he comes into the office a couple times per week to check the mail but he is busy painting, he is still writing comedy is pursuing his own stuff part of my first or did he would come and every day so i am glad to have that privilege to work with him. >> stacey louis marketing director of city lights publishing in san francisco. thank you. . .

>> host: welcome. i am ralph peters and it is my distinct privilege and a lot of fun to be able to speak today with one of the most talented writers i've ever met in a very brave young man, author nicolas schmidle and his book is "to live or to perish forever" two tumultuous years in pakistan and they were in the tumultuous. welcome, agreed to see you. congratulations on a terrific book. as a fellow writer i can only be anne gurley jobless but i love you any way. this book has a great back story. at the ripe age of 27, newly

married, you persuaded your wife a great idea for a honeymoon would be to go to pakistan and lived amongst the people for two years. we will set aside for now how your wife responded. you're still married so obviously it worked. but can you tell the background of this terrific narrative what pakistan is really like? you're nailed it. the people, the smells, the field in the air took me aback. >> guest: thanks, ralph. right at the time i was finishing graduate school in the summer of 2005i received a fellowship from the current world affairs which is a foundation funded by the crane foundation that you see the crane a logo on toilets are in the country and they send people on to your fellowships' so i got this originally to go to iran but we were having major problems getting in and i said i don't know anything about pakistan but it seems like a fascinating dynamic country so they sent me there for two years, the only instructions

being go there, don't come home, udo. so to make matters more complicated left valentine's day, february 2006 and arrived in pakistan at the time -- you recall the protests against the blasphemous cartoons and i was frightened i was off the airplane and ripped apart. it didn't go that way. it turned out to be a fantastic two years so that's the basis of the book and how we got there to begin with. >> host: what shook me about this book when i read i read as both a reader and a writer myself. and it is a very mature book. i mean, it's astonishingly objective. it's something that might have been written by authority-year-old or 45-year-old except for the fact that you're much more energetic. you tell the story well and cleanly but beyond that you seem

to have a gift of establishing of sympathy but empathy with some very, very dangerous people in fact the kind of people that killed daniel pearl and we will talk about that later. but first, nick, i would like you to talk about pakistan itself because with pakistan so much in the headlines and obviously a timely book "to live or to perish forever." but do you think americans don't know about pakistan? can you give a feel for the country? >> guest: i feel good americans don't understand is the dynamism of the country. the title was written by a muslim 14 years before the creation of pakistan. >> host: "to live or to perish forever"? >> guest: "to live or to perish forever." the title was now or never are we to live or perish for ever and this young man proposed it's time for the northwest provinces of the united india to come join into a single muslim state along with bangladesh on the eastern

wing of india, and in the same he proposed that these five provinces, the afghani province also west, they become pakistan and so this was the acronym, this was the basis. >> host: pakistan meaning? >> guest: it's the pakistan and also means urdo land of the pure. it was an amalgamation to bring people united by one thing and one thing only and that was islam. >> host: and i suppose the obvious question is was that a sufficient basis for a state because in my own time in pakistan will let out at me was when you cross the indus river which essentially bisects pakistan north to south you transition between two civilizations rest of the indus you have central asia, the look of the people, even the bland

taste of the food and go east of the indus and maybe you cross and go to islamic god and say nothing and lahore and you're in the subcontinent culture. the food is spicy, the colors are more vivid. does pakistan work? >> guest: it does work. i am not of the chicken little school that thinks pakistan is always on the verge of collapse. pakistan somehow i think has persevered negative 1971 civil war the dow was geographically unattainable to begin with. but i think pakistan works in so far as it moves ahead. it doesn't work -- it is still grappling with a single identity. you travel around pakistan and your right, the index does divide the civilizations. but you ask pakistanis in various parts of the country how do they identify themselves. they rarely ever if ever identified themselves as

pakistanis first. it's either punjabis or pashtuns, whatever their identity is, tribal identity and the muslim and then pakistani. so you see the tears of identity. so in that sense, the idea of pakistan has never really taken root amongst the civilization, the population. >> host: yet when british india was partitioned in 47 coming into two states, now three, bangladesh of course spun off in 71, but you look at india that just finished a month of immense elections except for a brief interlude in the emergency rule the democracy in india has never been interrupted and have a military coup. it's worked. and yet pakistan has had at least four military coups, several attempted, disrupted elections. what's the difference? >> guest: no government in pakistan has fulfilled its term and that is crucial -- the institutions have never successfully taken root. the politics of u.s. relations

with pakistan have also always been based on personalities and if we look at post 9/11 it was based on president musharraf and at the expense of civil institutions, and so you see now the country wants those institutions to develop. you see from pakistan is the all the country in the world where, the only muslim country where tens of thousands of people come to protest and demand will fall and to demand the judiciary so this is very unique about pakistan overlooked compared to other countries. compared to india it's hard to say exactly how do you differentiate culture but there is something very distinct. when you cross the border from pakistan to india you speak the same language and when we leave, my wife and i traveled from lahore to india. >> host: did you see the fancy semidey? >> guest: salles fancies their money with the goose-stepping. >> host: the last british legacy. >> guest: exactly. once you leave your not even

leaving you're just coming in and everyone is gruff and stamping your visa and flipping through very judiciously and then you get to india and everyone is all smiles and it's like how do you sort of explain that geography? how do you explain a matter of 10 feet the border guards temperament? i never quite got to that but there is something distinctly different about the culture and sense of civic responsibility. >> host: leader in the show i would like to come back to the complexity of islam and pakistan but first i want to get to your book because apart from all the readers learn about the reality of everyday life in pakistan and the complexity behind it, they are great stories. i mean, you went there and it's an object of book. it's very honest. yet you were driven out of pakistan almost literally by the intelligence services in a fit of paranoiacs toward the end of

your proposed state and then you managed to go back, and get that second time you had to leave under a very real sense of danger that the black forces in pakistan at work. so they are great stories but it's to your credit again you maintain your odd activity. you can't peg this as a liberal or conservative. it's just joe friday the fax man. some of the stories are terrific and the one that captured me is the way that you were able to build personal empathy work relationship with the mullah, the red moscow would later died violently in a standoff. can you tell about him and how that worked? >> guest: sure. i promised my parents and my wife before i went to pakistan i wasn't going to get involved with jihadis. >> host: so you immediately did. >> guest: sali spent a month and have not dealing with the

jihadis and i felt like i'm skirting around the issue and i need to work my way into this. and the impression i always had is if you wanted to understand jihadis you needed to be in karachi or the border areas. little did i know there was a mosque across town in kaj quaint islamabad called the ret mosque. and islamabad is an incredibly dull place. there is no night life. a friend once called it low self-esteem-abad. there was a red mosque run by this very charismatic set of brothers named abdul aziz and ghazi was the younger and ran the religious side. to get and i needed introduction and thought the introduction, the guy that interest me was the same individual, a close friend of osama bin laden.

and the first -- >> host: you're talking to someone who is a close friend of osama bin laden. you're father is aryan corps general officer. your brother was fighting in afghanistan at the time i believe. iraq, and a marine corps uniform. so this is a serious risk taking on your part. >> guest: yet, it raised all sort of moral -- it brought me to a moral and pass more than once, like you said you have to empathize or you will never be allowed in. you have to show a sincere interest. the understanding interest and when someone is trying to come in and get a quote. and i was able to successfully convey i was interested in understanding more about what they were thinking, more about their movement, more about their grievances were over the pakistani state, etc.. so this individual was very close with osama. he was a former pilot in the pakistani air force. and he was to be the introduction to ghazi. and i met him for lunch one day

and he had a little checkered past and that he had been the person daniel pearl had gone to to be introduced to sheik gilani. the head honcho of the group said daniel pearl was trying to meet when he was contacted. and he said to daniel i've talked to gilani, he says he won't meet you. and initio. fines out daniel pearl as he says to me i'm going to go talk to ghazi. if i tell you ghazi is off limits i don't want to hear your going behind my back to find another way to meet ghazi. i told daniel pearl this and you saw what happened. and i thought jack blease, this is the introduction. i thought for sure ghazi is going to be nasty and scary and it turned out that ghazi actually looked and behaved in many ways like jerry garcia. >> host: kind of raleigh wally. >> guest: bearded, long curls, fake beard, round spectacles and was very jovial and was easy to

laugh and was very open and didn't have anything to hide. he was open about his relationship with various jihadi groups and i don't know that he ever knew my family background but nonetheless he opened up to me so that was the basis in fact recently the second half of the book which is my four days and two jihadi camps and different groups and what not and it was based on this relationship with ghazi. >> host: there's several sections in the book. could you read one from the ret mosque and then when you talk about how we all ended. >> guest: so, you know, i'd met ghazi probably half a dozen times, and in the early part of 27 is when ghazi -- he had female madrassa students and they had taken every children's library and this was their response in moscow and this was the top position of moscow. a journalist asked ghazi now that you're going after the

brothel's does this signal the taliban of islam and his response was when rudy governor of new york he went after the brothels of new york, did anyone call that the talabanization and it wasn't quite analogy but tuesday. >> host: de are much more media savvy than the westerners realize. >> guest: he had a master's from the university, secular university in islamabad and in 1997 the same year he visited osama bin laden in kandahar with his father he also was an employee of unicef, said he had a foot in both worlds which made him accessible and incredibly dangerous because he knew how to work the media. he also knew what sold and what didn't. he never talked -- he would talk about his opposition to the government and sympathy to the taliban but never about the sympathy for the secretary organizations the red cross was affiliated with because he knew sunni skilling she has didn't play well in the media. so this is me once in ghazi's

office. i pointed up something against his computer desk. that's knew i said. no, i've always had that. but what about that, i asked, pointing to the short cylinder fixed to the barrel. that's a grenade launcher. a friend gave it to me, ghazi said. he showed me how it worked able to launch grenades over a wall. in other words perfect weapon against an encroaching force if you are surrounded by high walls inside a mosque. ghazi overhauled his information after the female commandos took over the childrens' library. half a dozen new computers were brought in and buy several ghazi's tech savvy disciples. industrial ct and tv burners turned out footage of explosions in afghanistan. in response to those who suggested ghazi wanted to take islamabad to the eighth century

he told me, quote, we don't want to go backwards. why would i give up my computer and mobile phone, walkie-talkie and fax machine? the changes were not limited to ghazi's technology there. just about the only thing that didn't change in ghazi's operations center was the, quote, ink color process charge by sherwin-williams on the wall. a weird twists for art, yes but if you were a.g. hoddy believed that depictions of -- what better than to collar a waltham with paint swatches. security tightened as well. getting in to see ghazi became arduous read he requested a call at least one hour before writing to give him time to notify the scouts piecing the sidewalks out front a western journalist was expected and not to attack him with a rusty shovel. >> host: that's great. i have to say i suspect that's the first time c-span ever include a commercial for sherwin-williams paint. [laughter] but yeah, the book of course has to be read. it can't be summarized.

it is so well done. and it just all rings true and i have a built in detector from my own years roaming the world. but ghazi didn't and happily. his arsenal was built out. the confrontation really pause inevitable. can you tell us about the last days of and ghazi. >> guest: july 3rd, 2007 ghazi and his boys kidnapped several chinese masseuses from across islamabad. chinese government got angry. pushed on musharraf and his cohorts to intervene to do something about the ret mosque. >> host: pakistan and china have long relations. >> guest: very close. and this is a bad time for those relations because there had been a landslide on the highway the chinese built bridging islamabad and pakistan and cash car in china called the karakoram highway, the tallest highway in

the world. the chinese of this to open up trade and just about a week earlier there had been a landslide that blocked the road on the pakistani side. the pakistanis couldn't move the rocks out of the way of the chinese were furious sea we built the road just when there's a landslide at least in the misuses were kidnapped so the army and the pakistani rangers and paramilitary force surrendered the mosque july 1st and for 10 days there was a standoff. occasional firing. you could hear blasts across town. we would stand on the roof of my house and watching the fireballs coming up off of the of red moscow and finally the government commandos pushed and and trapped ghazi inside the basement of the mosque and there was a shootout and ghazi was killed. now as we mentioned earlier it was a very awkward moment for me because the government parade ghazi's dead body in front of television and said we got him and my response watching this was okay, we got him, and yet

this guy had been so instrumental introducing me to a whole another world that my contact was gone as well and something -- i mean, he was a friend in a very weird way. but you feel very guilty grieving for someone who led this pro taliban rebellion in the city. >> host: let me remind or tell anyone who attended an late that we are talking with nicholas schmidle, the author of just an incredibly timely and well written new book on pakistan, his ad ventures of pakistan and misadventures, "to live or to perish forever." now, nick, as i mentioned earlier is that the web of relationships, serious human relationships you were able to build with a wide range of pakistani radicals extremists, politicians, average people. and there are times just when i was reading the book and fall on a former soldier and i just

wouldn't have gone there. i would have turned back. it is real bravery i guess you have to be young enough to accomplish. but in the book, you also talked about your first meeting with any kind of radical and just sort of cold shock about how that happened and the realization that you are in now. can you tell a little about that? >> guest: short, this was the first meeting like you said i was going to meet someone who qualified as an extremist and as a member of a band organization and he belonged most awful influential antishia organize nation, which has very close ties with taliban which had been banned by the musharraf government for secretary in killings and what not. and so, what i was trying to understand at this point, this was early 2006, what extent the sectarian violence in iraq was spilling over and we can rekindling tension in pakistan's we wanted to meet this guy to

get an idea. and a friend said he could make the introduction and we got in his friend's car and drove to the outside of karachi. this guy was waiting on the side of the road on his motorcycle and gave a quick hand weights and we started following can into this neighborhood that was totally on marked, all low brick houses and we were winding and winding and i thought okay. ten terms ago i lost my way and we are now -- i thought this is -- your stomach is sort of up here and you're thinking we get to this point and this guy -- what would he not kidnap? the thought of kidnapping was so present in my mind. >> host: this is 2006, not long after daniel pearl's death. >> guest: and the death of daniel is over karachi and every journalist working there is reminded by anyone who works in the media by essentially anyone

in karachi who is abreast of defense will say very careful you know this happened once. i saw a young ambitious western reporter going down this path. so we met this guy and he turned out to be very cordial host. his ideas were couldn't have been more opposite of my own but yet he was still -- he was open and, you know, turned out this was sort of the first example and first window into how this was all going to work in that these guys wanted to be able to have their ways be heard and they were banned by the government so he was an opportunity to speak to a journalist. >> host: and it's well recounted. obviously the book spans a good deal of time on your contacts with radicals including the taliban and i want to talk about your contacts with the taliban and experiences later in the show. but also it does a very good job of bringing out how complex is mom is an certainly ha complexities in pakistan that this is far from wahhabi

country, a great sufi influence and could you perhaps tell the audience -- c-span has got a curious audience and -- about islam's complexity in this context? >> guest: sure. the first basic division is between sunni and shia, and pakistan is about 80% sunni, and about 18% shia. there are small numbers of hindus and christians and muslim minorities that are sort of not considered -- that actually have been branded as on muslims by the government but also follow some aberration of islam. so within the dominant majority sunni tradition, it also breaks down. it breaks down there is a small section what are called -- more or less wahhabis than there are the dale bundy's which are more or less the taliban, they have most of the madrassas in the country of the 13,000 madrassas

about 10,000 of them -- >> host: and those being what was once a very orthodox school of islam founded in india and dale pond and ux describe that very well. >> guest: the souci influence is very strong in pan job. in the northwest frontier province particularly in punjab there is an archipelago of shrines that dustin fees will go and visit and spend hours in the evening reciting poetry, dancing, and it's a very, very unorthodox -- >> host: which drives the wahhabis not. >> guest: and taliban, but one that is happening right now and swat, one of the first thing they did is take over the sufis shrines and say we are now running these, no one comes in. it is a direct threat to them because it is a direct relationship with god. it's a very intimate relationship with god that is acquired through dancing.

>> host: an often julius, the celebration of this sufis. it's not all looking women away. there is just a lot of celebration. >> guest: when i went back in august of 2008, six or seven months after being kicked out i went back to register about one of the celebrations that's the annual celebration to mark one of the saint's death and it's the largest in pakistan, about half a million devote these show up in the middle and it's out of control the greatest party could imagine. we walked in, my photographer and i -- >> host: when i read this sounds like this is the muslim mardigras. >> guest: totally. men and women dancing and it is almost and on the rhythmic dancing. almost like head banging. very, very intense. men, women, people are throwing water and screening, there was a

camel draped in tinsel being walked through the middle and they are just screaming. it's just nuts, you sort of lose yourself. >> host: and you did lose yourself. >> guest: i did. we were in the middle of this tent and the drumming was going on and while the aroma of naturally smoke objects was everywhere maybe there was some sort of contact buzz but all of a sudden it's overwhelming the spiritual and myself and the photographer had been chased around. we spent most of the day being receiving threatening phone calls, reading about my own kidnapping and what not, it was a frightening day. >> host: planted by the intelligence agencies. >> guest: by this time i wanted to let go and with drumming and everything i lost myself for several minutes and we were dancing in this circle and at that point i understood why half a million people descended at this every year. >> host: fortunately you did come back to write a terrific book.

i think americans when they look at pakistan there is some sense that it's just a small place over their somewhere. but in fact it's a huge country with larger square mileage than texas depending what census figures you believe, 170 to 180 million muslims and just before we go to break could you talk a little bit about the differences in the major provinces of baluchistan and i'm sure the punjabis as soldiers and the sunnis as business people. what was your take on the differences? >> guest: this goes back to the point he made earlier about the culture in the indus. bill astana is massive, twice the size of germany. about half the size of pakistan with mi5 million people so you imagine it was described as being by the u.s. geological survey in the 1970's as the closest thing to the moon. >> host: where alexander the great almost perished it's so sparse. >> guest: the water table is 100 feet below the ground.

so the problems are also each province has its own set of problems and baluchistan there is a long simmering ethnic and this is where all of these hopper is to come from india and 47 they settled in the cities of karachi and in the what and took over the dominance of there has been simoni revolutions and all of these provinces have their own set a few will of ethnic dimensions, ethnic dynamics and the northwest frontier province which we will get into in the next was perhaps the most fascinating of all. >> host: certainly is, the wonderful world of modeling the taliban but the cultures of the days of alexander the great and i'm looking forward to talking about that. if you had to summarize pakistan today for the american people one or two sentences and this is a challenge, would you say to them? >>