interest. october 2001 the interest was afghanistan was the site of the camps that incubated the site of the then 11 attacks. . . @ @ x @ @ @ @ @ @ f @ @ j@@. all of the males in the broome are clean shaven, most of us anyway, and you to have broken the law. for this you may be stoned, whipped, carried to the soccer stadium and even more serious punishment could be meted out. this has been your life. now, this life that you have not necessarily chosen, however, has been thrust upon you for a very

simple reason. after the soviets pulled out from afghanistan, that country, these various groups of us in this room began fighting each other. we are of one ethnic background in this room. let's say we are all tajik speak we are the same group that was part of the massoud group. he was somewhat of a famous afghan leader. he was assassinated september 9, 2001, 2 days before september september 11. in in an effort by al qaeda to cut the head of the leadership of the remaining resistance to the taliban movement which at that time controlled 90% of afghanistan. he was hanging on by his fingernails and panjshir valley and in fact according to the people in the book and i have just been in contact with many of them as i have been traveling, it seemed that probably the resistance are what we now know as the northern alliance would collapse within a number of months had not the

american forces arrived. so, we are tajik so we have been fighting with the uzbeks and so on. one after the soviet pullout, what has happened is that we can even move from this room to the next floor here without paying a tariff or being held up at gunpoint by a band it. we can take their goods to market. the country as the evolved into the wild west. so, one day however the bandits go too far, and these are freelancers that no political stripe. there's not a religious orientation in this. they have no agenda except their own self-interest. when dey however to young children are killed by these bandits. the villagers near kandahar are so enraged that they run to mullah omar, a man whom we now know more about in the news. he is the leader of the taliban. they say to mullah omar, please do something about this.

he has among hamm collection of young fundamentalists, who believe in a certain strict interpretation of the koran and they are called the leed's, which means student in arabic or the taliban. this young cadre or's the goes after him that actually arrest the perpetrators of this crime and they hang them. this is a very happy thing for the villagers and in fact suddenly, but also overtime it increases in strength, size and force. so now, they are actually kind of stilling this universe at the point of their own sword. but by the time that some nominal peace and security has been secured in the country, the price of that is, we all know realize here in this village, the windows are black, the women cannot move freely, etc., etc.. into this in september, 2001,

the attacks on america. our leaders in our villages are bent down to their small radios, listening to the bbc, listening like we were to these attacks and one of them, the hazar wrathily there is thinking finally, finally the americans are coming, because he is tired of fighting alone. he has been scaling mountain cliffs and the snow. his men dressed in dress shoes with dress socks and shorts, a caring ak-47's with duct tape slings made out of, climbing to this note with the taliban on the top firing down on them. his men won't give up. they are so low and bullets that they are scouring the third around them, finding unspent browns, putting them in buckets of crushed glass, which they then shake and that polishes the casing again so you can reload

it into a magazine and refire it. this is how desperate things are. so, you can imagine then, back in the states, when cal spencer gets into his truck, he doesn't know any of this either but when he arrived suddenly after a harrowing helicopter ride to the himalayas, it is night, it is dark, it is freezing. it is 16, 17,000 feet sometimes and these are the famous pilots of the 160 its special operations aviation regiment, otherwise known as the 160 of sor. many of you may know them from that great book, blackhawk down and the movie as well. they are the best of the best when it comes to helicopter pilots. i was privileged to spend a week with them, talking in taking their oral histories as well. just flying into the country. it is that night, there's so much dust and grit in the air

that the blades are striking this particulate and creating double golden halos atop the helicopter as it moves through the night. there are no lights blinking except this eerie glow and there are guys on the ramp with straps on, on these guns waiting for any kind of fire to come up from the ground and sometimes there was fire from the ground. there was always a threat of lying to a fatal dead and of a fatal physics equations, which is they had no more power and no more left to get through this thin mountain air. they would have to turn sometimes on their own axes and stairstep their way back down and find another way. one of these guys, the commission commander, flew 80 nights in a row. unbelievable. sitting in the middle jumpseat, a pilot here, another crew member here. he has hemap open and they all have night vision goggles on.

they have all this year and electronics that basically in the end, he is saying, it looks like if we turn left right here, we will gain 5 feet in elevation because you can't suddenly power the helicopter ahead and try to lifted because you have run out of lift and power in the thin air, so it is like the air creeping up through the air. they do this and in fact i said to those guys, what you have done is incredible. can i put it in the book? they were actually quite glad to cooperate with me. they had never-- no one had ever flown so high and according to them in u.s. army history. the lands is 12 people. before they get in the helicopter i should say that mulhullen, who was then colonel mulholland, shakes their hand. he looks them and that i, and he says you guys are it. i don't know, he goes i believe

this will come out okay but i don't know what to tell you about what it is you are going to face because we don't know a whole lot. it is only six weeks since 9/11. remember, the whole world has been going on, the news cycle is bubbling with what is going to happen. in their team rooms at fort campbell they have been giving the discovery channel videotapes and the old national geographic said first to study what afghanistan is like. that is their intelligence at the very beginning. it got much better and much more robust and more complex but on one level, i think there's nothing wrong with that because you were doing everything it can to try to prepare these guys. they write letters home saying if you are reading this letter, things did not turn out well for me. they are taking off their wedding rings and putting them in a manila envelope and sealing it and handling-- handing it to the chaplain, and now they are landed.

mulholland said to them before they got in the aircraft, trusts no one, even the afghans themselves may try to kidnap you for ransom, etc., etc.. they are really in no man's land but the odd thing is special forces relish this kind of opportunity, much like the oss officers in world war ii, out of which special forces eventually grew, the fourth officially in 1952. they are trained to work behind enemy lines. they speak the language. like i said they know everything about the culture they are going into, often as much as any college professor anywhere sell their job is to live among the population then try to make things happen and exploit opportunities. this is different than the regular army. the army that we know more about, which stands up and ranks of thousands and often will have a plan and then choose to execute it to the best of its ability. again, these guys are inserted

into the middle of no man's land. it is dark, the helicopter pulled away and suddenly out of the bloom come the afghans dressed in robes and a smock with peggy pants, turbans. they can see weapons silhouetted in the night, silhouetted out and they don't know if they are good guys or bad guys. maybe there landing has been compromised and they are about to be ambushed. well, they were not ambush. they were actually welcomed. very little was said. it is important to get off the landing quickly. now they are in verilla country, because in world war ii they are now behind enemy lines. now their job is to get our village here to work with the next village over. they have got money, they have got beans, they have got bullets, they have got blankets and their job now is to point

everybody in one direction that the taliban. this is to say at the end of our story, when they finally to roll in to accomodate to achieve their victory, they do capture the northern city of sharif, the streets are lined with thousands of villagers welcoming and cheering and clapping them. it is quite amazing. colonel mark mitchell, then major mark mitchell, along with a gentleman, along with his whole team look up from either their saddles or their motorized buggies that there riding in, and they feel like they are back in world war ii because they are being welcomed as liberators. and, that is key. this is why i think this book is really a book about relationships and the power of relationships. it is a book about afghanistan but in the end i think, i tried

to write it so that you would be interested in it, even if you didn't know much about afghanistan because he would be intrinsically interested in the human drama of ordinary people trying to do extraordinary things with very little, so that you feel a kinship with the characters, or the real people in the book because you meet them at the beginning of the book, and they have families-- cal spencer, the same guy who gets in the truck and hears about the is sitting in his team rooms at fort campbell with ceiling tiles rains danes. there is great linoleum floor. these are not brand spanking new digs and he is about to the waffen be america's answer to 9/11. it is-- he is sitting there looking out the window, wondering, i wish i was a couple les down the road because my son is playing his baseball game tonight. this is what cal was thinking as he is about to go into this

unknown land. as they ride into this base camp, they are awaiting the arrival of this particular team now. first there were 12, and later on another team came in the of 12 more plus air force combat comptrollers, and then major mark mitchell and lieutenant colonel max bowers element came in as the command and control unit but in the end there were probably 300 u.s. personnel in this very beginning phase, and thousands of afghans going after any where between 40 and say 60,000 taliban soldiers and it is amazing what they accomplished by november 10 of 2001. they have landed, october 19, they arrived in the city with the cheering crowds. the pentagon had thought this might take a year and a half and it took just from october until

november 10th to do. as they are rolling into these cities, general dustin who many of you may know from the news. he is a rather famous figure in afghan politics. he now has some nominal part in karzai's government but he has from the northern part of that country for many years ago he had his own currency, his own airline for instance, his own-- i was very aware of all of this. he traveled in a large train of vehicles and i was interviewed i think by someone from his radio station as he made a very big show of this. he is a survivor. he, as they are rolling into mazar-i-sharif after the 60-mile course right come he says to the tenet colonel bowers, let's

hoisted the american flag. bowers thanks for a moment and wisely says@@@cx #@ @ @ j&f now don't raise the american flag-- would send a signal that we are invading the country. it was an afghan victory for afghans, so general dostum agree to that and the other americans certainly saw the wisdom in it stu but the book is filled, and what these guys do and you will see them again in afghanistan and you'll see them in the middle east in 2009, are filled

with those kinds of moments and i wrote "horse soldiers" to hopefully dramatized in a human way, just how it is this kind of training can be applied in terms of resolving conflict. i should probably talk about the title in moment, because as they began, i was about to say that they were not told a whole lot. for instance the discovery channel video tapes, the national geographic since the one but one thing they certainly were not told was that they had to ride horses while they did all this. it sounds rather romantic and picturesque but believe me, it wasn't. these ponies, they are really courses. there a certain breed from central asia, then look at, varies 30 on the mountainside but not used to carrying a

220-pound american male with lots of year. the saddles were made of wood. there tacked down with oriental carpet and stirrups are very short, because the general afghan mail is shorter than the american male and his trips are made of iron rings. since they don't wear combat boots the way we do they wear dress shoes quite honestly into battle or slippers or something like that. they could not put their feet in the stirrups so they would try to get, and number one, cal and another captain named mitch nelson and and the marshall, pat essex and then my low, wonderful medic named bill bennett, these are just some members of the team, have a drived-- arrived and general dostum comes up on his white stallion and says, i am general dostum and i am so glad you have come.

no we are going to go after the taliban. they have a meeting and they talked for awhile and dostum and rolls his map on the third, and nelson looks at it. he is very impressed with this map. it is filled with dostum's own marks about taliban movements because he has been fighting these guys now for a long time and dostum is happy that the americans have, but he is deftly worried that if they are scratch, if they are scratched, attacked or hurt in any way they will be yanked out by the u.s. government to go back to the united states. the team's first order of business is to try to get dostum to let him get close to the taliban. efforts to wants to keep them four, five, six, 7 miles away. you cannot accurately fit on a mountainside and target a bunker with a bunch of antennas on it that you know is a taliban position if you are that far away. and you can try and you can do

it but that is not why they are there. they are there to get close and be real accurate. these guys have the willpower and the fashion to fight the taliban. part of the year that is weighing down these small forces are lazar designator and satellite radioes. the marriage of this, their patient, therefore, their knowledge of the country with american technology and their own training of the special forces guys to work with this indigenous culture, not work against it or change it or try to make it into, to do with how we want to do things but to be smart enough to move into this village here and to work alongside it, is what really achieved this victory. that technology in this old world kind of sweat equity. so, after this quick meeting, dostum says we leave now, leave now. this is kind of fun herd of in

the army. you don't just leave no. usually you are deployed ago you were not working with the host nation so closely but he says yes, we leave now. i will take you to my mountain headquarters. the americans looked at each other and they say who has ridden a horse before? they see dostum saddling up. two guys raised their hands and said when we were back in summer camp. this is no chance to say hey, i didn't sign up to ride a horse. six of them get on board and they start riding along these trails and one of them huxley was later on, no colonel mark mitchell said, actually riding a horse was some of the most terrifying moments he had it aside from the firefights in the gun battles because sometimes the truth was two to 3 feet wide and there were ravines on either side. it was nighttime and you could see the clothes of the course is sparking off the rocks and how when the world that this animal

know where to go? jesters son-- fondey afghans would come up and slap your horse on the kind and and make it run down the trail and they would laugh to see how well you could hang on. this was great sport. sometimes he would be riding at night and you would hear, you know that sound when you are coming undone, like this saddles looking up the horse and the big american hanging on the side of the course, going down the trail. one of them fell off, and mitchell is watching. he falls on the trail. he rolls and egos of the it. he says, he is gone because it is far down, 1,000 feet or more and he runs over, and this was not fitch dark. this was when there was still some light. he is falling off the ledge and landing on the ledge below that like some buster keaton movie. they reached down and left him up. he is just white as a sheed.

another time one of the course is just took off. the otherwise capable american soldier on board could not control it and decided to run down the mountainside. so, here is what he thought. i saw that movie once, the man from snowy river, and i remember that he put his head back and grabbed ahold of the main and held on for dear life. i don't want to die, i don't want to die, and he goes, he zooms by dostum. he gets, he beats everybody to the bottom of course because they are taking switchbacks, and dostum rights up with this the most amazing look in his eyes and he says something to him, i believe in izbet or person, and the american says what do you say? and general dostum said truly you are the most amazing horstman i have ever seen. [laughter] and again, thinking quickly on

his feet, the special forces soldier said, yes, thank you general i know that, or something to that effect. while the book is serious in some ways, and i think filled with a lot of trauma there is actually quite a bit of humor because i think one of the reason for their success is because they didn't take themselves too seriously. i guess by that i mean on this helicopter ride that i discussed about with the doors open and it is freezing, one of the engineers on the first team, pat at six, again very sharp, very capable, has a family. when you meet pat you think here is someone that i know. this guy does not look to me like my cliche vision of a soldier. he is both very knowledgeable about the country.

number one, these are generally older men, later on in their career being selected for special forces so they have more life experience in "in harm's way." so i think they are a little more subtle than who they are and pat, he falls asleep on the helicopter ride on the way in. i don't think i could do that. it is freezing cold and he says, you know, nothing i can do about it. if they start shooting at us and something goes wrong, but for now everything is fine so i'll just take a nap. i think that is a very interesting way to not be overexcited about problems actually before they present themselves. so they are on the horses and what i will do is just talk about how they used them in this very 19th century fashion, marrying yet with this 21st century technology and then we will have some questions, but

they have ridden, they have identified taliban targets. these are places where the taliban have been dug in. before the americans of rival, what would happen is the afghans on their horses would line up in the ridges, or behind ridges, two or 300 at a time in ranks and someone like dostum would set up to the side with his walkie-talkie and when everyone got ranged they would look down the field, 1,000 yards, 2,000 yards away would be the taliban line with tanks, so that is their position and motorized vehicles belching smoke, and these guys on this and, our allies are going to charge it. they are going to charge of carrying rpg tubes, ak-47's and run across the field and they are going to try their best to take this position. i think that is just an amazing

sense of sacrifice really. so, the general yells, charge. the first line does, crests up the hill, crests, crest, drops down, keeps running and you hear the pounding of the foods. they get two-thirds of the way across the net taliban guns oakland-- open up. the horsemen are being in that of their saddles or shot out, laying down on the field. now they are find their rpg tubes. they have got the rains in their teeth and firing their rifles at the taliban line. pretty soon which you have is this collision of horse and machine and the horses win. because this form of this massive, moving bodies is overwhelming the ability of the machine to a just and correct its fire. you can imagine in your mind that tank barrels trying to move quick enough.

they just can't so eventually they lose. but, previous to the americans' arrival in that country, they would retake the position. you can imagine also that the afghans would be on this hilltop having just captured and suddenly in the distance you hear the grown of the tank coming back because it is probably retreating and begins firing to shoot these guys back off position. they would ride their horses again because the motorized vehicles could not go up into the hills to save the like the horse. that is why they are on horses, and they would wait and try another day. so, when people like cal spencer mitchell and mitch nelson a ride, they pull out the things in their backpacks and they swarm the line. the armor retreats and that is when the bombs hit and that is when they can't we attacked the position. the first couple of times, when i was doing my oral histories and traveling around the country i would say, what happened when the bombs hit?

what did they taliban do? they didn't know what was going on because sometimes we would observe them for binoculars emerging from a bunker that we had missed. looking at it in seeing a smoking call on the ground and looking across the horizon as if it had come from a tank or some kind of machine that had blocked it, it did not occur that this was coming from of but because some of these jets, these bombers are high up. they could be 15 or 20,000 feet that they are being guided by two things, or actually three things, a gps that has been retrofitted into the bomb that is being programmed, almost like your own onstar, leading you to the destination with the gpsc web plug in oar these lasers which should out an invisible beam. the bomb dropped on to the code for the coded laser and it's directed in flight. so, they had never experienced anything like this and this is

really quite in this short amount of time they are able to roll up the command taliban command structure, because they would swarm a hill or a position, bum and just keep moving in pretty soon the taliban are in full route. again now we are talking about bombs and bullets but this would not have worked had they not have their training to get into those villages and get all these people to work together and charge the taliban, so it is really, the story really dramatizes both aspects of changing society on the end of a bullet or the end of an idea. these guys are trained to do both very well. this is about a 60-mile journey, a bit like riding through colorado with the himalayas. they ride through villages, dusty, tired. they have scarves and sunglasses on. sometimes people did not know what to make of them because they had not heard of their

rival, so they would line the streets and watch them passed. they would keep on moving and ã en lining up for the first time in a long time for a haircut and shave. young kids are suddenly flying kites, much like in "the kite runner." that is a very moving in

incredible books. people are walking by with radioes on their shoulders, listening. within hours the radio stations are back up playing music and just the day before anyone caught operating a radio station would have been severely punished. so, the town is immediately springing back to life and it seemed, it is november 10, 2001, and they are now going to enter another phase of their combat which is the shooting will slowly die down and noticed time for these guys to help rebuild the city. they are very capable of doing that because the engineers that i talked about, pat as six that fell asleep in the helicopter. that with his training, to design things and they want to get the airfield open and open hospitals. all this stuff. again, our village here, listen, we may have gotten along for the last eight weeks or so but now we have got the city, trouble is

brewing again so we have all got to keep getting along, so they have a big meeting. they drought everybody together and say you can have this part of the city, you have this part of the city so there's a great attention paid to the diplomatic part of resolving this conflict as well by these guys. things cook along until suddenly , november 24, 2001, 14 days after they are rifle. something very strange and odd happens. 600 taliban show up at the gates of the city, unannounced, idling in trucks, i lincoln big delivery trucks with those high would cited carting trucks that you see packed with prisoners who say they want to surrender and come back into the city. at the same time, the bulk of the teams are driving pass them literally 20 feet away headed

east of these guys have come from the east to give up and our american guys are moving into another city where the big battle is supposed to happen. unbeknownst to everybody and in the friction of the high tempo of this moment, the afghans did not thoroughly searched these guys in general dostum who is one of the leaders at this moment in the city, along with another gentleman named fata who with a tajik, they don't search them and the americans, some are concerned about this but what dostum air was, he did not realize that within this group were real professional beligerent speak these were not the local taliban. these were folks at pakistani, a chechen, chinese and they are taken as a last resort for holding to a mud fortress that rises of the desert, looking

much like something out of the arabian nights, 30-foot thick walls, big hair pets, firing ports and they are putting this in the core garrett. it is called house of war, which is the translation of the persian. unfortunately in this courtyard were all of these weapons that had been stashed there by the taliban, because just weeks earlier they had lived in this fortress and they had been kicked out now and they fled. so in a move as all this literature, these taliban prisoners have actually performed something like a trojan horse maneuvered and got back into the city. then a major mark mitchell and nine to 13 americans are left kind of to run the store while everyone else has gone off to the east to fight what would be the big battle. well, on the morning of november 25, to those and one, two officers leap what is called

the turkish school house, the local headquarters 9 miles away from the fortress and they tryout. there is a goldmine out there. someone in that crowd has to know where osama bin laden's. they have to know where the al qaeda leader met use of these two gentlemen, mike and his colleague named dave coal what to do some questioning. a couple hours after the questioning begins, a grenade goes off and within minutes, dave's guards or escorts have been killed. mic is brought down in a melee of this from gunfire, and it is presumed that he is dead. dave 17 bullets. he can feel the arounds passing passed his head. he is surrounded. he dashes to the wall into the northern courtyard and up to the safety of general dostum's buccaneers where he makes a frantic phonecall back saying, i am in trouble. i think mike is dead and we are

under attack and we really need some help here because if we lose this and we get out of this fortress we could lose the city. mitchell was back at the schoolhouse because he hears this and immediately he gets in some trucks with some of the cia officers and they drive to the city 1.8 tractor-trailer backs out into the street blocking the way in mitchell things, they know we are coming. face were rounded. he has never driven a british vehicle i should say so it is these little things that make it so interesting. he is trying to ship and drive on the wrong side and he is trying to think and a moment he's going to be attacked. mortars are barking out over the walls, hitting in the field. he could hear the sound of gunfire and thus begins what comprises the last third of the book, a horrendous battle that's over, it really takes, it really does not end until december 1st and kicks off on november 25th

and at the end of november 1st, amazingly enough, and this is how i came to first know about the story, a young californian named john walker lindh immerges. mic has been killed. he is the first american to die in post-9/11 combat. and, lindh is discovered and soon his face and span's make worldwide news. it is a story that had not been told. it is a story when i began to start with the fortress and moved backwards, i thought this is interesting. these guys did something no one else had done before and after i had met them after several visits to their bases and posts i said i think that what it is they have to say about problem-solving, about thinking,

about cultural awareness. they are new ones appreciation of how violence is used, how it is not used. it is so interesting that we, all of us here, as taxpayers, as parents and citizens, i think need to become more aware of it. we need to know who would is out there that are on the front lines solving our problems, whether not we think their problems are not. they are there and how were they doing that? so, i have a family of my own and in the end i wrote "horse soldiers" to try to articulate that vision for myself and for them as well because they will be the ones who will become adults and be handed the emerging issues that we are now just thinking about, which is to say that although this book takes place in an earlier part of afghanistan, in many ways you

can look at what these guys did as a lens for what is going on there today. i will stop there for now with my comment. there is a microphone in the room if you would like to ask me a question. they will move to you and i would be glad to answer anything at all. [applause] thank you. yes, and he will bring the microphone right to you. >> it is it possible that similar techniques can be used in pakistan? >> yes. it is, although at the moment no, because well, army forces in general are not allowed to move in pakistan the way we did in afghanistan but that is not to say the pakistani army can't do that as well. what erasing in pakistan, it is interesting. a certain class of pakistani society has never really admitted to the fact that the taliban is one of their

problems. they have been in denial, that they have this group in their society called the taliban, pashtun people, who have come a they have supported in many ways in afghanistan because pakistani's often felt that india is its existential threat, so if you support this group of people called the taliban who are fighters and you are going to do your bidding and you put them in afghanistan, it is a security blanket for you. but, that is changing and what you fs debat can they do this in pakistan is as old as war itself. this is carrillo war. it is reminiscent in some ways of the american revolutionary war. the same tactics were used in the united states civil war by different groups so yes, the answer is yes. yes sir, how about right here at the front table.

>> what do you have to say about the current status of things in afghanistan, where the taliban, if i have got my groups right, seemed to be resurging and do you see an answer to this? do you think, obviously another 20,000 troops there? and, what might unfold or what you would hope to unfold? >> well, he wonders what is going on during the day in what might unfold. the power vacuum that ensued-- these guys, these couple of particular teams argonne from afghanistan by january or february at least of 2002. many of them went into iraq and did equally interesting things there that we also have never read about, very different than the large army, large-scale movement of troops. however in that vacuum you are absolutely correct, the taliban

had moved in. the government, as some of the special forces soldiers have told me, karzai needs to prode a real viable government, providing jobs, goods and services to these people because this, believe it or not, although i have talked a lot about people on horses with rifles but this is a social problem. as one of the captains, the fellow who went to west point and talked counter-terrorism curriculum and so on and still engaged in this, he said insurgency is a social problem with the military component. i hadn't thought of that. i think i have but i have not put it so succinctly as he can do very well. he said to me, teen pregnancy, drug addiction in the united states or social problems. we have not been able to beat that in the united states with all of our own resources, so you

have got to remember when you go to a foreign land, you don't know the language, you don't know the culture or the social fabric, it is doubly hard to solve the social problem, because an insurgency is not rising out of a frontline. it is rising out of people who disenfranchised and want something and they are going after it by these unconventional means. ..

if you go with that stanton died we are going to come and kill in your family. so what needs to be created is a trusting your preferences by the way, that's the term and for that, so you need some sense in your own space that you can do that freely so we need these other troops can provide at the same time of the smaller teams developing intelligence and the social fabric from the inside. it's an interesting hybrid of the two if you think about trying to integrate both ted folks who

won't give up. well so he's going to bring excellent skills going after those guys. the other side or part of the claim is that at the same time you need to develop that intelligence and you can use special forces teams to do that and then that stuff is handed over to what are called direct

action teams which go after the targets. the sf guys or people like them don't necessarily go into the night and capture people, they develop it. what it means is it is a further look at using less what to do more. and i think it's very interesting. see, i don't know how many of us here if we ponder a moment i don't have to answer but what if we send a half million will troops into afghanistan in october of 2001? as we leave here today we might think what will the country look like today. i'm not sure we would have achieved with the collapse of the taliban quite so quickly because the moment you insert that many people and the afghans may not like each other and fight each other but they like even less people to invade their country and tell them and the genius what happened here and in the world of the mckristol's of the world, is that they don't

appear to be the invader with a heavy handed imperialist. again, they wear a local barber and move within the society outward. way in the back. >> yes, in the past week robert mcnamara mara -- dyga and if anything was the special forces by, more bombs, tanks, man. has the united states done anything to win the hearts and minds of the afghan people beyond the simple matter you just described or are we spending more material men and other resources to prop up a society whose only contribution of the last two and a half millennia has been to exact a toll between the empires of persia and cafe by controlling the road.

>> well, i don't know if that is the only contribution, but -- [inaudible] >> yeah, which really didn't become the huge cash crop is today until after the soviets completely destroyed the agriculture in that country. the opium is something that actually we haven't talked about and here is what i think about that or here is what the people involved in addressing this problem think about a particularly the sf guys. major general jeffrey lambert retired, who ran special forces command of the time of this whole deployment, he said to me recently, he said if you go in and kick out the opium economy which is like one of the legs on the stool, it would be like going to iowa and a burning down all of the cornfields and then walking into all the coffee shops and telling the farmers you're going to promise them the

world and do this and that while their fields or on fire because you set them on fire. he said the marco economy needs to be changed and fixed but at this moment if you try to eink get out from under them it would further destabilize the economy because what you want to do is create a parallel economy that replaces with the taliban have and the taliban are finding themselves off opium profits but at the same time providing jobs in a sense of livelihood and security. to some of us in our imaginary village who don't really care about them and what these guys are doing and what they did in iraq very well and anbar province during the week ending one of them for instance in the marshall went in and said there's 70% unemployment most of it is illegal, some hasted with drugs and smuggling and contraband and so on and that is how people are making their living but because there is so much unemployment i just realized this is not about a bomb or a bullet or who is the

fattest cat in the neighborhood it's about who is the guy with the jobs so they sat down and i did an economy study and irina study and they said here's what the people want and can do. i'm going to create those jobs and what happened is just like a losing football team the guys that didn't really want to be on the team were not committed and they left and came over to andy's side and i started working for him and then they started reporting on the bad guys left over and then they sent in these direct action teams and went after those guys and those guys started eating each other because they were fighting over dwindling resources. so, that is -- i mean, pat, one of the guys in the book as well, he is either in iraq or afghanistan, he came up with a plan to bring palm trees and has a cash crop, and they did a study and they decided if they

let this go for ten years and worked it they could be making more money off of plywood made from palm trees than poppy. that doesn't sound like -- again that's not really a military solution but it is a special forces solution and a social solution to the problem how are people money and power people holding under control. i don't think it is a lost cause. i think the one thing we can address these afghan -- you may be also suggesting doesn't have a sense of the way we think of it in the united states and that is one of the base problems is what is the glue holding the factions together? they are not fighting for the nation of afghanistan they are fighting for their own religious affiliation or their family and their village and so on. yes, sir. >> yes, given that this approach was used successfully early in

the afghan conflict, why don't you think it has been used in the intervening years especially since our military resources have been quite constrained? >> he's wondering why it hasn't been used in intervening years i'm assuming in afghanistan? >> in afghanistan. >> because the troops were needed elsewhere and that was iraq and there is only so many of them going around with a volunteer army and they were however according to colonel michel they have been there and they have been doing things and it just has not received front-page play that the larger force troop movements have but also nato, which was never really designed to do this kind of thing it had been hobbled by each country's own kind of kathy ghats about what is they could and could not do and they have been one of the guiding bulwarks

and they've been all paddling and essentially in place and, you know, to say that it's all going to change immediately i am not sure. several more and in -- yet, here is one up here. >> your book describes the tactical success the small group of special forces personnel had but do you have a sense of how they feel about the success of the wide strategic vision of the u.s. policy, you know for instance the worse they were given to ride in afghanistan is quite a nefarious fellow. he fought with the soviets, against the soviets, against massoud, mixed up in the drug trade. i am told that and -- when the

taliban were bottled up they wanted to surrender to either the u.n. or the u.s. forces and general franks would not put u.s. forces and they surrendered to dostum maybe a thousand or more taliban were suffocated in shipping containers and buried in mass graves which inflamed pashtu nationalismn the southern part of the country. i am just curious how these small group of guys who carried out their mission so remarkably how they feel about the wider effort. >> well, the wider effort is what they are about if people are hearing the question how do they feel today where afghanistan is. they are trained to deal with folks like dostum because dostum is the red meat on the floor and

you can go into the country and say i wish he wasn't here, i wish he wasn't, you know, in criminal activity like the drug trade and so on so forth but he's not so how do i deal with him? are you asking if they are happy where we ended up in afghanistan? >> whether they feel given -- i don't know possibly disappointment where they feel they put their lives on the line were remarkably successful yet the u.s. and our policy of on the willingness to mechem and some troops which has left the country largely lawless still today. i don't think you can probably travel today. >> you know, i don't -- in general i would say there probably is disappointment but i can't speak to -- i don't have more specificity than that because the thing is that they did achieve some success and i think the disappointment is over

the suffering that's happened in intervening years since 2001. they did do some things in iraq for instance when andy marshall and others were part of that. they are not used to getting credit or feeling -- b. mast for their opinion about anything. so, i would say however there is disappointment that what they did was left to languish some of the more senior officers said there wasn't really a plan with what to do with afghanistan once it collapsed so quickly and they said the same thing sometimes about iraq as well. but being members of the military their disappointment to me dustin to go any farther than that. how are we doing on time?

[inaudible] >> i would be glad to continue this over here or up here. i want to thank you for coming. it has been a pleasure and thanks for listening. [applause] t@@@@ dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb dbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdb b