended in 1901 and it's basically a collective punishment indirect colonial rule-system where the basic fundamental deal is, the tribes and the fatah and the political

agent and as long as they're quiet we're not going to send the army in to kick your ass. okay, that's the basic principle how the place is governed. in 2002 in the valley campaign through pressure from the international community the pakistani army for the first time in pakistani history went into the tribal areas in full force and war-fighting mode and instead of fulfilling the bargain of don't cause trouble or we're going to come in and kick your ass, they lost. that means the pakistani army called their own bluff. and now the tribes don't respect the army anymore. and one of the results of this process and repeated failed incursions into the tribal areas has been the fundamental system. i've talked with a lot of people from the frontier corps, and they say, we're going to get back to the roj. we're going to restrengthen the power of the political agent.

we're going to get the frontier scouts working again. we're going to fix the tribal structure and go back to the old ways. i'm not sure that's right. i think it was probably a bankrupt structure any way. the reason the british created that system was not because they wanted a well administered portion of what was india. it was to create a hedge if the russians decided to invade. i think we need to go back to a grassroots and saying, what do we need to achieve in northwest pakistan that's going to lead to a cessation of violence. a very radical leader who's ba-ja sat with me why don't you have elections. let the political parties operate in the fatah. let us hold local elections. whoever gets elected can run the place. it'll be like the rest of pakistan. why do you treat us like an internal colony? and, of course, the standard american response to that is, if

we do that, the radicals will get elected and then the radicals will end up owning it but this guy was a j.o.y. politician and in the very next election they got trounced by the secular nationalists so i don't think it's a done deal that the radicals are going to get elected. the only thing that i can think of that we could do to increase the chances of radicals getting elected would be to keep on striking them with drones. >> trudy? >> thank you. trudy rubin. can we make progress in afghanistan without first making progress in pakistan, which was a question that several senators asked general petraeus this morning. and can we make progress in pakistan if the pakistani army continues to really reject the idea of a counterinsurgency

doctrine and change its strategy and its tactics thereby going in and flattening villages, creating new refuge flows, et cetera. >> well, a couple of points on that. firstly, i think the pakistanis have changed their approach over the last few years and we've seen a pretty significant improvement. the campaign this year while, you know, they had some problems were certainly nothing like some of the previous campaigns they've conducted so i think they're getting better and we should give them credit for that but i think the fundamental problem in pakistan is not one of capacity. we could always work with the pakistanis to help them do things better. but first there has to be a change in some of the motivation of certain elements within the pakistani security development. i'm not suggesting the whole pakistani army, or the whole of isi or any of the rest of the

pakistani national security services are on the other side. but certain key elements within those organizations still continue to tolerate and in some cases assist the afghan taliban. this has been admitted by the pakistani government. it's not a secret. the problem is always to understand is this local road commanders or is it a certain rogue element within the service or are these people following orders that come from the very top of the pakistani government? you know, who's giving the orders that are creating that support for the enemy? i don't think it's one or the other. i think the truth is somewhere in between. and i certainly don't think that the pakistani civilian leadership under president zadari is supporting the taliban so that leads me to say that the fundamental problem in pakistan

is that you have a civilian-elected democratic political leadership that doesn't control its own national security establishment and elements within that national security establishment are working against us. the classic example of this is after the mumbai attacks when president zadari promised to send the head of the attacks and the general kiyani said, no, that won't be happening and contradicted the president in public and kept isi out of the investigation. until that motivation changes, i don't think we're going to see a lot of different motivation. we need to -- not we, the pakistanis need to receive a security guarantee that makes them feel comfortable enough to stop mounting the attacks. coming back to the iraq example. if the sunni community hadn't been given some kind of security guarantee they would have no choice supporting al-qaeda. we got to take a similar approach with the pakistanis and say how can we raise their comfort level where they don't

feel they need to support the taliban anymore? that will require some pretty tricky bilateral diplomatic work thank god we have richard holbrooke in charge of that because i would not want that job. but a regionally-based guarantee to the pakistanis is probably the only thing that's going to get us to the point where they feel comfortable to not support the taliban. [inaudible] >> yes, absolutely. >> yes, please. >> paula, i'm a research assistant at harvard university and an army reservist that has been called three timing. i read michelle was advocating for the civilian response corps which would fall under the state department and i'm wondering if you could comment on the feasibility and efficacy of such a corps and how soon we might see it? >> first thing, thank you for your service.

there's been a lot of discussion where the civilians and there have been successive attempts within the state department to increase the number of field-deployable civilians who can get in the higher risk environment and do civilian jobs but in a more dangerous context. is eric here? i think he is somewhere. eric was the first aid officer in afghanistan. and he went out individually, you know, carrying a weapon, working with special forces patrols delivering all the aid capability of a normal aid officer but in a much more high risk environment. at that time he was probably a foreign antibody in the aid structure and people were very nervous about that. similarly, i know a number of state department officers, dan green, who worked in afghanistan who undertook some extremely

dangerous activities to do the political reporting and get the sort of state department job done. but again, those guys weren't institutionally supported. they were individuals who were out doing their thing because they thought it was important. what we're seeing now is a shift to institutionally support those guys. that's the role of the civilian response corps among other structures that are in state and elsewhere. the civilian response corps is probably going to change under the obama administration and given the discussion that's happened since the nothing else and also during the campaign i think we'll see more money going into foreign assistance generally and certainly an increase inattention to raising greater civilian capacity. but i hate to tell you there's no santa claus. it's not going to happen soon enough to make a difference for you. it takes time to build these kind of capabilities. the military is going to have to keep doing them for most of the foreseeable future. and actually, although it may

not necessarily be the core mission of the military to do these kind of nation-building tasks i think we all recognize if it doesn't get done by the military in a lot of cases it's not going to be done so it's about the military being in the capacity and the other agencies bringing the knowledge, putting those two together and generating a result. not that the military doesn't have knowledge but, you know, there is a lot of expertise in the civilian agency government that we need to bring to the fight. so, you know, i'm positive that it's going to improve but i think it's going to be a slow process. >> the gentleman all the way in the back. >> thank you. my name is dominick donald. you mentioned several areas and i'd like to take that on a little. one of the interesting things about those areas is that 50 years before churchill was trotting around there they became a center of sort of the include on the frontier and that was if you like a kind of early -- a kind of precursor of some of the thinking of al-qaeda

inasmuch it was an alien radical entity in sort of putting itself in a very specific local belief system where it found good roots. and then i'd like to move on to territory that is very much yours which is indonesia. one of the striking things about indonesia, of course, it's very varying and socratic, you know, it has -- depending where you are, there are different variations on sort of the practice of islam and the different elements that have come in to build up that local practice of islam. and i wonder, therefore -- i haven't read your book yet. i'm going to be buying it, i assure you. [laughter] >> although your answer may be decisive. [laughter] >> unfair. >> is it worth building up local

belief systems, local interpretations of faith in areas where accidental guerillas might be emerging or has globalization basically meant that's not possible? that those belief systems have lost much of what is distinctive and it's not doable. >> well, the answer is very simple. it depends. [laughter] >> but the explanations are a little more complex. when i was in indonesia in the 1990s i was working with ex-members with a separatist muslim organization that was across three different provinces in indonesia. those guys were xenophobic, traditional, orthodox, socratic. they had a strong overtone to their theology. they believed in charms. they were very much like

traditional northern western islam in their belief system. a large number of the people that were working with me in the 1990s joined g.i., the al-qaeda ally in 2001. those guys had an arab-centric world view. they had a completely different theology to the j.i. guys and d.i. was focused not only in indonesia. they had a global focus. why would people join two such theologically different movements in some cases the same individuals in many cases members of the same family? why would they do that. theology can't be the explanation for that. you know, the same group joins two different organizations. it doesn't explain it. also, the theological basis for al-qaeda has been present in islam for about 1,000 years. so why isn't it always been like this, okay? again, theology can't explain the al-qaeda phenomenon.

it has to be something else. similarly, if you look at indonesian history there are period of breakout of radical islam that happened at times of flux and crisis in indonesian society. what i suggest is it's those times of flux and crisis and the underlying sort of deep structures of how tribes, social groups work, those things are a much more powerful explanation for what we see than islam. what i tend to say islam is the language, not the logic. and if you take that and apply it to pakistan, bin laden is one of a long line of cranky guys in caves hiding out in the hindu area. the difference between him and the mad mullah or any of the other guys going back to the mid-19th century he has the tools of globalization. he can beam his message in

living rooms to the best by al-jazee al-jazeera. and it's in my cycle, it's the contagionon affect. radical groups have tried to take over local groups. it's been part and parcel of life in that part of that world for centuries. the different thing is now there's a contagion possibility which brings our response to the united states and other western powers. now, let me be very clear here i'm not saying intervention is bad. the alternative to intervery long is more 9/11s. we have have we have to get involved in this extremely radical but very small group that's opposed to the west. that's about how you do it. and doing it while make the local people your ally the vast amounts of my examples in the book that's a much better approach than doing it

unilaterally or in a high profile way and alienates them and strengthens the radical group. it's how to intervene and not whether to intervene. >> yes, the gentleman over there, please. >> i'm from international peace operations association. in your book you recommend getting the lexicon right because of the constraint of names. so i'm wondering the global war on terror has been dropped and we now have overseas contingency operations. i'm wondering if you could speak to that. >> and manmade disasters. >> yes. [laughter] >> man-caused disasters, yeah. you know, it's not human-caused disasters. i think it's interesting. [laughter] >> a little reverse sexism there. look, a lot of people have said how idiotic the label "war on terror" is.

because, you know, you don't make war on a tactic and all that kind of stuff. got that. it was -- it was then and it is now and it always has been just a political label, you know? and today we have a new political label so i think we have to engage with these things on a level of political discourse rather than as a sort of definitional problem of what are we dealing with. i think if you look at what the administration is trying to do, i think they're trying to get everybody to take a deep breath to calm down and to move away from some of the language of fear and confrontation that's been creating tension. i think that's a valid effort and i'd remind you that the bush administration did that on a number occasions as well. it's not an obama administration thing. i think everyone has recognized there's a need to kind of de-stress the discussion. so call it whatever you want it's probably going to still be the same on the ground but if you change the label, it does eventually change the way people think about things. when i called for a new lexicon

i was talking about something slightly different. i was mentioning the fact that most of the words that we use to describe the threat actually tell you what the threat is not. rather than what it is. it's a nonstate actor waging unconventional war, asimetcally. so you know whatever it is it's not symmetrical. it's not a state. it's not conventional. it's not regular. okay, got that but what is it? and i think we need to move beyond that sort of unwords language and actually start engaging with what is it that we're dealing with here. >> the gentleman in the first row, please. >> tim reed. just back to pakistan again. you have as the president said last week, al-qaeda is mostly in pakistan, not in afghanistan. you have taliban and al-qaeda leadership in big cities. and yet you cannot have american boots on the ground and you have

a pakistani army which seems incapable of tackling them. so in practical terms, how do you tackle them? and secondly, what threat do the tribal areas in the northwest of pakistan pose to the rather fraile civilian government? -- fragile civilian government? >> i think there are two keys to getting progress in the current situation in pakistan. one is to strengthen the rule of law in accountability, the judiciary, those sorts of elements to the government and improve the authority of this elected civilian leaders. the other is the pakistani police. pakistani military and isi are externally focused. they're worried about the threat of india. there's only one element in the pakistani national security establishment whose matter concern is state collapse and extremist takeover and that's the pakistani police and the

pakistani police have actually done some very, very good work in community policing, stabilizing the environment and counter-radicalization and most of the good counterinsurgency work that's happened in pakistan has been done by the police. and yet we've underresourced our assistance to the police dramatically. we've given large amounts of resources to the military which have often been diverted to platforms that address india instead of focusing on the local civilian administrators, judges, the rule of law, police, all those sorts of things that bring about stability to the people. so i would suggest those two lines of operation. the political line to do with improving the throw-weight of the civilian government and then in terms of assistance, focusing on the police and the judiciary. >> i think our speaker must be getting thirsty. and so with apologies to people

who have questions you can put them to dave when you buy one of his books and get him to sign it, but i want to ask one concluding question of my own. mark sageman, former cia officer now psychiatrist who's written very thoughtfully about terrorism argues in his most recent book about the third generation of al-qaeda that left to itself this movement is burning itself out. and that if we avoid doing stupid things, that will happen over time. we have to be very -- continue to go after first generation al-qaeda where we find them but if we avoid dumb mistakes, this is generationally going to die out. do you share that view? and if you don't, say why you think it's wrong? >> i think i do broadly share

the view. i think we've seen a substantial drop of support of al-qaeda over the last few years. not only for al-qaeda. every time j.i. does a bombing in indonesia their public approval rating drops dramacally is nonbelonging to the mass muslim organizations. so it's when people leave the mosque that they become radicalized. i think that shows you that the movement is losing steam ideologically. having said that, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to disappear and fade away overnight because a lot of these movements can be sustained more easily as an internal network than they can as a mass movement. there's a researcher at the naval postgraduate study where he shows insurgencies end slowly where you drive the insurgency down to a point where it becomes harder and harder to find the insurgents and then they can

stay at that low level for a very long time. and if the pressure is relaxed or the situation changes they can come back. so i think the threat of al-qaeda will continue to go down. it will reach the point where it's no longer threatening national society or individual state but it's still a threat there in the background. i don't think that means we can necessarily relax. that is we the security services can necessarily relax. i think that the majority of people can go about their daily lives but we still need to be vigilant with regard to al-qaeda for some considerable future. >> ladies and gentlemen, that concludes an extraordinary hour of thinking about some of the most important issues we face. i'd like to thank all of you. it's still true. i said -- i said it was going to happen and it did. i'd like to thank all of you for the great questions and for coming out here tonight. i'd like to thank david for typically thoughtful and deep questions and most of all i'd

like to thank dave kilcullen for all he's done and all he continues to do to help us understand the enemies we face and to fight them more effectively. thank you all. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> david kilcullen a former australian infantry officer is a senior fellow at the center for a new american security and a partner at the crumpton group. from washington, d.c.-based strategic firm. before that, he served as special advisor for counterinsurgency for secretary of state condoleezza rice. for more, visit cnas.org and search his name.

♪ >> this summer book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> well, right now i'm reading on my kindle which i have sort of given up paper to save trees and also for convenience when i'm traveling. i'm reading it on my kindle which is electronic books that i can download through a wireless connection. i'm reading the soul of the age which is a new biography about william shakespeare. years ago i had the chance to visit in england a royal shakespeare theater and i sort of become a shakespeare fan in my old age. i wish i'd felt as strongly about studying shakespeare when i was in school. maybe i would have gotten better grades. but that's what i'm reading now. usually what i do is i get a big long list of books and i stack them up on my night table and i don't seem to make much progress there but, you know, i like all sorts of books ranging from

books about lincoln. there's one that i've read recently i really liked a lot called lincoln's sword. it's not about his military prowess or fighting the civil war. it's about his use of words, which they called his sword and it's really well done. he was an extraordinary writer and speaker and this is about how he honed those skills. >> to see more summer reading lists and other program information, visit our website at booktv.org. ♪ >> elizabeth brackett correspondent talks about her biography of former illinois governor rod blagojevich. this is part of the printers row litfest. it's about 45 minutes.