>> good morning, everybody. we're here at our beautiful sunny tucson arizona looking out on a great looking audience. of course, everybody joining us at home on c-span groggy having lost one hour of sleep except here in arizona were we don't have daylight savings time. that is why i am looking at bright eyed and bushy tail so let's day gaulle of the people from the festival it is a two the amazing event

here in teeeighteen starting out to become a premier book festival in the country. of course, the great part of what is going on here in arizona. let's give them a big round of applause. [applause] [applause] as i said yesterday, we ended one street here in but there is a good streak of festivals the start out that may be is just as important we're very lucky to have standing here with us today before i introduce him a one to take a moment of personal privilege somebody that is here with us in the audience new-line had a chance to get to know and i wrote a book about his background that is the original berlin bomber. [applause] have after world war ii along with his wife lorain.

[applause] is a truly great historic figure and a book end to our conversation about today's military the differences and similarities. we are lucky to have tea nine here who is a master storyteller prepare he has had a pretty amazing career bringing people all over the world a writer who has worked on travel on adventure and entertainment stories and wrote his own book about world war ii point* and has some things like playing basketball with george clooney for a story. [laughter] four taking acting tips from harrison ford and his book that we are here to talk about it is "horse soldiers" with the opening days of the war in afghanistan and the

era after 9/11 we have been living with for a better part of a decade. please join me in welcoming doug. [applause] and we are excited to hear about doug stanton but also want to hear about george clooney and harrison ford. [laughter] >> i'm giving a talk later today how to -- make a live-in by being a writer which may be the oxymoron been doing that you travel around the world you have celebrity profiles oil 12 have something to do with the people on the magazine cover that they have never done before but i think i

may have reached the apex one i asked harrison ford to teach me how to be angry on-screen he said that want to teach you that in the process in telling me that he got very angry on purpose and it is quite amazing someone who is so in control of their own facilities and voice but how did i get from that to afghanistan is a thing i am trying to figure out. but i always wanted to with the famous people look like when no one was watching them and that is our approach my role as a storyteller trying to tell stories to people about people that we don't often really get to see your glimpse. first it was a world where to book called in harm's way

about the sinking of the uss indianapolis toward the end of the war i was so moved by my experience working with those veterans when i called up on the phone there were often home it was not easy for them to talk about this time if you remember in the movie jaws the captain the fictional survivor of the indianapolis in this scene where he talks about delivering parts of the atomic bomb the they are sound and eight by sharks for five-- might editor said i shimmied them i thought he was kidding if they were made up in the movie. that is how out of touch our was in america was with this book and of world war ii that ends the war is essentially because they do deliver the atomic components setter later dropped in japan and pearl harbor being different loaded i said it was made up

and he said they exist and delving into the world of our grandfathers generation generation, going to each kitchen table around the country during those interviews it is really a story about men and later on, their wives facing the supreme existential moment figuring out who they are and how they will survive and this sets the course for the rest of their lives. some of these guys were 16 years old song in the middle of the pacific left for five days after a series of flukes finally picked up after 900 out of 1200 were killed by the torpedoes or killed by the sharks are other wounds court-martialed the first time it had happened a few commit suicide the story lives on and on but on the kitchen

tables always the wives were standing at the sink doing the dishes high that this is interesting this this must be something you do you do the dishes. but the reality was that they were actually hearing the stories for the first time as well. so they would say i get out of the navy and then alice would say no. that is completely wrong. the yet at the same time when they say tommy would happen when the ship sunk in 12 minutes, it is quicker than it takes money out of the atm machine and the story begins to re-emerge of who these men were as american citizens fathers and grandfathers i tried to tell it from there point* of view so that when

i come 22000 on the challenges set for myself is can you do that with the modern soldier as well? what i did not understand they do may find the same challenges people of that generation typically are retired and when i went to interview them they always took me out to dinner and paid for its at the red lobster. [laughter] of calling a man in his arm a middle-age who is part of this special forces group route of kentucky part of the u.s. military that almost never cooperated with the new criteria in any way that i wanted to do it like i had done with the world war ii officers of. i don't care what kind of batteries you used the caliber of the ammunition was interesting what did you

do before you deployed? they were taken aback because it was a question about humanity and have this change them as fathers and sons and citizens because that is the central thing we need to digest and ponder who are read sending overseas to fight the wars that we sometimes don't fully understand how complex the issues are. we see them from our point* of view but what is happening on the other end of the world? would do the pakistani think? in a big enough show explains how would move from writing magazine pieces to world war ii and the modern soldiers to tell a story

visit you herded around the kitchen table it is epic the yet intimate and personal about a subject you would not even pick up to read about the special forces group in the united states army, centcom, spec were fair the impersonality of all of this and wanted to strip that away and send the story somewhere else to the hearts and minds of us because i think after 9/11 high know where i was you probably due to was getting coffee getting out of my truck and stopped i thought how do i tell this to my children? course of soldiers is my a way to understand violence in the 21st century. how was it created?

how is it stopped and what you do to neutralize it? to make these remissions i have is a writer that we may not even glance when reading the book that. >> you do that very well as talk about some of the guys you got to know. you remember where you were on 9/11 i am sure everybody in the audience remembers. for these groups of people that came into afghanistan when the invasion was not the hundreds of -- hundreds of thousands it was the hundreds or the dozens but their lives were about to change where were they on the september 11th and what were the first days after it 9/11 before they deployed like for them? >> is a great question because it is what we are reading about we need to understand who these folks

are racing things like of conventional war for unconventional troops setting up a dichotomy the deployment of large masses moving forward and asymmetrical line and citing the enemy the special forces harder and untold part of the united states army it is hard to back the oss and roker were too another reason the story attracted me instead of being dropped behind enemy lines who may not have similar names but a common enemy as we did in world war ii to overthrow the nazis they were dropped into afghanistan and the warring tribes to stop fighting long enough to grow into one mission with the taliban with clear an

unprecedented because the special forces were never deployed as of the doublemint in the united states history ever. it was always the add-on or they operated out of the margins out of the spotlight of the news everything you read in the book we did not know what was going on at the time this means september 11th training on a river in kentucky doing infiltration with the chinook helicopter if you saw blackrock down it is those helicopter pilots the best in the world, i was able to spend one week with them at their headquarters in fort campbell and their story was amazing they do the routine mission dropping the zodiac off than they link with another team and

they go home. and one guy now that it is deployed 11 or 12 times since then 11, well over 40, chief foreign officer smart they get caught in the fog in this river and almost get run over by a todd -- tugboat and have two anchor and they forgot to bring the winter clothing so they are hanging out trying to make it through the night to get home he just wants to have a martini and set on a couch they think they're headed for the philosophical boneyard there is no place for them. and the role of tanks and armor and the cold war setting they turn on the radio and they hear this thing happening and they

know immediately something will now happen to them but they don't know what it is. if you remember back then and went to the pentagon how to invade a country there was no a four afghanistan but plan b would have been to mess 60 -- amass 60,000 troops the political pressure and the need to do something soon seem to be america was behind the move and said we have to do something so tommy franks plan was third out the window and within the special forces community these guys got the job growth of labor told by then colonel john mulholland that their job was to go into

afghanistan and kick the taliban out of the country to make it unsafe captured the city to the north then they go to kabul then kandahar and a whole country would fall in a domino effect river ought to mention he was only talking to 12 gries. [laughter] cal spencer, one of them to six weeks earlier was on a training mission was thinking i am getting too old for this and i have got developer -- to go. they finish what war planners saw might take a year and a half and they did it in little more than six weeks involving 300 personnel and is not exactly accurate because thousands of conventional people followed shortly thereafter

buy it cost roughly $100 million and they did push the taliban out of afghanistan and did go after the training camps in a way that probably none of us in this room because we don't know much about what these guys do, can really describe or talk about which is the point* of the book to make that real. >> host: let's talk about how they did it too because they use it literally were "horse soldiers" in this day and age of stealth technology they were riding on horseback and it is interesting when we usually think about america fighting in the world the past half century large numbers of forces fighting guerrillas out there every year it was reversed. >> guess we are the insurgents in afghanistan which is a new thing for us because we don't think of ourselves that way. they link up there is some

very important people in this story the cia military teams to have gone in earlier to make things happen with these warlords reach as we have lines of communication still open and without pointing these people in the right direction in getting these guys to stop fighting each other you could not have started their resistance among the grass roots level to go after the common enemy of the taliban. it is true the united states and the afghans were the underdogs they did not have the armor, we had air but it came in later sell how they did this was the story of the book and if we look at this room and would come in here we would say we would take control of the room.

[laughter] fined teenine way. we look around and say this gentleman over here his issues are this and he wants last he is fighting with this person here. i would know what language you speak for what language you speak to your children were i would know some much and that is what special forces are trained to do in language skills too basically walked into the bottle space to understand the centers of gravity so it really means that this is a social approaching conflict and violence from the point* of view of a diplomat anthropologist sociologists. because you understand as many people in the book told me it is the roots of this violence and insurgency our social in nature one person

said it is morale 18 pregnancy and attributes then bank robbery which also has roots but if you understand that as readers and americans and taxpayers to stand back and say the goal is not just to go kill everybody and bomb everybody back into the stone age is it worth it to create a political change? that is the question and if you think answer is yes you might want to take a look at some of the new thinking coming out of the army and it is interesting to really come to talk to these guys some of the thinking was so forward and leveraged with philosophy and language boreanaz that it was missing

in our parts of american society that the people who wanted to get out of afghanistan immediately and that is the debate nowadays have a stop to ask what would happen if we do that? who was the person living at the other end of that idea? what do women want in afghanistan? that is a key question. what is the end state we try to achieve? >> i am sure we'll have plenty of questions you get to through 2010 but let's talk about more about the book itself in terms of how did actually talking about these people's homes but you have access to that nobody else had talked about the

research project at a time we're still at war in afghanistan. >> guest: it took five years to write the book. i thought it would be like interviewing at red lobster and going home. i was naive. i was naive. there is no stupid question. no stupid question in general because it was clear to the people i was trying to interviewer was truly interested been the character and humanity in their mission not just shoot them a book but men and women in the united states would understand something like that was very important that happened after 9/11 to neutralize the conflict here we are in 2010 still talking about afghanistan but a

shining moment in history it did work for a certain reason and i thought it was an important story to tell. and i had "in harm's way" which was successful and read widely the navy had adopted as part of the reading last-- list for core values there was nice reviews and i felt the book had done something obviously my magazine pieces never would do. it showed me being a storyteller you can move people in a way that i found important is a book about community ultimately. i shift that to the country off of exit four near fort campbell kentucky and got on post i call the affairs officer the special forces group and there wasn't one.

this is how unprepared they were to actually even we in the spotlight and after a while i made repeated trips on the post and after a while, when you are a reporter dealing with people like movie stars, you can never figure out anything will happen but dealing with the united states military if it says they will be there at noon, they are there. [laughter] it was very refreshing to do these interviews if they saw that i was not crazy and pretty soon in the headquarters which was just off of white church he said just walk around and i said i am looking for so-and-so's and i have no idea so i would knock and i was there

and i am looking for so and so and he is not there who are you? we went back and forth after a 10 minute said that is may. [laughter] they said you found him. [laughter] i said okay. there was a lot of shoe leather and ask questions that i remember asking what did you do the afternoon before you got on the plane to fly away? we went to burger king then i came home and watched the disney channel with his daughters and i thought i did not read that in the paper that is interesting detail because that makes him real, the whole global conflict bloody chaos i want

to know the character and nature of this man and is part of a large mass of people who have an answer to 9/11 hours before he gets on the plane he chose to burger king and watches the disney channel with his daughter. if you can touch on those details it does something mysterious and shows commonality among the huge even something as innocuous as that. >> it shines a light on making people real and when you look back over the last 10 years and c everything brawl those that were sitting at home watching the disney channel he had no idea what would come next

this was september into october 2001 it is all just beginning part of the book of special forces is also the cia and a lot of people think analyst some were sitting behind a computer or james bond that is not with these guys were. they were there emitter the days after 9/11 talk about the c.i.a. side of the story as well. >> they have the open lines of communication you are operating in the north and if you can get everyone to get along than you cannot for resistance and overthrow the bad guy which in this case was the taliban which

afghans did not want to support they do not want the taliban there. maybe 10% of the more southern are there and they are ahead between days and weeks. so mitchell comes in later and they get into the helicopter in uzbekistan or they are based and a colonel says good luck nido no if you will come back from this. some of the guys lot that blew their hair back a little bit because they knew they are trained not to be the strongest people in the room although they often are but what is interesting about their training going

back to the agency paramilitary teams they are trained to recovery were quickly it is an interesting idea which is why if you keep putting a person in a position of failure over and over and watch how they respond to that do they just combo and collapse our rise up and prevail over those circumstances? that is to you want. it kind of felt like being a writer. [laughter] i remember driving from campeau mccall after i took part after going back to your question of what is the business they do? and afterwards almost all special forces teams say it is perfectly preparing them for what happened in afghanistan. i started to study this.

at least a one week or two week 24 of our live action scenario of being in a foreign land called pineland with its own and them and politics and auxiliary operating outside the camp you have a guerrilla chief fed is translated for afghan war lord or somebody in bosnia, a professional belligerent to you have to get along with. so they don't kill you and social change can happen. thinking about this i read up on it and i fear that if the warlords like to be given gives. i go to the camping store so i buy a camping lanterns and a thermal blanket because i will live in this camp and observe while they do it and watch and learn because i thought it is important to absorb the central idea at

the emotional level. underground, just like a real guerrilla war. so the farmer and his kids will drive-in on an atv and bring me from the outside world. and the sf team along with the local resistance will say what's going on? whets president so in so doing? what's happening in tideland? and so they'll repeat this scenario. and the medic who's never done this in the real world is doing fake dental work from the kids. he is looking in the mouth of the young child and the farmers son or daughter, you know, they've got doing this is going along with it even though they don't re they don't understand. so, tell me you have a cavity i

can take care of that but listen we hear that so and so over in that part of the county is creating problems for us. what does he want? so they are gathering intelligence at the same time they are getting back to the community. now, their aims and the community and accelerate a moral one so that it's all moving in the right place and the right way to beat you see how that works? it is very different than walking in, taking down the door, tell me what's going to happen. so, this is -- the pilot teams, the paramilitary teams had that same report. report is a very big word in this world. building rapport with the people around you so that you are on the same page. >> part of these people they were encountering in afghanistan was of course the taliban. one of the characters in the book that is of course fascinating to i think many of

us here is the american taliban. john walker land, and you really tell his story as well at the same time you were telling the story of the folks fighting on our side. what was -- who was he? >> well, general walker lynn grocery california -- it's interesting you ask that because did you see the news today about the jihadists falling on the hills of jihad machine and then the young man from new jersey who is a somalian i think who went to the same town in yemen to study arabic as well in fact told his american parents she needed to go to yemen to study the real arabic from their real -- getting it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. so general walker land is of that ilk but he is far ahead of this kerf, and he ends up in the crosshairs of the afghan war.

he's gone to study arabic and in yemen and he ends up because he doesn't -- he actually in seven bin ladens's brigade and ends up in a fortress in the maza sure reef which forms the kind of last part of the "horse soldiers" discovered in the rubble after this battle was over and the shocking world about how did this young american from california and up in this fortress. so he is in there because he represented at the time i was writing the book his story is less unusual i guess is what i'm trying to say today because we are finding now more people seem to be attracted to this trajectory driven by these ideals. it's so interesting he with a repressive environment in california and ran straight into

the arms of probably one of the least permissive environment on the planet and i don't know. we can speculate on all of this, but he runs tragically one of the first people to be killed after 9/11 was the officer named mike span and he comes face-to-face with general lindh command that is one of the arcs of the book as well. >> we have many questions from the audience and we will ask people to start lining up of the with the microphone. to my right, as they do, let me fast-forward a bit and you in the the book with a quote from sergeant patau who says you won't be able to say today or tomorrow if it was the right thing, what they did in 2001. you're going to have to go back to afghanistan in ten or 15 years from now and say was this

right. we are now in 2010, next year will be ten years from that initial invasion. talk about what's happened in the past ten years and when these guys look back on it what are they seeing now about whether it was right? >> i think they would say yes. i think that some of the first people that talk to me about iraq and what was going wrong there and what was also going right were the special forces soldiers. in other words, the very attuned and aware of the social nuances of this problem of a certain group of people on the globe who want to do you harm. if you want to boil it down that is what this is about. so how do you deal with that? i think that more people we to be leaning in over these ideas if we are going to solve -- negative could people who want to work for peace need to study the war as much as the people

who study war need to study peace because it is like playing only the black or white keys on the piano. this is a problem to see if you don't believe in the war, i would like to write an op-ed about this. i don't believe in five-year but hit the house is burning down. it doesn't really matter if you believe in violence or war excess in the world for a number of reasons that we need to come to terms with and grasp so that we can do something in our own small way to move the needle in one direction or the other. so what has been fascinating and heartening about dealing with this community is the people have felt deeply about white people fight and i think there is one of the journeys of "horse soldiers" has been my own education in that. now, today if you look at december 1st, president obama's speech and the announcement of

30,000 more troops, general mcchrystal's request for the trips and the counter insurgency program, you don't see in that program up front in bold headlines much of this talk of an unconventional approach to this as a, quote, social problems but i think those things, are there. i think president karzai gunning just last week to meet with tribal elders. you have to remember i don't even know how to describe this. the fact that these people are fighting and fighting with the taliban is because they don't think that karzai even as the exist and the folks he has in power, they feel they are so corrupt any money that they get never trickles down for him to show what is a symbolic act to sit on the floor with 400 of these guys and say tell me what your problems are is an earth moving kind of symbolic gesture.

i think you're going to see more of this approach we are hearing british foreign secretary millo brandt said that we need to start dealing with the taliban, the ones that work for the dollar as opposed to the ideology, the 500 million-dollar package that was announced in london in january with the members of 70 different nations to kind of peace and reconciliation fund there is a another community defense initiative going down. all of these things are trickling so when singing is when you leave here and start reading the news if you can negative up your radar a little bit ask yourself what is the nugget of what is happening. how is the change being created and what do i need to know -- would 22 due to read to grasp the situation? >> i know there's questions coming but i just want to pick up on that point because it

brings it back to when i introduced colonel hobart some of the beginning of this program because when i was writing the candy bombers and i was writing it the same time that we were watching what was going on in afghanistan and iraq i got this sense that there is a difference between winning a war and winning peace and what we were able to do as a country in the berlin airlift is wind peace and the basic saying goes win hearts and minds but it was more complicated than that it was changing the psychology which is what you're talking about as well. and it seems one of the things we have not yet been able to do that afghanistan has been to change that psychology over the past ten years. do you think the reason we are still in the kind of situation we are now is because of a lack of work on the security side that we have pulled away troops into iraq or is it because you

haven't been able to change the conversation really in the minds of people in afghanistan? >> number one, when people say we've been at war in afghanistan ten years the reality is that is not exactly true we have been at war for a handful of time with any kind of concerted focus, so even in june of 2008 when the monthly death toll exceeded in afghanistan what it was going on in iraq no one seemed to become planning and then suddenly when the president asks for 30,000 more troops everyone kind of weeks up and says it's been going wrong for so long why are we doing this now. if the thinking -- when i was working on the book often people would say or we even in afghanistan? it is hard to think of now because it's kind of dominating the news. so the question is what is the interstate? what was interesting about horse soldiers and special forces personnel and cia personnel and conventional troops is they never wanted to turn the place into minneapolis.

that's never been the point. the plays and is afghanistan and these people do not want the taliban and power by and large. so if you let picture in mind what is going on it is a country that you can go to school in that girls can go to school, greg mortons and has done fascinating work in this area. he basically is a civilian special forces kind of person in other words if you read his books and absorb them and understand them you just distill those that is the nugget also of what some parts of the u.s. military are using to create change. so, the idea is that instead of going from the top down and hitching the wagon to a corrupt government in kabul which for a number of reasons can't reach into the land hugo tried by tried, valley by valley, person by person. it's very old fashioned, very time intensive and you have to speak the language and know a whole bunch of stuff that we are not training as a matter of

course in the army. so we are catching up with that. but how long did it take for anyone to march to selma for civil rights? it took years and decades. so the question is what is our time line here? and what are we willing to do as taxpayers and for the citizens to support this? i don't have -- that is a rhetorical question right now. that is how i think people should look at is that it's generational, its social, and it's not going to end up looking like minneapolis. but little girls standing on the side of the road won't have to shield their eyes because somebody in a black toyota truck is going to drive by and through acid in their face because they are young girls going to school. that is the kind of stuff, that gets me hot.

>> we've gone through this situation in the country where i think there's a lot of discussion right now about our role in afghanistan and that wasn't even through a couple of years ago. it seems to me there was a lot of division about iraq whether we should be there or not but that there was a fair amount of unanimity that afghanistan was the right war, the just war, the place we should have been by partisanship on that issue and yet in the lead up to president obama's decision in december of last year and in the months since we've seen this kind of debate. what do you attribute the change to? >> lack of understanding of what the problem is that it's not war, politics by other means, that americans have to come to grips with is that wars -- war equals also political change and there are certain parts of

society that use violence and chaos to create change but that is not with this problem is about. to step back and say this is about a country that is strategically placed on the globe which the whole globe has interests and is non-devolving further into chaos and unrest. in our own self-interest and then the people there would like to be different as well. so it's getting stuck in this mind set that when i hear some of the debate on the left and the right we even need to bomb it into the stone age or pull out next week. well okay, fine, so but what about that little girl standing by the side of the road? what are you going to do about her? we have a responsibility so she doesn't get blinded by a couple of acid? it is a question we have to ask ourselves. what do women want in the country? they want 9/11 to tell what they

probably wanted to mess out and the jihadists out and karzai out. so the what the misogynist sort of their lives who treat them as chattel and so one. >> this may be a simple question, but who is -- who are the taliban? how do they get to be in control how are they different? rn de to the afghanistan and how is it that they are different and how do they get to be such an oppositional thing to what you describe as the majority? >> the taliban is joining the club of fundamentalism that he believed that afghanistan should be governed by a certain set up laws, not only pashtuns and the tajiks and uzbeks and other

parts of the country but today -- you have to ignore borders for a moment and think about up in the corner with pakistan and the borders are irrelevant there and this -- they are being fed from pakistan were growing within afghanistan. they are afghan citizens but your question is if they are not popular how were they in control? they do what we used to say about the vietnam war, the adjust your preferences and night by coming into your house and slitting your throat or slitting the throat of your family and terrorizing you and then if you read david rhodes piece in "the new york times" after his release, seven months in captivity he was shocked to hear the taliban had more pan arab impulses and also that they

were providing goods and services in the hinterlands that karzai's government could never do. so if i want to come in and terrorize you and at the same time i going to run a legal system and banking system and give you a job and in play you i guess you are going to kind of live with that until something comes to neutralize the death grip you have all my life. >> i'm not sure you can answer this but he would have an opinion in view of the success of the cia and special forces troops just after 2,001, one was in this strategy and tactics followed again when we went back to afghanistan when the idea is to win the hearts and minds especially true reconciliation instead of sending in 30,000 troops? >> it wasn't to say before the

plan for 30,000 year recently. we've been talking about this and it continues to sound fascinating but it doesn't sound so fascinating to a lot of people within the u.s. military because what you're really saying is this kind of thinking is more decentralized and it's not about being in conventional in your approach. what i'm trying to tell you is it was a hard sell as a doctrinal kind of approach to solving this problem so when people say what happened, we basically removed our resources to iraq and elsewhere. the power vacuum opened up and the taliban rushed into the control about 50 of the 34 provinces. to go back to the other gentleman's question by adjusting everybody's preferences and then creating a shadow state, which allowed me to kind of live and breathe the other day. but i do want to say to entrée's question, too, it seems we may be tilting back to what we are talking about now. if you leave here today at the

back and start reading the newspaper will get this stuff, the people were seeing this is a social problem, political problem. we want to stop working with taliban in other words, the 10-dollar a day folks and so forth. but again, it's going to take a long time and the question is what is the patience and your right i don't have an answer. >> yes, sir. >> i could ask about 16 questions but i know i'm not allowed to. >> keep it to 15. [laughter] >> i would ask you something quickly. the first one about the language when the special forces first went there how did they deal with the language problems? the second is about turtle -- tora bora. the correspondent here in the middle of the battle of futures

ago and he gave a talk on sixth street and sixth avenue that first hand account of what happened there. third, charlie wilson on 1 degree of separation because i knew somebody who knew him and helped him come and that shows we have been involved in afghanistan along time ago before the recent 9/11 report or anything else. the question i was going to asked is about women. >> about what? >> about women in the middle east. i feel strongly on women's rights. my mother in egypt was demonstrating in the 1920's for women's rights but have a great notice now. [inaudible] i was on my way to kuwait and on my way and i found -- i met american engineers from

texas who at that time was so, usian and was flying to iraq but have to fly to kuwait and then i met him on the way back he was there to fix the offshore rigs that have been damaged by the iranians. he came back and was so amazed how liberated the iraqi women were. he had the iraqi woman that engineer in blue jeans and t-shirts in front of him. simbel iraq is not any more like that and so while we might have fixed some things, we have damaged a lot of other things. >> very good question. >> and they were? >> we have women, tora bora, and the language. >> pick what you want. [laughter] >> or answer any thing else.

>> the language because it is a good question. the reality is there were not a lot of speakers on the special forces team treated the speak arabic, french, so the use translators. they had to do worker rounds and dropping in the dirt to figure stuff out and again the cia was very key in being that liaison and helping out in this way. let me just jump to the women's issue thing because it is -- its population in afghanistan and so it is amazing that why are they being treated this -- let me ask you how do you stop this? how do you -- the question is how do you create change so that women are not treated as second-class citizens in that country and we are not going to get to the bottom of this right now but so some of you know in

some parts where the sharia law is enforced your window is black so that men walking outside can't see inside etc. it's draconian and it's not even the last five centuries, so -- >> i tell you it's a very complex question. the reason egypt the went the way it did and became more -- it's not completely lost or anything, egypt was in a long week of progress and was very european and moving that way and then instead of what happens with war and once this happens the army took over basically and disrupted the progress that was happening. and so i think stability is a very important thing and we

shouldn't get over. >> someone asked earlier about the taliban and where they come from and basically they rise out of the cauldron of a hellacious servile war that gave rise to the social fabric of the country after the u.s. and soviets pulled out in '89. so you're right, stability in the absence of stability we tend of ironclad rules and laws, draconian measures are part and to place to control people and to codify societal rules and so on and so forth. anyway, it is a good question. >> thank you. >> we have one more question for? go ahead, yes. >> as to you were talking about what can we do to help the position of women, my standard snot the answer is send anyone over there who believes in the

sharia law, a big can of "get over it yourself." that's this not the answer. well, this wasn't my question that now it is my question. not everybody their must be so intolerant, and i wonder if it is possible to draw something that someone here said just about how to lessen the influence of right-wing radical thinking people is to draw the moderates of whatever group you are looking at into some kind of project that where you share values and i wonder if that is possible there. i don't know. it must be tough when you are afraid someone is when to come in and slit your throat. but my original question is anything you were mentioning working tried by tried from the bottom-up is that still going on bye anyone? >> it is going on more debt to the hyper little, yes, with

forces in their working some. but afghanistan is a country built on consensus. they have lawyers and sit in a circle and they all figure out what it is they are going to do and then they try to do it and often it changes and people don't do what they said they were going to do but it is a country of consensus making and afghanistan likes a winner, too. going back to the question about the taliban. typically, in that society you are going with the winners of what is going on right now is the counter insurgency deployment etc is that karzai and the afghans have to seem like more of the winner then that taliban had been believe it or not in operating the government and that is one of the things we asked about wife of 30,000 troops. that's fine to create from the top down police force or which can provide security but then from the grassroots bottom-up then work of this person by person tried by tried.

as a case in point detroit said they were so disgusted with the talent and a couple of weeks ago they were going to fight them no matter what and if the u.s. wanted to help out, great but they were sick of these guys coming to the village and extortion and terrorizing. will it turns out that reasoning like this last week the two so the tribes are now fighting each other and they stopped fighting the taliban. so, this is again a problem that they have to solve. but what we did in 01 and we've done throughout is that at that little mode of discontent would be on a groundout by the special forces thinking. >> we will take one final question from gail hubbard sen for plugging us we will be speaking in half an hour about the berlin airlift and candy bombers at the integrated learning center. >> i very much enjoyed this.

thank you. how much is the opium trade having an effect on the economy of afghanistan and how is that intertwined with our task of changing the psychology of the people whose lives depend on that? >> that's an excellent question. recently there was 100 million-dollar aid package to bolster pakistan and afghanistan agriculture that some of the people who are in the book have been communicating with me about and they think it's very important. here's why. like an marjah it is extremely important, it doesn't mean they are using it but they're growing it. if you want to go back and see what happens after the soviets pulled out in the agriculture and social fabric, etc., etc. petraeus if you can replace the poppy with something else and the government -- and this comes from the