of insecurity as well. >> i know that ms. amos has another engagement. thank you very much for coming. have a good afternoon, everyone. >> thanks so much. >> at a new york university law school symposium, legal analysts discussed public corruption. you will hear from the senate committee attorney, just as a professional, law school professors and the executive

director of citizens for responsibility and ethics. this is just over an hour. >> i'm the professor here at the law school and i have the honor of chairing this first panel on defining corruption because time is short and because the speakers are identified here in the program and i'm not going to give them the introductions which they are due appropriate and we will launch right into our discussion. to kick things off, i'd like to ask the panelists to consider where is the contested terrain today on the subject of

corruption, where is the battleground, where are we confused about what is corrupt and what is not correct. what is left to be decided. i'm going to proceed alphabetically starting with the professor from northwestern. >> [inaudible] >> i have to ask what counts as corruption from purposes of criminal punishment, or what counts as corruption for purposes of ethical regulations that are enforced by noncriminal sanctions and the rule of the house that might lead to expulsion from the house or whatever or what should count as corruption when we are talking about campaign finance legislation and other structural reforms of the sort mentioned.

i suppose we're focusing mostly on the first question of what counts as corruption for purposes of criminal prosecution. and there's been a constant battle on that subject going on for the last 30 years. yet the supreme court of the united states and it thinks that we should define corruption in a way that provides pretty clear and definite rules and on the other hand, you have everybody else. all of the prosecutors, apparently the congress of the united states, most of the lower federal courts, and they seem to want to criminalize anything that might divert the public official from faithful service to the public. conflict of interest, and disclosed conflict of interest, supreme court a year ago considered a federal statute that out what deprivations of the intangible right to honest

services. nobody knew what it meant. the supreme court said we better narrow that statute and the dead, but now there are congressional efforts to broaden it, so that's the topic being brought out land. >> okay. the chief counsel for the criminal justice committee on the senate judiciary committee's you ought to comment on that? are we in a situation of over defining corruption? >> sure. i think of your body needs that there needs to be -- there needs to be real definition. people need to understand what conduct is covered particularly by the criminal statute to be noticed and it needs to be fairness. the question is where you draw that line. when you define it how do you

define it. i think by and large there are a lot of ways you can look at what is corruption. i think within the criminal contact, probably the fair place to start is saying that corruption is what happens when you have public officials acting in their own personal usually financial interest rather than in the interest of the public that they're supposed to be serving. i think there's a fair amount of consensus that you've got corruption and criminal corruption where everybody recognizes it to be a bride somebody takes money to make a certain decision that they may or may not make otherwise they are getting paid to do so. on the controversy i think it comes when you have a similar principle that has been structured in a somewhat different way. that doesn't look like a pride that we have all come to recognize and i think that there is some tension between the need

to be able to have some flexibility to address lawful conduct that comes up both because public officials and those who deal with public officials were also often sophisticated and they come up with new and different ways of getting -- doing what they want to do and there are also new circumstances that arise and the prosecutors need some room to address changing and evolving methods and circumstances. that on the one hand. on the of the hand, the need to have notice and fairness so you need to have a contract that is somewhat specifically prohibited. i think the areas where we have seen detention and would the service is as the professor diluted to, they did allow a lot of flexibility and also created some confusion as to exactly

what was covered. we can -- i won't get into that foley because i feel we are staying in a more general level cure, but a couple of other examples of where that tension ochers as to conduct the doesn't look quite like a bride another what is in the gratuity context, the issue of what is known as status gratuity that the head of public officials getting money essentially because they were a public official supreme court in the dimond case in the 90's said that there was too broad of a construction and the money had to be paid for in a specific link to a specific act and there's the question of whether that leaves a gap that is significant. another one is in the supreme court case called velte is which dealt with whether payments in a

bribe payments needed to be for something that was in the range of offical response ability of the public official and there was a police officer who was taking money to do checks on eventually a criminal history data base and the defense coming essentially which the supreme court accepted was, well, he wasn't supposed to be doing that so he can beat to it wasn't a bribe because he wasn't taking money to do a decision in his responsibility. so that's another area which is that line between staying within the sort of accepted boundaries of existing statutes so there's absolute notice, but on the one hand, on the other hand wanting to reach the conduct that officials and those who want to corrupt them are able to come up with. and maybe the answer to that is

continuing to refine the law with new precise, but also effective statutes that reached a broad range of conduct. we will turn to the professor on this same issue of where is the contested terrain maybe we can sharpen it a little by saying is that the corruption as hard to define, or is it that we can't agree on what is corrupt even if we couldn't define the conduct in question? >> welcome first, thanks so much for having me here. i think that you know, why don't i start by being a textualist because no one ever thinks i am a textualist. if you ask where the word corruption comes from it comes from the latin word which means

to break things into pieces. so to understand what corruption is you have to have the notion of what on corrupt would be. that is how do you know it is corruption it is a deviation from what would otherwise be the proper outcome, and i think one of the reasons we have a difficulty in defining corruption and in going after prosecuting corruption is in part because we don't have an agreement on what the normal or what the good would be to begin with. instead of talking of the criminal case for a minute i want to talk about two other recent supreme court cases that talk about corruption because the show i think what the real difficulties are and these are a few cases in which there wasn't a criminal prosecution. they are the case in the citizens united which are cases that involved -- the first case entirely legal spending of money.

that is a man who had a case in front of the west virginia supreme court spent millions of dollars to change the e election outcome. all of the money he spent was completely legal. that is the campaign contribution that he gave was within the limits and the supreme court has held that independent expenditure which is how he spent most of his money are completely protected by the first and mint. it in the supreme court says we think that there was a risk of corruption here because the judge that got elected on the basis of contributions and expenditures from the litigant is likely to feel gratitude. so you have a conflict there or attention to two different values we have. to be to take and spend money as much as you want and speech how you want and the other is having the justice system in which money plays no role.

the supreme court comes up with a definition of corruption that is extremely narrow. what the supreme court says is when it comes to money spent on influences and who gets into office and who decides as often as what determines what the decision will be the report says quid pro quo corruption is the only problem. now what concept, well, they are easy cases. the easy cases are you bribe a public official by giving him money that he puts in his own pocket. or by votes from people by offering them $10 to vote for your candidate and a trip to the understood those are corruption's and those can be criminally prohibited. but what about the intermediate case, which isn't offering the candidate money to put in his own pocket, but offering him money or spending the money independently to get him

elected? well that's often constitutionally protected conduct so what we do about that? what skill even a step further which is the supreme court has held that if you offer for $10 to vote for you that can be made a crime, but if you promise that if elected he will reduce the taxes by $10 that's not a crime, that is again the first amendment protected speech. and so, if you are going to have a narrow definition of what counts as a crime of corruption while having a very broad sense of what it means for the system to have been distorted, you can solve the problem that no one is talking about only at the extent of leaving a lot of public discomfort at the kind that leads to the polling results talked about earlier. was that an answer to your question? i wanted to make sure.

>> that's your answer to my question. [laughter] >> melanie sloan is the exit of dirt for the citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington, and we would like to hear your take on this issue. >> i think that there's a serious danger in defining the corruption because politicians are clever and will come up with new ways and schemes more specifically defined crime and that is why the statute in my mind was so great. it was so broad it allows you to take on a host of conduct and the concept we need to narrowly defined things i think for a lot of americans corruption isn't too different from pornography. you know it when you see it and a good a symbol of life and a lot of people might agree is corrupt is something we saw on the front page in "the new york times" today that she has gotten billions in tax breaks and is

paying almost nothing in taxes in america and there's the question about why. they've got in tax breaks by a lot of political the influence. they spent a fortune on lobbying and then they gave $30 million to the new york city public schools, and this involves a figure that has had a lot of corruption issues, charlie rangel and i think that he brings an interesting point because charlie rangel would argue he was and corrupt. even on the last day when he was about to be censured by the full house, he was arguing that he hadn't received any personal enrichment. no money, no actual dollars had gone into his pocket which was his definition of corruption. he didn't get any money but i think that there's very few regular americans that would look at the host of conduct and mr. trinkle was ultimately found to have engaged in and think that it wasn't corrupt. in that way i might differ from the keynote speaker to say it isn't all about the money sometimes it is also about the prestige sometimes because for

mr. rangel he wanted to be the center which was the lasting legacy to new york and then the 3 million to the new york public schools, so it wasn't about mr. rangel personally getting money, then you have other public officials engaged in wrongdoing not for money but perhaps to cover up their other misconduct like john ensign who i think although the department of justice isn't taking this position most americans would also find what is corrupt. so i think you have to look at corruption as members of congress and members of the state legislature of using their powers for some personal interest that may or may not be financial. >> okay. thank you. now to jack smith, the chief of the public integrity section of the department of justice. >> i come at the question i think from a similar perspective

than the one that melanie just mentioned. i think regular americans expect the mechanisms of government will protect their interest, they pay their taxes and follow their rules and expect to get what they paid for and that is a great starting point in defining what is there and what isn't fair. what i find when we litigate these cases is what it comes down to often particularly following the skilling case is the issue of the corrupt intent. the bride statute is the most common statute we use to the it's the bedrock statute. what you see in the actual litigation of the cases of the battleground it's often not debated by the time there is a trial about what one person did and the other person did. it's not be dated what a politician was given and it's not debated what act were some

way to the benefit of the person who gave him something. the battleground in these cases and we see it again and again and again is what was that person's intent? did they do this or that? did they act corrupt when? did they take things merely because they were friends or was it because they were going to be influenced by the other party? the point raised earlier about the status gratuity, the was the situation where you didn't have to prove that, you didn't have to prove you did this or that. it was you got this and you are a public official that's a crime or i think one of the things melanie and i would agree on the was nice about that is there was a bright line but it is a broad line so it was very clear to the public official listen, this is the rule. it's very clear deutsch can't do this, but at the same time it was broad enough to capture conduct that i think regular americans would find offensive

and in a broad sense corrupt. i think another important area to think about in terms of the reach of the corruption law and in terms of defining the battleground is, and this follows upon some of the points raised in the address is how far it can reach in terms of state and local government. the federal programs, bribery statutes and the department of justice and for my litigating unit because it allows us to reach corruption in state and local government and as it was then pointed out a lot of the tax dollars of those americans who go to the federal government and they come back down to the state government and there is a lot of room for the corruption. i do think that when we are talking about the how to be defined corruption and where is it more corrupt? it's difficult to do that because i don't think that the number of the prosecution's is particularly a good way to do it because oftentimes when i go to

speak to folks about the corruption programs and what sort of cases they are doing oftentimes i go places and first thing i hear is the end of the corruption problem here and my immediate reaction is what you definitely have the corruption problem. and that has been our experience, so one of the things we are doing in the department is trying to go places and bring cases they haven't been or otherwise wouldn't be brought if we were there so i think part of the issue is one of the tools can be a tool that gives people notice so we give people notice with the rules are so we start enforcing them but at the same time as broad enough so that we can capture conduct that i think regular americans think i expected more when i put my tax dollars in. we have a lot of perspective on defining corruption and i will let you react to one another,

and perhaps keeping in mind now as the general topic also defining, and are we under criminalizing, sticking to the criminal law, or are we over criminalizing corruption? >> jack and melanie talk about what does the average american think is corrupt? there's a lot of cynicism out there. there's an academic discipline called public choice theory that sees all the government is corrupt. everything is bribery or the functional equivalent of bribery. 50% of americans ask is congress rough? yes, if that is the second most common name to come to mind when you start talking about the federal government. let me give you a hypothetical case imagine mother teresa is elected the governor of illinois. as a lot venture i get to pose a hypothetical cases that never could happen. unlike anybody that has ever

been elected to public office, mother teresa gives no thoughts to her own welfare or to the welfare of her family, no thoughts to the welfare of the political supporters. she thinks only about the welfare of the people of the state of illinois. but conflicts of interest are ubiquitous. public officials can't avoid them, and mother teresa is going to make some decisions that are going to favor her political supporters and she's going to make some decisions that are beneficial to somebody that gave her sister a job once upon a time and she's going to make decisions beneficial to somebody that served as her host when she visited a foreign country. when it happens the newspapers in chicago and the u.s. attorney's office will say ah-ha, behold, look one hand is watching the other. that's the functional equivalent of corruption. we always knew that mother teresa was no different from the rest of them.

and you know, you file charges, she finally did the right of services and one of the conflicts of interest wasn't properly to disclose, you have a long trial, you will charge one scheme of the fraud that began the moment she was elected to office and at the moment she left. and every benefit she gave to somebody every benefit she received from somebody is going to be tossed into that trial and you're going to instruct the jury to don't need to find all that happened you need to find some way there was a scheme and sure enough they will convict mother teresa. the standards should be written on the basis of what is the average american -- i mean, jack and melanie do point out the quid pro quo bribery standard is under a clause of, and there are things we don't like that don't qualify as quid pro quo, that if you try to do what they want to do, chased down every new thing that a prosecutor might do in a

public official might do to avoid the existing wall and make that a 20 year federal felony as well. you're going to wind up with the wall the struggles and unjust convictions. >> there is a kind of rain after her falling down -- [laughter] on the local and state political officials and public servants any reaction to that? >> sure. where to start. you know, i think that it's easy to kind of see the runway criminalization of corruption. i don't really buy it. i think that we are talking about sophisticated actors who generally understand the law and

of war going to be represented by the council if there are effort charters and these are people who, if anybody can negotiate the statute these are the people who can do it. i think that you can argue as to whether certain kinds of criminal statutes have been overly broad or overly difficult to understand i think that the solution to that isn't to then say let's not do it, let's not try to define the problem but let's do it better. and they really are important categories of what people would perceive appropriately to the corruption that simply are not included in the very precise limits of bribery. you have in the status gratuity

situation you have something that looks like the corrine favor of some interest providing money to public officials over a hurdle of time especially in the hopes when the right time arises that public official would act in the interest. that's something even if you don't have the precise profit at lincoln could be very problematic. if you have a very precise rules that defines when you can and can't do that that's something that my boss senator leahy would argue is a problem you ought to be trying to get at. similarly, instead of taking a bribe, you have say a mayor who secretly has an interest in a company that that may your award the contract to it's hard to see that that is less insidious than a cash payment come and get that is the kind of case that formerly was covered by the service fraud and now is not.

so, i really do agree that there is a need for, as i think jack said, bright lines but brought lines. and i will certainly agree with pam's point, that you're not going to address everything through just criminal statutes, but there are structural issues that need to be addressed on their own merits and that you're never going to be given to criminalize everything people find distasteful. but you should be criminalizing those things that are actually people being corrupted by taking money they are not supposed to be taking. and i would actually argue that overtime aggressive standards for corruption and ethics while you're going to have more prosecution which may in the short term need people to think

that there's more corruption over time is going to increase the public faith in government. >> so, professor carlin, are we over criminalizing, are we putting public servants elected and appointed in a terrible position where they don't know what they can do and they can't do a naftali in their hands? >> khator o de qtr to what did people voting a now dead people getting elected which is maybe a little bit scary although, you know, the personal benefits to them might be left. i think the natural problem here is that you can't have a criminal statute and we learned this in the obscenity area that says we can't tell you what this is the we know it when we see it. of that can't be the standard so you can't have the crime of

corruption broadly understood. that being said, the question is what do you want to regulate, where do you want to put the effort, and what can you expect thousands of government employees and other people potentially covered by the statute to understand their responsibility to be? i spent a fair amount of time i guess about two and a half or three years as a commissioner on the california practices commission, which is the state agency that oversees campaign finance and conflict of interest. and the rules of conflict of interest were incredibly complicated, that is good legislators or other people who are making decisions go to the reception, they could but then it turned out that it mattered how long you stayed, whether the food was sit down or stand up, how could you decide whether a gift needed to be disclosed? the was complicated, too. if somebody gave you tickets to

a ball game is it the face value of the ticket? is a the value on stubs.com over tickets and the like? if you need a crime to fail to disclose, and you have the kind of disclosure regime to the states like california have, potentially you are engaged in crime every time that you interact with people. ..

>> i think that is a lot of what i worry is about is if you actually had to prosecute everybody, you would have different laws because if we prosecute everybody for this, we'll have a narrow law, but if the law is decided president the prosecutor and they have their own political interests, i think you do run a serious risk that the broader you define corruption as a criminal matter, the harder it is for people to actually comply with the law and the riskier the prosecution becomes. >> okay. melanie, do you want to jump in? >> sure. i think the real problem is we've overly narrowed the

ability of prosecutors to go after corruption. there's been a series of bad court cases over the last ten years or so that made it difficult for the public integrity sector for example to target corruption, and i would name the diamond case was the first terrible case making it very difficult to prosecute for anybody accepting things like tickets and gifts that were not specifically for a specific action, but were just done in general to butter the public official up so if you later wanted to ask the public official for something, then as noah mentioned, there's the valdez case which is overly narrow in an official case. if a police officer running somebody's license plate for cash isn't an official act, running a license plate, isn't that something we think all police officers do?

if that's not an fib act, -- official act, then what is in the feemped debate clause and the way the courts have the debate is another very significant problem in targeting corruption. the case was where william jefferson's office was searched and the dc circuit in this case ultimately suggested that there's a future debate clause means you cannot use material that is in the legislative sphere against a member of congress. it means you can't accidently find something. they suggest you can't wiretap a member of congress because he or she might say something about legislation in the course of that phone call, and the fbi has no permission to incidentally hear that so i think those kind of narrowing enforcement tools have made a job incredibly difficult.

we are not that sympathetic, but i feel that is the lack of tools at their disposal so much harder. in other places there's ethics offices that tepid to -- tend to not do a great job. the house and senate i think are two great examples of a lot of conduct that doesn't rise to criminal, but people view it as crucht, and that's why we have things like the gift rules and travel rules and all these things, but what we find is despite all the rules that we have, the rules themselves are not enforced. the jack scandal which ended up with a wholesale change in the ethics rules in the house and senate was interesting because most of the kind of conduct that jack a brame and his cronies were involved in at the time were already against the rules. the problem was there was no

enforcement of the rules. the question is never as much about the definition of a really aggressive enforcement because i think enforcement is a deterrent. most politicians don't want to go to jail or see their entire political careers derailed by front page headlines about ethics problems. if they are enforced, they'll be less likely to engage in misought conduct in the first place. >> i fully agree and i think one of the good areas about the law is the people who commit the offenses are detourble. they have something to lose and if the department of justice brings cases like this, other actors will not commit acts they otherwise would have done. if we can come up with laws that give people notice but are broad enough to address the conduct, we really can't address not everything, but quite a bit through the criminal cases we

bring. going back to the hypothetical though briefly, i do kind of debate it because i think there's a difference between the law here and the facts. you mentioned, you know, that the case against mother teresa would be reported in the newspaper, and we don't want to live in a society where somebody is convicted based on the newspapers. i can tell you very often we have cases we investigate where there's allegations in the newspapers which, if nose allegations were true, and if those allegations were the complete story, i can see why the average american would think that is corrupt, but we don't want to live in a society of a form of mob rule where we get a few allegations without any process and convict somebody. i think that's the role of the prosecutor to take allegations like that when they are public, investigate, and see if the facts actually back up what's there. is the allegation in the source

credible? is there information on the other side? is there corroborating information that makes it even stronger? if you have that an objective professional prosecutor to look at those things, i think the issue you have with the mother teresa case does not get into a courtroom, and if it does, then is jury has to decide whether there a scheme to defraud, and i think then given if you have a statute that makes clear what's illegal and what's not, i don't think there's anything unfair about that. i think another fair really to raise here is it was mentioned earlier about the jefferson case where a large sum of cash was found in his freezer, and i can tell you there's other cases like that in the future, but that's not the usual corruption case. the folks who commit the crimes are sophisticated individuals, and by and large, they give the money or give and receive the benefits in all sorts of

complicated reforms that are not nearly as stark or easy to report in a newspaper. because of how the crimes are committed and often committed by sophisticated people with great means, we do need laws that are broad enough to reach conduct. i think that the example given earlier that noah gave was a great one. right now under the statute as it exists, we can want charge undisclosed conflicts of interest. you have a mayor, and he takes bribes for city contracts, puts the money in his pocket, give somebody a contract, the average american taxpayers do not get they paid for. i prosecute that case, it's bribery, and i think everybody would think that we should. that same mayor says, you know what? i don't want the bribes, i want more money. i'm going to start my company,

hide my interest in it, funnel the contacts to me. i can't prosecute that case, and i think the average american in terms of what's wrong if you believe those facts, if those facts in an objective investigation are brought to lite, i think that average americanments the department of justice to bring in that case. >> so, what i see here is in terms of the terrain and the contested terrain, we have three areas. one is on gratuities, one is on campaign finance, and one is on conflicts of interests, and in each of those areas, there's a lot of uncertainty about the line between criminally corrupt and lawful and every day politics. i'd like to focus, if we could, just on the conflicts of interest since the supreme court's recent case put that into play. i've been looking at the

prosecution of our senate majority leader here in new york not to leave the whole field to new jersey, and joe bruno was certainly one of the most powerful figures in new york state politics for two decades. in addition to being the majority leader in our senate, he worked for an investment company, and his job was to go out and to so lis sit -- solicit clients for the company, specifically the unions probably because they had so much business before the legislature and in order to get any bills of interest to them up on the radar screen and so forth, they had to deal with him, and so he called or allegedly called both public

sector and private sector labor center unions and said please invest with this company that was an excellent company that would give them very good returns, and he did quite well, and he was compensated based upon the business that he brought to the company. when i was called after the indictment by the new "new york times" and they said well, what do you think about this? i said, well, that sounds like what we would expect to go on in a banana republic. how can there seriously be a question about whether that is a permissible way of governing ourselves here? they said, well, they say everybody does this. this is what business in albany does as anne told us before.

all these legislatetures are just part time legislatures, they are citizen soldiers so to speak with law practices, insurance companies, other kinds of businesses, and they do quite well. they find many, many people come to do business with them probably because they are well-known and prominent and very smart. what's wrong with it? >> well, what's wrong with it is it diverts the public official from serving the public interest, but it's a tough problem. the "new york times" some years ago had a story about the fact that general dynamics was giving $50,000 a year to the allentown symphony. it was an orchestra you've

probably never heard of. why? because this was the favorite charity of the services committee. they were trying to carry on the favor. there's no dolt about that. what do you want to do about it? do you want to say they can't give money to the al tentown -- allentown symphony and say we'll lock them up if he makes business decisions and he doesn't disclose they gave money to their wife's favorite charity? think about the ethical legislations. this is where they should be addressed. there should be rules on what gifts you can take from lobbyists. maybe they can buy you lunch. we have to have rules whether your insurance company and your law firm should be able to do business with people who are contracting with the state.

they shouldn't be, but can your insurance company do business with somebody who might have business with the state later? well, i mean, that's everybody; right? i mean, just -- that's the way the problems ought to be addressed. figure out what conflicts of interests we want to cut off at the front end and forget about trying to come up with some sweeping statute that will cover everything that we don't want public officials to do in two or three sentences and authorize a long prison term for violating that statute. >> conflicts of interests, just too complicated? >> i don't think so. it's -- obviously, it's a more difficult soundbyte than broib ri, but when you -- bribery, but when you have public officials who are

benefits finally in a way that is not allowed by the rules and the laws and that can affect their -- the way they perform their official duties -- >> what if it is allowed by the rules? >> well, i think that there ought not to be criminal laws that conflict with ethics rules, and there's a point that justice scalia made in the sun diamond case, and that makes some sense, but, again, you can -- that's something with good legislating, you can address, that senator leahy introduced bills on the gratuity question that attempt to fill these gaps that are left in the law, but to do it in a way that provides real direction that is not setting traps for people, but that is allowing

prosecutors to go after those cases where you have people who are public servants not acting in the interest of the public, but rather in their own financial interests, and i think that i agree, you know, if you have a potential -- a company donating to a certain charity that somebody likes, well, that sounds like something that ought to be addressed if at all in ethics rules, but when you have a public official personally benefiting financially, that's something that ought to be covered by the criminal statutes and can be if the statutes are drafted in a clear, but appropriately broad way. >> pam, you want to weigh in on that? >> sure. so one thing to keep in mind here with regard to, for example, state legislate -- legislatures who have business on the side is the american people are getting the kind of legislatures they are willing to pay for.

that is, if you say to people you cannot be a legislature and eat, you have to do something else to put food on the table, then that's exactly what you will get is people who had businesses that are connected in some way because you can't find a lot of people who are in a business that has no relationship to government at all who want to spend 50% of their time on business, so, you know, if people want lettures on the -- legislatures on the cheap, somebody else is going to be paying for the legislatures, and they're going to reap the problem that they sewed themselves. i agree with this entirely that it's very difficult to move everything into conflict of interests opposed to just talking about the general interest of legislatures because think back to caperton again. what was the conflict of interest there that required chief justice benjamin to rescue himself from the case?

it was that money was given 10 that he would get to have the job he had, and if you say that it's a conflict of interest any time you act in a way that's likely to continue your election, you then create a really difficult dilemma because then what you are saying is if you do something that's likely to lead to you being reelected, that creates a conflict of interests, but, of course, voters are voting for you because of what you do or don't do. if it's a con infrastructure -- conflict of interest of just talking about money or other things or well, if it's a conflict of interest for justice benjamin to sit on cases because campaign contributors gave money, what do you do about the fact that in the year before they come up to reelection, judges prosecute criminals more harshly than in present years? is that a conflict of interest

because they put something in jail longer to keep their job in i think once you get away from the narrow category of financial benefit to the individual, you are going to create a situation in which there suspect a clear line, and just to quote the old cliche of lord atkins is absolute power corrupt is absolutely and unfettered prosecutor power has its own corrupting influences they may be just as bad as the corrupter influences if you define conflict of interests so broadly that it sweeps any time the constituents of a representative are benefits which is what you might think of the allentown symphony as. it's not like there's private concerts in the house. that i understand, but who wants to go to allentown -- i

shouldn't say that because people from allentown are probably watching. whatever you do, never say anything bad about guns. [laughter] but seriously, you know, if you viewed it as a conflict of interest when people try to ingratiate themselves with a legislator by benefiting the legislator's constituents, you really have completely elastic definition that starts to butt up against what normal politics is. >> ms. sloan? >> the charity thing is a great example for several reasons. first, this is a growing problem, the misuse of charities, and want misuse of charities is getting much more sophisticating than i'm going to be a defense contractor who contributes to defense appropriators favorite charities. another example we saw

recently. steve boyar, now former member of congress in indiana created the frontier foundation that was going to help give scholarships to people, to needy kids in i understand. the foundation gave maybe $2,000 in scholarships in i i indiana. it actually allowed him to play golf with lobbyists who had business before his committee and all those folks, were, in fact, contributing to his frontier foundation that allowed him to play golf without having to give money to anybody. this is the kind of situation that one, most people i think would find objectionable and would find to be a conflict of interests, but this is an example where the house routinely giving waivers for this kind of behavior whereas

you would think members of congress are, in fact, allowed to raise money for comarts, but -- charities, and there's also ethics rules and federal regulations that say you're not supposed to try to ask of anything of value of people who have business before you, but for reasons i cannot fathom, you get waivers so you can raise money with businesses before them. when rangel got in trouble, he forgot the wairve. if he got the waiver from the ethics committee, all the issues regarding whether or not he got the million dollars for the rangel center, that would have been a nonissue, because because steve got waivers, he was allowed to raise money from folks with business for his community so he could go play golf, and that's the kind of conflict of interest we don't want to see, and yet, there's more and more of this many members of congress have these committees, have these charity

foundations hatch from utah has the hatch foundations and who gives to it? pharmaceutical companies, and they have found mr. hatch to be incredibly favorable to pharmaceutical interests. they are not giving money7ov

>> oh, i thought the rule was this because the rules are close enough, and they got legal advice from somebody and thought this rule was consistent with that rule so for us to have an enforceable conflict of interest law both either in the house or senate or any sort of state body, i think there's a real need for coordination and consistency with the criminal law because efforts to kind of add another layer can complicate things so much it makes it very difficult to enforce. on the other side, i would just say this in the beginning one of the issues that was talked about is, you know, everybody does this, and i can tell you as a prosecutor offend times when we investigate cases and other cases as well, one of the defenses is some variation of everybody does this. i think most of the folks here, and i'm sure melanie devoted her career to people who try to use

that defense it doesn't work. everybody who does this is a defense to a charge. if there is fair notice that this was against the rules, we have to bring those cases because, again, if we bring those cases, i think they can have an effect going forward and we just need a clear rule to base the cases on. >> we're going to take questions in just a minute so warm yourselves up for questioning, but we'll give another five minutes to just for free back and forth here on the panel. >> well, just a couple points on the sort of everybody does this approach. i think first of all, it's just not true. there are, as anne said, a lot of good public officials are in it for the right reason, and

it's just simply a copout to say that the system is corrupt, therefore i can't be held accountable for what i did. the other thing is is that to the extent that there is systemic corruption that rises to the level of crime, the way that you start to change that is by enforcing the law, and if people start getting prosecuted, then everybody, you know, people will stop doing it to some extent at least although the criminal law is not the only solution or the complete solution, and where there is systemic corruption that results in people benefits financially, that is currently outside the scope of the law because some of the court decisions that people have addressed for other reasons, well, that's where writing new laws that are precise and give fair warping, but that -- warning, but bring that back in

is very important. you outline that conduct clearly and firmly and enforce the law, and that gives a pretty strong counter incentive to public officials who might be inclined because it's kind of the culture of the place to violate the law of the you know, one other just a follow up to another earlier point in not convicting people based on what's in the newspapers. i think the jefferson case is actually an interesting example on that because, you know, of course he's famous for the $90,000 in his freezer. one of the few counts he was acquitted on is the foreign fracts count for the money in the freezer. he was convicted on a lot of other things. i think most people don't know that. it is really important that the -- that the law is precise

and the facts dictate who is charged and what they are convicted of, and that's how you start at least on the criminal level solving these problems. >> al, you look like you are ready to jump in. >> well, i just want to say something -- oh, i don't have this on. i want to say something about the new legislation that's going to be precise and give fair warning to people in what senator leahy introduced and noah has been talking about. it says you're going to lock somebody up if he's done -- where is it? if he's taken an official action benefiting or furthering the financial interests of anybody from whom he has received a thing of value, and he fails to disclose information regarding that financial interest. it probably means a thing of

value -- by any federal, state, or local law or statute. you vote not to reinstate the bush taxes for people over $250,000. you benefited everybody who makes more than $250,000. you benefited anybody who ever did anything for you. if you failed to disclose that as required by a state and local regulation, you're guilty of a 20-year federal felony. what's a crime in iowa is not a federal crime in illinois. you're going to try people for the state and local regulations and in the federal court and what's not enforced by criminal statutes and punish them for 20 years and adopt the uncertainties of those regulations which are enormous. the person who administers the federal regulation says to a new

member of congress, study them, study them carefully, but you won't understand them. different rules for disclosing donuts than disclosing sandwiches. different rules for taking money for a book chapter than giving a speech, and in illinois -- by the way, this statute doesn't cover it at all if the gift has gone to the spouse or the nephew or the cousin. there's lots of ways around this statute, but in illinois you do have to disclose the money given to the spouse if you constructively control it. what? nobody has any idea. all this legislation does is adopt the uncertainties of the enormously complicated ethical regulations. >> i want to respond quickly because i don'tment to get into the details of this bill

introduced, but i think that example just doesn't really hold up. if you -- if a legislator votes for a tax cut that benefits their constituents, first of all, they disclosed it. they voted. that's a disclosure. >> nobody? >> nobody -- >> order. [laughter] >> absolutely not. it covers a situation where somebody is secretly gets gifts or is secretly a specific financial interest and is taking official action that benefits that interest. it also does cover spouses, not in every respect, but in certain respects, so i think i argue pretty strenuously with a number of those characterizations. i also would say this is a piece of legislation that was introduced, and if it can be tightened, i know senator leahy is all for tightening it and

making it better, but saying this is hard is not an excuse for not doing it when there are very significant factual scenarios of what all of us would agree are real corruptions not now covered by the criminal law. >> i want to move to the question and answer part, so if you have a question, i see a microphone there, and please take the microphone, and if you don't mind, let us know who you are, you could be a law enforcer or even a corrupt politician. [laughter] >> good morning, panelists, members. i have a question for anne about corruption in new jersey. >> the questions are for the panelists. she'll talk to you later. >> oh, she's still with us in the front row.

she can answer if she chooses to. my question is for the panelists i'm sorry. >> well -- >> my name is howard, and ronde joseph fish released a public report in which he found that the regarding rungs at the water front harbor and among the subjects of this a report by the inspector general was albert and the report -- >> can you get to the question quickly? >> please give me curtesy. i'll get to my question in the next few moments. the question is the inspector general found in his report that the prosecutor improperly interfered with separate criminal investigations, one involving an uncle and friends. what steps if any, anne, did you take -- >> come on.

go to the back. >> i have a question that relates to what professor karlin alluded to. what connection, is there any correlation between the issue of corruption and we understand what greed is, and the issue of what salaries are paid to some elected officials? we had a situation in new york city about two decades ago where we had a rogue president who was making, i don't remember the exact amount, but making one fiefth or one tenth of what his fellow graduates of business school were making running corporations, and he was running the bar of queens with 20,000 employees doing a good job, but having trouble paying college tuition for his kids and struggling to be on the social level of his fellow graduates,

and may have felt forced to engage in corruption. i don't know that he was lining his pocketing. >> i think we got the question. >> yes, thank you. >> well, you know, the salaries that public officials make, they know going into what the salary is, and if you feel you can't live on the salary, i don't think the acceptable thing to do is i'll make the salary and try to make money on the side. >> [inaudible] >> okay, there is a problem, and this goes back to you get the government you pay for. it's like the jimmy carter made a campaign promise that he promised the american people a government is kind and compassionate like the american people, and that can be a problem sometimes. [laughter] if you want to attract frustrate talent to the public sector, you can obviously give a discount because people are committed to public service, but you can't

expect part time legislators to a better job. you can't expect the same quality of legislator if people can't develop expertise in the job. it's like any other job. that being said, there's no excuse for taking status gratuities or taking bribes or no excuse for any of that, but it does leave a lot of legislators and officials to think a lot of the time they're in office of what their next job is going to be and think in ways that maximize their future income in those next jobs, and that's the problem. >> it appears that we are out of time, so we're going to call this first panel adjourned. [applause] >> on c-span2 tonight, a discussion about u.s. strategy

in afghanistan, then president obama holds a town hall meeting on the budget at facebook head quarters in pala alto, california. later, legal analysts discuss how to define corruption. >> here are some of the programs featured on c-span this weekend. three former secretaries of state talk about diplomacy and lawyers who participated. on easter sunday, president ford's son talks about ethical issues and jenna bush's memories

of the white house with her grandfather and father, and then vice president biden on the presidential candidate bob dole. for a complete list of this week's programs and time, go online at c-span.org. >> the afghanistan study group held a series of discussions today on the afghanistan war. this panel focused on afghanistan war strategy troop costs, counter insurgeon ji

operations and peace negotiations. speakers include thomas pickerring and richard vague, the cofounder of the afghanistan study group. the group published their report in august calling on the obama administration to change its strategy in afghanistan. from the carnegie endowment for peace in washington, d.c., this is an hour and a half. >> thank you for joining us. i'm steve clemons and i have a special greeting for the people watching us online right now. there's loathes of blog -- lots of blogs that are running con currently all through the morning and our provocative afternoon, and the topic we're discussing is u.s. policy in the afghanistan war, does afghanistan today contain or leverage u.s. power? we really have a very dynamic session with voices and people

that capture not only i think the political spectrum, but the people thinking hard about these issues. i think every one of the people in the panel today is someone who essentially put themselves out in what i call the kind of constant peer review process and someone subjecting themselves to both the critique of many people trying to think about this question of what is the appropriate role of united states in afghanistan and what is the responsibility, and where should we go? we have this morning a great session, the cost benefit review, and friend and ambassador tom pickerring and decided to give him the world. he was ambassador to united

nations, russia, and so many others, and he was most recently cochair of the century foundation international task force in afghanistan entitled afghanistan negotiating peace. this book is available to all of you. pick it up outside. i hope you read it. it's one of the most important contributions i think right now out in the field looking at what are the next steps, america's options today, and where is afghanistan and the responsible way forward. i hope you look at it. it's an international task force with nine american members. there's the foreign minister of russia, leading figures in china and so on. he was at the national intelligence counsel and a

member of the afghanistan study group of which i was a cofounder and one of the leading likes there. this a another afghan study group, cochair at the american strategy program, and what i like to tell everybody is richard is my link to how pragmatic semiconservative business people think about the world. good to have around. to paul's left, there's james collide, former deputy assistant secretary of defense at the department of defense. i'll never forget getting a call from james from bosra in iraq. i may get this wrong, but i think we were doing something with opec. there's another friend, warren, and james and others are people who think about how you stabilize economies, basically look at war torn conflict

regions and move them right and how does u.s. policy essentially want or not get things right so much, and james' committed himself to a book on this subject, so i look forward to hearing about the combination of policy and outcome which we discuss. joshua faust to the left. he is the very provocative and sort of excessively informed editor at the paper and author of interests in afghanistan. it's a brilliant paper done as part of the century foundation task force effort available online to those of you who go to the century foundation and find his work, but his blog and writing are must-reads for anyone thinking about the area. it's a great pleasure to have josh here. she is the senior staff producer at cnn, if you watch the

question of change in the middle east, she's in the middle this drawn on by anderson cooper and others and is a great voice to take us through this also a great friend. thank you for putting cnn on hold for us. without further adieu, please welcome elise. thank you all for being here. i think we should be okay. i'll just speak really loud. okay, here we go. well, thanks very much for this opportunity, steve. i think it's really important even though we have such change and chaos in the middle east that we don't take our eye off the ball. in afghanistan as we work towards the summer and beginning of the draw down, there's going to be a renewed focus, but i think it's important to start these discussions now, and if we

see the debates taking place in washington about the budget right now, i think that we saw even though there were $40 billion in budget cuts, the money for afghanistan was not cut at all even though a lot of reports including the very well written report by the afghan groups suggest that our interests are not really vitally at stake in afghanistan. we have what many would consider a failing strategy, so we have as steve said an excellent panel, and we're going to start with ambassador pickerring. >> thank you for the opportunity to be here this afternoon with this audience. it's a special pleasure to do so. steve is not here, but i want to say this in the sense of greatest kindness to steve.

he's the intellectual promist of policy debate. [laughter] in that sense, we're grateful to steve for putting us together through electrons or in person today. i have eight minutes on the clock. i want to talk quickly about my sense of what our strategic objectives should be in afghanistan, and then i want to talk about the report that steve so kindly introduced and give you a sense of what it is we thought about the opening for a political process in afghanistan. one, as an alternative to present strategy, but as a supplement and indeed filling an important void. strategic interests in afghanistan in my view fall into several categories. one of those, i think, and perhaps from my per perspective the most important is we are dealing with a region called after pac. if we look at important issues

of the united states, they rest in pakistan, and our interest in afghanistan translated in my view primarily to how it affects things with respect to the future of afghanistan. this is, indeed, one of the reasons why we believe a that a political process is required in the workout. the second interest, i believe, has to be, but very subsidiarily so, the prevention of the return of al-qaeda to yet another refuge, admitting they are in a refuge in pakistan at the moment, admitting that as general petraeus said less than 100 are present in afghanistan, and in some ways looking at the why we have 130,000 troops to deal with 100 al-qaeda. the third interest in my view is difficult to define, but it seems to be preimminent in what i call the interior political consciousness of us all that a great power can't leave a country like afghanistan a great deal worse than it found it. you have to think about this a

little bit, but it has everything to do with the future of afghanistan, indeed with the karzai government, with the negotiating process, and indeed, other things that we're doing in. that regard, it is obviously of interest to afghans in the region, and it was obviously of interest to the united states as a great power, and in a sense a steady stream of what can be chalked up internationally to us as failures is not in our interest in each afghanistan or beyond. let me then put those aside and say that we faced three simple questions in the study of whether a political process had utility with respect to afghanistan. i didn't say my len yal significance. i mean utility. the three questions are is a negotiation a real possibility, and if so, when? the second question is what do you negotiate about? the third question is how we get there. we felt we were close if not in

a political stalemate. we felt there was growing lack of interest in fighting. we found in interviewing people in all possibilities including the taliban, there was a strong interest in the political process and strong interest in a political process soon if not now, and there's a strong interest obviously in each of the parties in creating a fortress of protecting their position of a strong interest by asking for infeasible outrageous and outlandish possibilities as a result of the negotiations. initial negotiating positions, in fact, guarded the interest in a question of moving ahead with negotiations. in many cases, we felt the interest in the negotiations was genuine even if the expectations were well beyond the possibilities of fruition. the second question is the question of whether there is a

center for the process of negotiation and obviously painful as it is, there is no alternative in a negotiation of this sort, but future governing of afghanistan and all its future facets. the political appointments process, prime minister versus presidential system, the questions of where authority rests in the center, in the hinterlands and how or what way to balance that. we think there's a number of other very important questions that we'll have to figure in the negotiation including the role and place of islam. it is now firmly entrenched in the present constitution. how do deal with human and civil rights and their protection and particularly the issue that's so important of women's rights, issues of justice and accountability, those questions obviously come to the floor. how to get there is a much more difficult and i think taxing problem. we looked at many alternatives.

we came up with one alternative, not that it was the only one, but the one that we felt made the most sense. we believe that a process to have credibility needs to be kicked off within an environment that is managed in a way that each side feels they are getting a fair shake in the process, and in that sense we thought that a facilitator mechanism, a person, a state, a group, an international organization could play a role in a two-faced process. one, sending out the parties with respect to the two questions i just raised. what are their expectations with respect to negotiation? are they willing to enter in negotiation? secondly, we thought that that process should last a reasonable amount of time for assurance. that individual or mechanism probably should take place under the u.n. em brel la, but not necessarily directed and

subservient to the united nations, but have the benefit of at least the umbrella. that means you have to find somebody or some state that occupies a relatively neutral position to carry forward to phase. the second phase of what we believe could be a useful political process has to resolve itself around a standing international conference. the center piece of the gorks particularly at the beginning we believe should be located in the afghan parties. they are the ones who need to determine the future governments and the other issues in relation to their own country, perhaps accompanied by a mediator or facilitator to help move the work along. the afghan parties, and we believe there's four identifiable afghan parties in the largest possible sense including the karzai government and the taliban, but those in kabul now are the loyal opposition and are in effect the

old northern alliance plus or minus and civic society and civil groups redeveloped over recent years playing an important role in civil society and are a hedge against extremism on some of the most critical issues dealing with human being in the future of afghanistan. we also believe that around this central negotiation, we need to think about gathering the other important players. principally the united states and pakistan, perhaps a little further out but no less important, iran, india, the stanes who border afghanistan, ewe beck stan, china, russia, certainly key members of the e.u., japan, and saudi arabia, enough so that, in fact, that group can hopefully create some synergy or harmony in its

ability to strengthen or support solutions in the afghan group that are very important obviously as a way to move the process forward. if the process moves forward and we have no confidence it necessarily will, but we think it's worth a try, and as it moves forward, and we think that that's important, we believe that a second set of issues needs to be addressed by the outside groups, the nonafghan groups, and those are really questions of can we support and formally commit ourselves to the afghan solution? can we recognize whatever status afghanistan wants? neutrality or nonalignment? will we commit ourselves to future assistance, both economic and security? will we support a u.n. peace keeping mandate that for the long period with views of enforcement rest on creating an afghan force to be able to carry forward its own effort? lots of question. i got my slip. i'm off the podium.

thank you, steve, very much. [applause] >> thank you, ambassador. paul, would you? >> okay, thank you, elise, and good morning. the one main observation i want to leave with you this morning is that i think the policy and more importantly the discourse about the policy in this town and beyond in afghanistan has lost sight of the cost and benefits of what we are doing. ambassador pickering reviewed the interests in the region. unfortunately, we look at the counter insurgency and too often lose site of the purpose and look at it as an end in itself, and that's the way we americans look at things. we want to win the fight, and that's the goal in its own

right, but we've lost sight of why we initially went there. it had to do with a very justified in my view response to the 9/11 outrage. it has to do with ousting al-qaeda from its then home in afghanistan and rowing its then ally the taliban from power, and since then, it's been nine and a half year of a long mission creep and we lost sight of the original purposes. the conflict in afghanistan is often thought of as a struggle between the karzai government on the one hand and the taliban ally with international terrorists on the other, but, in fact, it's a far more complex civil war with sectarian dimensions, ethnic dimensions, rural dimensions. i worked on the topic in the 1990s when i was still in government. let me focus mostly on the

counter terrorist dimension because that's what this was all supposed to be about at the outset. a u.s. military victory in afghanistan is not what is going to determine whether or not the american public is safe or not from international terrorism. the afghan taliban is not an international terrorist group. it is one of the most insular groups around. it is interested in the political and social order of afghanistan. it is united united interested with the united states only as so far as we interfere with the politics of afghanistan. as was noted by general petraeus recently and the number we hear repeatedly, no more than 100 al-qaeda members in afghanistan. that's been the case for a long time now. we have this worry about recreation of a safe haven. well, even if given the

opportunity to return to afghanistan, it's hard to see any advantage from the stand point of bin laden leaving where they are in northwest pakistan and trying to recreate something in afghanistan, and even if they were interested in it, it's hard to imagine the afghan taliban, which, after all, suffered its biggest set back ever in direct response to our response to the al-qaeda's terrorist attack in september of 2001, that they would want them back, and even if despite those two considerations, al-qaeda tries to reestablish something like it had before 2001 in afghanistan, you know, the gloves are off now, and unlike pre-2001, to put it bluntly, we bombed the heck out of it which is not something we were inclined to do back when the rules of engagement were different prior to 9/11, and even if al-qaeda or another

terrorist group reestablished something like what al-qaeda had prior to 2001, it simply having a geographic haven in one particular place, be it afghanistan or anywhere else, simply is not the critical factor in determining what the danger is to american people. look at the 9/11 terrorist attack itself, where it was prepared, where people trained. for the most part, i would say for the overwhelming part of what went into that operation, the physical haven in afghanistan really had very little to do with it at all. now, this is all by way of, you know, weighing what we are supposedly gaining on the counterterrorist side with what the costs are. there's various political costs,

and there's also the assumption of what i said would be true even if we made the assumption there's a counter insurgency effort that is working and succeeding, and there's lots of questions to be raised about that. the main one has to do with the nature of the karzai government, whether we have a local regime that is strong enough read on which -- reed on which to lean. i would suggest that we don't, but also the trends in terms of sentiment within afghanistan, what the numbers are with even by from our own military command about what the trends are in taliban strength, and what they seem to add up to is that by our very activity and presence there, we are stimulating more recruitment into the taliban, not less. our presence there also not

unimportantly at all as far as the counterterrorist mission is concerned increases the propaganda supporting the extremist narrative that the americans and american military is out to get their lands, kill their people. you heard it before. it's all nonsense, of course, but some things we do tepid to -- tend to add resonance to that. ..

>> we have another kind of american way of thinking about the instability and problems overseas. it's like we've got this in green and laws that goes over borders called and stability. if we don't fix it in afghanistan it's going to get worse in pakistan. of course it works the other way around to the extent of bad guys are chased across the line it increases the security problem on the other side of the line in so far as we are doing things the highly unpopular with the pakistani public which is quite clear as well as the afghan public it makes it harder for the pakistani government to do things in cooperation on behalf of the counter terrorist goal or anything else. closing thought, again as a matter of cost and benefits. don't take what i just said as saying terrorist safe havens don't matter at all. that's not what i said. the question is or what we are doing in trying to ward off a feared even in afghanistan, does

that improve things from a counter terrorist point of view we enough to justify all the other costs political, monetary and otherwise? [applause] speed there's been so much talk over the last several years whether we are winning or losing in afghanistan how we can make a right but there's just not been enough discussion of the cost-benefit analysis and that's why i think the work of the afghan study group is so important. james, would you like to take the floor? >> i want to confine myself to a few thoughts. i'd like to confine myself to a few thoughts. i absolutely agree i think he's been in the forefront of this in the very beginning that the

requirement was to begin to see afghanistan in its regional environment seeing it in looking for ways in which we could find overlapping interest with countries that joined it. the second thought i want to leave you is the very important factor of what indigent wants and what we want and how india figures into the equation. i remember when i just left the pentagon and was brought in the very last day this enormous exercise that there seemed to be 500 kernels running around the national defense university putting together something for general petraeus and i walked in and said it's very interesting but where does india figure into any of this and they said it doesn't because we are centcom, we are central command. that's an interesting concept. and this is actually a very important thing because my own particular view, and i've been arguing this for some considerable period of time the overlap between with the indians want long-term and we'd like to see long term and southwest asia

is very high and that's what we should be aiming at. it's not a zero sum for those of you that have the comments of dealing with the subcontinent and there's the tendency to sort of regard either as falling on one side of the ledger were together when it comes to india and pakistan but it is possible actually to tilt in the direction we have been in some significant ways my argument would be we should tilt rather more in federally towards the indian view and work less to preserve the fiction somehow we are going to be able to square the circle with the pakistanis. it's my own view during the period if i'm old enough to have seen the last afghan war and to be wandering around in the late 1980 is working with many pakistani friends as is absolutely impossible they are going to be interested in working with us in any sustained way. i think pakistan is in business to leverage outside situations, outside power to their advantage the existential threat which doesn't come from afghanistan at all but in the mind of the officer corps which is

preeminent in that country comes from the indians. i think the final thought, too is a couple of observations that i hope would buttress again with you toward the car her already and i do agree with some of the very crisp clarity's paul presented to you. i really wonder what is this about, and i think the american people wonder what this is about, too. i think the support for the war is paper thin and god forbid touchwood any mass casualties and as any kind would occur without any regularity i believe it would be over no matter what the final arguments for staying on 24 team or whatever the latest intelligence or to the counter insurgency i think we would be out. unfortunately it would follow the pattern of conduct by the united states in which at the end of the day we are there because we are there because we are there rather like the old university drinking song. the point is exactly we can't leave now because we would seem to be yielding to pressure. this is a tree strange way to conduct a great power diplomacy.

all the more so when the time our material circumstances are in some question and our resources are really under great question. i think the last thing is to try as americans and this goes to some of paul's we've thinking about the way we approach things is to realize that from the beginning, from 2001 we militarize the response and declared war on the tactic and it had a terrible effect on our thinking about dealing with the real particular the of the region. i lived out site for 27 years a lot of it and that places and as many places as tom pickering, but i've looked at the scars and out there during a lot of the shooting and the last period the russians were in afghanistan occurs to me as we create the taliban as a kind of phenomena logical thing. there's the taliban and here are we. we give them their unity of

purpose and some very important ways, and i think if we were to realize that our response, the one thing that still hangs in the air as an acceptable, widely accepted american approach to the challenges of the last decade is we fought the punitive glory in afghanistan and that is the reason everyone accepted it and yet in our thinking here there was the disinclination until very few years ago, and i think about the forefront of this to think about how are we going to work afghanistan as a regional issue, how do we want to leverage the chinese or the russian opinions, what we want to do with the indians, and i think the closing thought i would like to leave you with is this i am hard pressed to see how the pakistanis at this particular point inclined to believe we are really leading well ahead in any profoundly, you know, heavy footprint way well before the what is it 2014 period that's now mentioned.

and i think the idea that we can rely on the pakistanis for anything is very implausible. what we've got to do in my own personal opinion and it may be too late for this is say let's work with the indians, it's not zero some we don't have to go on with everything the indians want in the region but the indians are a way to work with the irony in and offer a way to involve the kind of power ambassador pickering was mentioning as a very important group of people to be included in the final negotiations. i think that it's not going to be very pretty. i think it is worth the candle, but to tell you the truth, when you listen to paul and the investor pickering, some of the arguments for this particular decade-long adventure we are now having i think will take very much before the end product development reveals the lack of support in this country for this ongoing war. [applause]

>> thanks, that's a very provocative food for thought on the retail and i think that we can spin on that in the q&a. richard, would you like to take the podium, please? >> thank you very much and everyone for their time this morning. the foundation of our national defence and frankly the foundation of our economic influence globally is our financial strength. in 2000 our national debt was $5 trillion in change. it is currently on a trajectory to exceed $15 trillion. there was a royal battle over health care, which is $95 billion a year. we almost shut the government

down over about $40 billion of budget cuts, and yet we are spending $120 billion this year in afghanistan, a country whose gdp is only about 16 billion. it's out of balance. and when general petraeus late last year suggested we would be in afghanistan for another nine or ten years which is tantamount to a trillion dollar recommendation it was barely a hat on and. let me put a little with of spending on the context. in the year 2000, the department of defense budget was $294 billion. if you took that 2,000 number and moved forward in time as some time adjustment factor like

gdp growth or inflation or what have you, the budget this year, the department of defense would be about $380 billion. it will actually be $710 billion. the difference between the two members is $330 billion a year. in the year 2000 with the 294 billion-dollar number, we were spending about 3% of gdp. at that 700 billion number it is over 4.5%. almost 5%. roughly. most western democracies spend more in the neighborhood of one or 2% of gdp. you can see the burden of the disproportionate burden frankly that the united states has carried, 2% of gdp is about

$300 billion a year. let's put it in the context of the historical war in the u.s.. the war on terror, iraq and afghanistan combined, is now the second most expensive war in u.s. history and the present value in all of these expenditures for today's dollars had over $1.2 trillion only exceeded by world war ii itself, and now in excess of the cost of the korean war and the vietnam war combined. let's put it in the context of the global military expenditures, what other countries spend. our 700 billion, and these are hard numbers to pick and as we research this week it slightly different numbers from different sources. but our 700 billion is about 60%

of all the military expenditures of all countries combined in the world. the rest of the world combined. britain, france, china, russia on the stand about 400 billion or so. and in fact if you only looked at all of the suppose that for serious, however you might find that, the number looks to be under $150 billion annually by the rest of the world, people we would categorize as adversaries versus our 700 billion. so my final thought is i don't think it's in our best interest given the financial strength is the bedrock of the defense to be spending 45% of gdp. i think three to 4% is enough. [applause]

thanks, john schmidle que around us out and then we will open up for some q&a. >> okay. so, i think everyone in this room can agree the war in afghanistan as for lack of a better term and malarkey of tragic courses. this is the phrase in using pretty deliberately to represent a lot of the nonsense talk that you're in public when people try to discuss what's going on in the conflict and how we are going to get out of it, what the options are and so forth. and it's been very refreshing actually here on this panel to hear a great deal of sober and clear thinking about what is happening and about what our probable ways for work are. but if we want to put a bird on the war to borrow another phrase how to fix it we have to dig into the political question and

i think this was the heart of the central condition task force report i would even say the heart of ambassador pickering's report but it's also the topic we tend to avoid the most and that is ultimately politics are hard. politics and afghanistan are even harder and politics in pakistan are even harder still. i fully agree with everyone here when they say that the war in afghanistan is intent of afghanistan it is ultimately about pakistan. when it comes to discussing what to do about pakistan, we fall apart. we tend to rely on cliches, posturing, empty threats and frankly i don't have any solutions to this. i'm just highlighting a problem. i'm not an expert on pakistan. but ultimately, when we look at things like how to negotiate with the insurgency or how to establish some kind of regional political order we are making the mistake of assuming the only problem facing the area is the insurgency or is al qaeda. but both of these groups are only some collectors and a much larger complex network of

political interests, organizations and factors both inside afghanistan and inside pakistan. when we look at see the four major parties to the war investor pickering mentioned earlier, just looking at one group like the former northern alliance block represents easily a dozen separate competing groups all of whom are very likely going to start killing each other the moment we leave and stop providing this to the override. that has nothing to do with the insurgency. a huge part of the instability in afghanistan has nothing to do with the taliban and everything to the opium. that's not part of the insurgency. that's not al qaeda. even though there's connections they are ultimately different interests and after different things. these need to be taken into account when we think about what to do about the war. that will not solve the problems plaguing the strategy in the area. it will not address the major issues that we have to deal with

as it comes to creating the kind of regional solutions which touched deutsch kabul and islamabad and with tehran and washington and brussels and london and beijing for lack of a better regional partner. you can expand this out as much as you want in the midst of creating this kind of regional political framework we have to keep in mind that ultimately this is about politics inside afghanistan and politics inside pakistan. and neither country wants the world to be dictating terms to them, doesn't want want to be dictating moral, social issues, certain policies, any of that. and so why all of them were good ideas are genuinely good ideas and things that make sense and that have presidents in history, ultimately if afghanistan and pakistan is to not buy into the politics of what we are doing, they are not guinn to work. any kind of negotiating framework of any kind of a regional alliance the will contain terrorism will not work if afghans themselves don't buy into it. and unfortunately what afghans'

want and pakistanis want is the one thing that we don't know because we don't have a lot of insight into how the country's work, we don't have a good presence outside of the capitals of those cities, we don't have good relationships with the civil society groups in the countries to say nothing of normal people who aren't educated and don't speak english. so, i kind of leaving this open as an old crab what we do kind of thing. [laughter] but when we talk about the kind of political issues we need to understand these are political issues, and when we talk about things like budgeting priorities in the united states and think about the acrimony that brings out of us and people are almost literally stepping each other in the kidney with this stuff and then think about what would happen if the world was trying to dictate a fundamental political issues like whether you are going to obey the taliban or the karzai government, we have to understand that these are life-threatening issues for these people and they won't back down just because it would be cut because a bunch of foreigners told us to. on that had been a bible and my comment and see what comes of them. [applause]

>> thank you to the panelists, and i feel we have a lot more questions than answers as people brought up the topics we've really don't talk about that much when we talk about the war in afghanistan. and when to ask you questions and then we will open up to the audience. we have about 45 minutes, so we should be able to get a lot of questions in. by talking about cost and whether cost should better in afghanistan we spent 119 billion in fiscal year 2011. as we said in afghanistan which has a gdp as richard pointed out of only 16 billion.

if the u.s. national interests are at stake, we do see that some conservatives say it libya for enter into the to instance the cost should be insignificant. but then you also get a very passionate reason about why, you know, the u.s. is undermining its economic base in afghanistan. so, let's start by talking out whether cost really matters when the critical u.s. interests are at stake and then the ambassador pickering, if you could talk about other ways the u.s. could pursue its objectives with afghanistan may be perhaps not spending so much on the military. richard, would you start? >> one of the things i would say as others have pointed out is we don't believe that this is to the extent of $120 billion our vital national interest. we simply don't. but if you took the situation in afghanistan, where you have

tried this or ethnic groups or whatever, who are going to the chaos and there's going to be a war, where there's more countries in afghanistan where that is the case. and if it is our job to go make a country's right, which i don't think it is, it's not just 100 billion in afghanistan its 100 billion a lot of places and you run out of money pretty fast. >> ambassador? >> i'd like to begin with the notion that all war and with political implications, and at your peril you refuse to shake them. i'd like also to note that in all cost questions you have the benefit calculus that has to be put in. if it is an existential problem for the future of the republic, then i think the notion of cost diminishes, and the obvious interest is of the highest. i don't think any of us at a table has portrayed the cost-benefit ratio in anything like that. i think that in the end as a

member of the speakers said the pressure to leave in this country is going to overwhelm the commitment to stay. that if we don't begin to move in all the areas that are available to us in an early stage we will heighten the interest in the public and abandoning the exercise. and i think that these are important strategic determinants of what we do. i suggest that there needs to be a political process. i'm not a counterinsurgency guru. i felt and minn first hand for two painful years. i know we can make progress and my view is that progress will enhance our capacity to deal in the political sphere. i also think none of this is predictable and a lot of the remains uncertain. if we don't know where we are

going no exit strategy will get us there and alternatively if we have an exit strategy and we all know where we are going, we are creating chaos. we are somewhere in the middle of that awful nexus and some further clarity of thought is a useful proposition i think to inform for the process was going. i was astonished a very long review of afghanistan strategy is apparently a solid look at what the u.s. objectives ought to be an based on what i thought was historical can't come and historical canned doesn't help in terms of clear thinking. we do need a political dimension to the strategy that that is hanging out there and that is long and i'm sorry to the critical question that you asked. >> what you think, paul? was the cost matter and other

ways the u.s. can be pursuing its objectives? >> we have a tendency to say something is an important u.s. national interest and then slide in every a logical way to say we must continue to support whatever it is doing that is pertinent to that interest. i think my colleagues have actually covered it already sufficiently well that the question is not is this topic area important to us of course it's important for the reasons leave out in the earlier remarks the question is is a particular policy or effort or counterinsurgency or whatever it is we are doing, does that increase or advance our interest more than the cost that it entails that is the question that ought to be phrased and unfortunately that is the way americans often freeze it. >> what's branch out beyond

afghanistan and pakistan. james why don't we talk about how china, turkey, india, saudi arabia, iran, the neighborhood view of the engagement and commitment in afghanistan, if we pick up and leave and demon time to get out won't the region see the shape in power leaving, how does this hurt the u.s. prestige and trust in the u.s.? it sounds like it might be damned if we stay and damned if we leave. >> i think the question follows very much on all for what has just been discussed. one of the things about this very long review that characterizes to thousand nine was not only that it was terribly long but by the way we acted everyone else didn't really have much to say about it they were passive bystanders while people were at risk and talking out there as well is that took the view of about us

in some ways plate completely to the continuing haven't of the city to be profoundly self-government shall and begin a correlate different groups of generals of which might be the right approach leaving such important things of the state craft and is a very in part of the tool kit becomes more and important when you're on a downward slide doomed to be relevant and the chinese and 20 years, but we are not at our best in a moment, there for things like the statecraft become correspondingly more important. so, what should have been at the very beginning which was right we are going to have the punitive war and now let's see what we can leave behind rather than bringing the baggage train of good intention that had a congressional earmarks attached to every single one and have an ngo haven in kabul and then again unilaterally decided to revise the strategy five or six times is defined below the national interests are and

they're very considerable ones out there. if we deny ourselves that particular approach, if we say, and god rest his soul to richard holbrooke there are some countries that we can't really deal with or have to see how we are working it out here within the city and no one can go out there and speak with presidential authority to the chinese and the russians, and we are denying ourselves the chance to say look, we are going to be out of their sometime. it's probably going to be sooner rather than later and do you want the preferred default option of pakistan isi de to be the thing you have to live with cracks and that has a very bracing effect on each country's response to the post american at least large american footprint period in afghanistan. so, it's not as if it is either work. it's one of the things that was astounding. we could even have had a unilateral ramp up with president obama's version of the righteous surge in afghanistan but it needed to be accompanied

by a parallel approach which is multilateral and said, do know, we are going into their to him are these people to be able to get the point where as the ambassador pickering is making it clear we can speak with authority but we are on a losing streak and right now everyone in the region is expected to leave and will be for 2014. >> ambassador commodores gentry foundation analysis has so many international members, china, russia, japan, turkey, that looked at the scenario facing the u.s. and taliban. talk a little bit about america's prestige in terms of staying in the terms of leaving. where are we better off now? >> my own view is that we are better off if we can do it. pleasing in a way that at least establishes some stability, perhaps some openness, and indy

safety and afghanistan. it is not in my view possible to achieve even this millennial objective if we are not prepared to work in the neighborhood hard and the afghan parties very hard. i think that we have an opening to do this. i think that in the broad context, those of us who remember vietnam know that every one of the same arguments with a deeply that we engaged in the long and very difficult negotiating process. i think we underestimated the vietnamese nationalism and overestimated the communist control. to some extent, we shouldn't underestimate the afghan national was some, and we should certainly never asked to underestimate the afghan xenophobia at the present time. those kinds of questions are not

now harnessed in our effort in an adequate way. i think a political process could help engage those in a more constructive way that we have now. i think the notion, which i think is the trial but was very prevalent in the iraqi in venture that all we had to do was to win the combat victory on the ground than the movie would stop and we would walk off hand-in-hand into the sunset for some bright light of a glorious future that it would all take care of itself is so discredited now that i think we have to worry about that and hopefully that particular memory will be steered into our consciousness although i have to say it is now being tortured terrifically by libya. and we have best intentions and perhaps at the moment no clear

exit >> when we are talking about our actions in libya and president obama talking about vital freedoms of people, how do we know that the taliban who we believe and you said to be ready themselves and negotiate aren't going to kill, harass and country in these vital freedoms of the people that are so vital to american values, and given our actions in libya, what is the commitment, what should it be to the human right conditions of the people in afghanistan? >> it is a terribly difficult question. we have to strains in american foreign policy that go back before the foundation of the republic. the struggle for safety, security, confidence, growth. and the struggle as well for defining a political parameter to life, which enables that through freedom and liberty and the protection of law and all

the things we hold dear. they are in every sense of the word now opposing policy choices for us and a lot of places like libya in the middle east. we have of course followed the usual policy. when this esol begins to move from one to the other particularly in the direction of freedom and liberty and democracy, we try to move with it if not ahead of it. there is no guarantee. i think that the use of force is probably justified in my view to prevent genocide. and we are now engaged in libya. but the moment we engaged in libya the moment of our success became the disappearance of mr. mr. gadhaffi. we face the problem of could we get enough air live support for a credible alternative that involved more muscular the

because we are not going to achieve the disappearance, and with that i have to say the protection of human life by dividing the country, or indeed by an incessant and interminable civil war, which seems to me the only to prospects that lie out there for us at the moment. and it's very important. i see today in the news that british officers are going to benghazi. the question is is this a situation treatable like the original offense against the taliban in 2001, or will it involve more. when you commit yourself to the military force, type in your hands with respect to a whole series of political restraint is often a terrible way to reach

your objective. to some extent when you cross the military force line, you cross what i have to tell you i think is the restraint on an otherwise you are there for an interminable engagement. so, why why don't like it and i was against the notion accept to prevent genocide being involved, i kind of think that the homeopathic approach to libya are not the answer to the current problem or indeed to achieve the objectives we seem to have committed ourselves to. >> we will be coming back tomorrow for the discussion of libby obviously brings a lot of questions of that. we're in your cost-benefit analysis does the human condition human rights of people fit into afghanistan when we can to afghanistan obviously the taliban was brutally treating women in particular. we could leave afghanistan and see if you're involved taliban that feel they can go right back

to that. >> three basic points. 1i would recall what joshua said earlier with regard to the resistance by afghans to somebody else trying to impose their value as it relates to the political and social ordering of the place. number two, a lot of what we westerners find objectionable with regard to the social order in afghanistan is not just limited to the taliban it's part of the larger culture particularly with regard to the status of women. i don't for a moment want to integrate out right atrocities or abuses of the hands of the taliban i just want to put it into the context it's not just taliban and even as the taliban were to go away, and we had somebody else in charge of afghanistan, we would be witnessing a culture and the role for the women most of us would still find pretty darn important. and number three, when i look at this rather strictly from the standpoint of the u.s. interest given all the resource considerations of the sort that richard mentioned we have to

pick hour will goals and pick our fight. back i recall when i was still in the government during the first two months of the bush administration before 9/11 there was a lot of policy deliberation about what do we do with regard to this afghanistan taliban problem, and it was seen quite properly in my view that the clinton administration to the previous couple of years as mainly a bin laden problem. it was the task was defined as how we persuade the taliban to cough up this awful terrorist bin laden. before 9/11 i think there was the right way to raise the issue even though at the time there was a lot of agitation about the human rights issue and about how the taliban were treating them and i think our policy makers quite properly took the approach look, we can't load too many things on our agenda we have to keep our priorities straight and our top priority is doing something about this terrorist

problem. i think that's still the right approach. >> george, why don't you weigh in and then i will open up to the audience. where do you think, if we are ready to negotiate with the taliban, how are we leaving the taliban in the country? , do you think the situation will be in terms of human rights given what you said about the people are not willing to turn back, but the taliban will be involved if we negotiate with them. >> if it's important to keep in mind that the taliban -- again to follow on what paul said it's not the only human rights abuses in the country. the most prevalent sexual abuse children happens by government officials not by the taliban. the most prevalent use of slave labor happens by the government officials people line with government officials and not tell them, the most prevalent examples of abuse to the women and abuse to the subordinates and house servants happens the people who are not fighting in the war and have been by normal afghans and not for the taliban. so when we try to trim them in terms of human rights for certain minority groups we choose to start caring about

after a certain point, it's missing the entire reason we are there in the first place. ultimately i just think our disposition to al qaeda has very little relationship to how afghanistan treats its minorities and its women. and as much as that sucks and people don't like to admit that, it is unfortunately a reality of the war we have to deal with. that being said, i think would be silly to assume that taliban would have no role to play in the future of afghanistan. one way or another they are going to be there either by renouncing the name taliban and continuing some ways either as a political party were being incorporated into the government in some kind of new governmental process, i mean ambassador pickering hinted it may be switching political systems and there's a lot of issues with that, but would be inappropriate way of reordering what happened. i would say that one of the fundamental issues stays in the political situation inside of afghanistan and that the original group in 2002 was more or less the international community dictating the terms to afghanistan.

and a reordering things so afghanistan's have a say in how they can shape their own future by default after and would allow them but it also include these other issues is that you can start this discussion by the time some kind of turning point comes whether it is 2014, whether it is ten years after general petraeus says it is, whenever that ends up being, buy getting involved now and playing a role, we can influence that disposition. we can have some kind of influence. i don't know how much but some kind of influence to protect those values. >> the notion that her body was unanimously that row women and children under the bus to get the right deal in afghanistan. i think that we put a very heavy emphasis on the fact they have to be engaged and the civil society has to be there. we see evidence. i don't know how good it is honestly one hesitates to trust

all the anecdotal evidence but to see evidence at least in some places the public is telling the even when they have the guns that they cannot shut schools. they have to keep them open even for girls. now this is a change and it's not millennial. but there have to be at least some standards met in this process that we can abandon as the president goes ahead and despite the war, despite the dislike of americans and the opium trade enjoy slightly better life than today, and i think this the counter insurgency is making some progress. at the end counterinsurgency is not the answer, it is an important method for building the right kind of balance and we would all agree that it in fact is not throwing one or another constituency under the bus it's trying to work all constituencies that makes the difference.

>> thank you. we are quite open up for questions now. i ask if you are called on to the microphone will come to you. please identify yourself. please, keep your question short and keep it a question. thanks very much. >> as we are talking up the taliban i had a quick question, the turkish government is considering to allow the taliban to open an office, how to the panelists approach to the idea? thank you. >> the taliban have made it clear that to produce aveda negotiations rac stevan i suspect there are altering your motives to become recognized internationally and find ways to reach out beyond the contents of the confines they now have in pakistan and inside of kabul.

i see no way you can get a hit in that process without ensuring that those people engaged in the negotiations are going to stay alive to participate in the negotiations. if turkey feels that it is important in a sense to appeal to the best instincts of the taliban by giving them this kind of opportunity, i for one would have no objection, particularly if it can help lead to the negotiating process that can make some sense. if it is merely a kind of back door to what i would call a kind of subterranean or subterfuge kind of recognition of the status for the taliban which exceeds the present condition, i think it obviously presents problems. my feeling is that you can take the chance on this one and see whether in fact it can encourage progress. turkey can always change its mind.

>> thank you. two quick questions. going back to vietnam analogy. is the u.s. looking more towards a policy of the vietnamese, are we falling back into that whole again with the way we are training security forces, trying to turn security duties over to them? does in fact karzai, and the second thing is in terms of the constitution it's been ten years since the bomb accords. is that going to be rethought? do you think the center last presidential system is going to have to be jettisoned favor of the parliamentary system that evolves more to the problems to the provincial efficiency? >> you want to take the vietnam question and then maybe paula or james can weigh in on the other part? >> i doubt if i am nearly as qualified as anybody on the panel to talk about the parallels here, but it sure looks that way. it looks like that is the excuse

that is being constructed to get us out. and i hear very encouraging things about how well that is going. >> well, since i raised that point, i guess i'm stuck. i think if it walks like a duck and? like it is a dhaka i think it is a duck. to some extent everything depends upon the kind of afghan management on the future in one way or another and in powering them to do this despite all the restraints and failures makes a certain amount of sense. the vietnamese finally settle down and decide their own future were pretty good at i'm not sure afghanistan is anything like this in parallel but it certainly makes sense to do everything you can picture in power afghans to deal with their own future. >> to deal with several. we are particularly enamored with the idea of a new constitution will make a big

change. when thailand said something like 15 since 1936. the constitution as they used to see in thailand are not kept on the reference as captain the periodical section of the library. [laughter] i think we mustn't fall into this. after all, the things, was mentioning a moment ago. the idea that the women go to school, let's not forget until the early 1970's two-thirds of the medical facility in kabul were women. this is a place that is seen progressively, and we bear some of the responsibility for this. at the base of the culture and the introduction of weapons systems and the lowest common denominator in afghanistan but there is still a historical memory. this is a the old joke is pakistan is a state in search of the nation and afghanistan is the their way around. but they do know who they are. so it is less a matter of the new way to do it all the more so since a would be seen as an imposition but actually rather singing to them some of these

that ambassador pickering the tests are going to have to be in the sense let loose and let them play themselves out because i don't think that another is going to make much difference. >> i wouldn't use the imitation is the pejorative sense as the ambassador mentioned it does involve the afghans learning to run their own affairs. and though one mullen parallel aspect between afghanistan and vietnam is there is no more to the economic equivalent. it's not quite be the 1975 type of event. we have to have some type of arrangement with regard to the constitution i would hesitate to use the word jettison, but i do think a more stable afghanistan is going to have to be one that is more decentralized in fact as

well as the jury than perhaps what was put together ten years ago. >> this is a country in which no one who is ever governing kabul is governing the entire country in any type of centralized way >> or his entire life at jolie. >> the question of the constitution is getting ultimately again the question of afghan politics. we designed a government of afghanistan for hamid karzai to fail for lack of a better term. he's responsible for every single government officials and disappointed, response all for every provincial governor. all 400 district south governors are appointed by hamid karzai and we chose the man to lead this who didn't have a substantial militant economic or political ties to the rest of the country. so we created the situation with a very, very strong central leader who is substantially responsible for almost every political arrangement in the country and gave nothing but

money to leverage power. we shouldn't be surprised this is broken and this isn't working. so, when we think about what to do with the constitution to is a danger in revising the constitution and in putting out the serial constitution's but in the first 20 years the united states was an independent country we went through three's with the first we shouldn't we have read every visiting a mistake that happened or saying we set this up to not work and when we look at what is happening in the province and not in the district in the process of ice have openly calls the afghaniszation we talk about the memory when people like -- now i'm blanking on it, amir woodring this in the 1900's, afghanization was destroying communities and displacing others to balance of the ethnic balance of the country. so the terms have not just in relation to what we care about that in terms of for that can care about the have a lot of baggage that go along with them and to bring you back to talking

about afghanistan itself, driven by afghans who stand on their own the words we are using to describe what we want to do also has an effect. when we look at the question of constitutionality, we have to be willing to revisit this because right now the government doesn't and simply cannot work at all. so if we want to have a functioning government and actually afghanize and have them capable of running themselves, we have to change what is there because right now it won't happen. -- before. the gentleman right here and then in the back. >> bert the lives and associates the work of national security issues for the last half century. a lot of it in congress. and joshua referred to the politics of afghanistan and pakistan being important. i would like to switch to the politics of america. and how we can get the congress to do what all suggest we should do.

and to support the war being sent in fact the majority in the polls are they want out. but in talking to senators and congressmen, they are well aware of that. but also afraid that not withstanding that because it's false america likes to win comes to 12 and their opponents in the elections can accuse them of voting to lose the war. and the more substantive reason i've been given everything was said about the cost and benefits and how bad things are going is that all bolten ackley because of pakistan and the news that of the taliban takeover that would halt the radicalization and pakistan. as paul mentioned we are doing now makes it harder for pakistan to cooperate with us. could we do more by explaining

that apart from cooperating with us it's just increasing the chances of radicals winning in pakistan and taking over the nukes to enhance the confidence of the congress in voting to get out. >> richard? >> you know, i think the way you phrased it is correct. it's an extraordinarily disheartening. you know, afghanistan, even though 70% of the public is against it, what is really true is nobody thinks about it. nobody gives a you know what about it around here. so the only time it comes up is in campaigns and the only way it comes up is somebody saying you know, we are going to cut and run and in citing votes against a particular candidate, so we are locked into something that's kind of almost on autopilot, and at a cost of 120 billion a year. i recently reread time and peace, which is the story of clinton in bosnia and all that,

and i guarantee you that there is nobody i know that even remembers that war knows a any of those issues and the politicians in washington were obsessed with every nuance and every detail and what the effect would be on the public doesn't care. and what really impresses me is i think the president could power this down without even telling anybody. [laughter] and nobody would notice in the country. he wouldn't get any negative repercussions. he wouldn't even have to tell anybody. i don't want to oversimplify, but sometimes i feel we are to close to this problem. sometimes i think we need to kind of back up 60,000 feet and look at it. the president could save us a couple hundred billion pretty easily. and it wouldn't have to be controversial. what's frightening about that is how much over the last couple hundred years how much power is the fault upon the presidency as opposed to the legislature.

but it is a very discouraging equation. >> the other point really deserves some attention briefly. the pakistanis have a nuclear arsenal, this would fall into the hands of radicals and therefore the sheila c. bair is as we need to always continue what we are doing. it's important to understand that this is part of the pakistani diplomatic tool kits. the idea that they are precariously placed, and if anything happens to change things, who knows what might happen. pakistan has always is a much stronger state and people give it credit for. i can't, you know, obviously no one can go into their direct specific detail about the arsenal, but i find it not the trump card the pakistanis and the people who repeated in good faith in the converse think it is. >> i'd like to follow-up on that in just one second. we have a history of the taliban ending and flowing inside afghanistan and when we think of what is the risk for the militancy, i think it's important to see that every time

the taliban goes beyond basically the federally administered a tribal areas, the military steps than push them back and it's very effective. and at pulling in the spring when the militants began doing something they don't like. and they are the recovery effective at protecting the major cities either islam a lot. despite the bombings and everything, you don't see the same mass movement of people occupying areas you saw in the theater or was kyrgyzstan. you see them actually defending these areas and pushing them back. so to follow-up on that i think the danger of them islamic takeover in pakistan is completely overstated. >> [inaudible] >> sure. go ahead. >> the shape the politics as we made comparisons with the and on and have no conscription and that has made a huge difference with regard to how this has been played and richard's observation that so much of it just isn't noticed.

i'm going to ask you to keep your questions short swing can have as many as possible we're going to go to the man in the second to laughed runback. first seed. sir, did you have a question? okay we are going to go to this gentleman right here. and then this gentleman right here and then in the back. >> briefly i think the room is getting a little carried away in their belief in the collapse of the american public support for the war in afghanistan. when people are asked about negotiating with the taliban there is a divided response. in afghanistan among afghans when people are asked about negotiations, two and three would like to see negotiations in the afghan public. my question is what would be an effective way in your view to

present to the american public the concept of a future negotiation? >> okay. we are going to take two more. right here. and then behind him. right there. yes. >> from the woodrow wilson center. it appears that the united states and afghanistan are now launching what now started negotiations for some sort of a long term strategic relationship i'm wondering whether that doesn't cut across the idea of international negotiations, whose outcome at this point is on certain. i wonder, tom, whether you would comment on that. >> and then right here. >> from the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. question about the pipeline. no one ever talks about oil or gas. i'm told there is more natural gas in turkmenistan right above afghanistan and it is worth more

than all of the wheel and iraq. could that have something to do with the decision were the intention to stay in afghanistan? >> paul, are we getting the way? could you take away the long term strategic job and george, why don't you talk about the pipeline? >> the question about getting carried away is how we settle the negotiations domestically, and i think we can take some lessons from the nixon administration with the imam we keep making that comparison. there's ways to declare victory, and make the point that this is part of how through the sacrifices of the troops and a decade of long slog we've gotten ourselves into the position we can finally turned things over to the afghans we've always said our leaders are saying now that the negotiations of some sort are going to be necessary so i think that is quite sellable and

we've done that sort of thing in the past and i would be confident in the of the administration's could do that. >> ennis irca long-term strategic relationships. >> pacelli negotiations go read the report at least to try, it may not be everybody's cup of tea, but it's by the strenuous effort to do so. on the long-term and short-term, i tend to think that the negotiations with afghanistan over the long term on the bilateral basis or useful to push the question of negotiations among afghan parties and within the region on the long term. but the truth is of course the first negotiation can be adjusted to accommodate the second negotiation. we have to be very careful when the first negotiation to have our interests clearly stated, and in my view they cannot be permanent arrangements for ever. we have to issue that and really get to the future of afghanistan, hopefully one that will more afghans will be coming

together about them will be divided in separate on. .. >> it's something that you don't really hear about. >> yeah, a lot of it was there. but the point is, it was just too many moving parts and too

many things changing. ultimately, capital is a coward. you wouldn't get anybody. >> what about the issue that there are a lot of natural resources in afghanistan. we've heard a lot about the minerals perhaps being a real source of revenue for the country. is that just a pipe dream or something we should be spending resources to help develop on behalf. >> there's expression in the oil and gas. it's far away and hard to get it to market. same thing applies in different ways to some of the resources. we know what the chinese have done in copper. that itself requiring a huge amount of infrastructure. i mean the chinese are finding not just in afghanistan, elsewhere, africa, that local situations can be paved to their advantage to some extent with money. after that, things get harder and they are running into the same local difficulties. >> all right. we have about five minutes. we're going to take one more round in the back right here. sir, right here.

and right over there. we'll start with the gentleman in the back. raise your hand. stand up. thank you. >> let's keep our questions short, please. >> my name is dave weiss. i was a long-time several service employee in the state department. i did several foreign service tours. last one with a prudential reconstruction team in helmand providence. it was hinted by the panel, i want like to ask the view on given the lack of governance which is a huge problem in helmand and other providences, how can we leave afghanistan better than how we found it? >> sir. right here in the front. >> bill, good fellow, center for international policies. let me ask you a question about timing. the argument, i think, in favor of the surge was we're strengthen our military position

vis-a-vis the taliban in a year or two will be in a stronger position. another argument, ambassador who was on the century commission path forth, argued, in fact, we are in a weaker position now than two years ago. it really is essential, timing. when is the right time? >> and we had a gentleman right here. >> martin, peace action. thanks for putting this together. the president is going to go through a decision on troop level drawdowns in afghanistan in july. what would you like to hear the president say about troop drawdowns and policy changes? >> i think what we'll do is we'll just ask the panelist to take all of this into consideration with some clothing thoughts. i was in afghanistan in september, traveling with the

prts. i think one the things we did see even those there's a lot of aid, and the real thing is the governance issue. the governance is moving very slow. not at pace with the military objectives. that's what's really going to be what -- weather we quote unquote win or lose in afghanistan. ambassadors, do you want to start us off with taking this in some closing thoughts? >> yeah, very briefly. i think that lack of governance and how to deal with it is a huge problem. i don't think we can substitute western paradigms like federalism. we have to be very careful, i think, to understand the traditionally afghanistan was centrally governed but weekly. it was governed in the providences but by no standard method. this was abored to anglosax and we should learn to live it.

somebody asked the question about right time. right time for what? right time to get out? as soon as possible. right time for negotiations? now. >> richard, what would you like to see the president's policy review? >> well, we've participated in a report where we suggested that they could do with 70,000 fewer troops. and we continue to believe that's the case. and i'd go back to the point about how do we el this to the american public? that's a step that's not necessary. the american public is not interested in this question. there's no selling that needs to be done. if you sold it to them, they wouldn't notice that you were doing it. i don't want to over make, but i don't want to under make. you have a lot of expertise in every nuance and detail, and deeply concerned about this month -- the american public is not there. >> on leaving afghanistan a better place than we found it, one can easily make the argument

that we made it a lot better in the first couple of months when we ousted the taliban. the fact that we stuck around nine more years doesn't negate that. on the time, negotiations always take at least two parties. it is a mistake to look at it narrowly from what's advantageous from our point of view. a year from now, six months from now? i agree with the ambassadors. now is the time. what i'd like to hear the president say in july, consistent i hope he will say we have something ors a cosmetic fulfillment of his commitment to start the withdraw in july. >> in the president's review, i hope he gives it far less time and attention to groups of military. they are interested in the most effective way to bomb and bomb the rocks even more effectively than we have before. pay also attention to the important over lap of interest with india, and don't -- try to begin to deinternallize, if that's a verb, the habit of

deferring to pakistan's issue and giving them veto other issues there. >> josh, close it out for us. talk about the governance. in terms of is this really, are we not focusing on the right thing here? should we really be spending our resources time and dollars on strengthening the government? which nine years later as we've seen isn't -- has definitely we have to admit has made some progress, but still is a long way to go. >> i think talking about it in terms of strengthening the government is even the wrong question to ask. we should be asking is it the right government first? if it is, then you go to strengthen it. >> just to play devil's advocate, if we are going in to over throw and still suggest some kind of democracy, we can't choose the government. should we broaden our outreach? if we want afghanistan to have a true election and don't want to be seen as imposing from within. is it up to us to choose the right government? >> i mean it's not.

and that's kind of what i was getting at. one the stipulations in the constitution, in 2005, there was supposed to be district-level elections and they would be responsible for political, economic, and social affairs in the districts. that's not happen. six years out of date. in the interim, because that didn't happen, we've been trying to build up the alternative structures of whether they are called a, a, a, i'm not going to go through all of of the acrony. afghans are capable of running their own affair. they don't need outside help. the question is whether or not they are doing it in a way we approve of. that's a separate question of whether it's strong enough or doing what we want to do. they are capable of governing themselves in the future. when we look at that about whether it's going to leave them better or worse off? things are better. telecommunication, health care system, road network, things

have happened that are improving afghan lives. it's not perfect, but it is by far enough to make it better. but there has been progress. the current government as it is can function. it just doesn't function very well. when we think about what our grand plan is for this country, i think we have to keep in the front of our minds that they know how to run themselves. they are not stupid. they are illiterate, but they are not stupid. so it's kind of an arrogant thing to say are we putting in the right thing? do we need to get it strong enough to a position that we feel comfortable with? i think that's kind of the wrong question. >> well, i think it's ending on a somewhat positive note. [laughter] >> i'd like to thank our panelist. i think with all of the discussion of afghanistan, today really crystallized and showed us some of the sobering issues that aren't discussed. the next panel will delve into the recommendations of the report. there are copies outside if you haven't read it. it's really an excellent

document and i really want to congratulate steve and the task force for looking into some of these issues on the political situation in afghanistan which has been ignored for too long. thanks very much. [applause] >> thank you so much. [applause] >> tomorrow's "washington journal"

>> 2/3 of the more than people depended on the network news of those three networks as their primary source of news information about the president of the united states. all were hostile to richard nixon. >> go inside pivotal moments on

american history online at the c-span video library. search, watch, clip and share with every c-span program from 1987 through today. it's washington your way. >> president obama visited facebook headquarters in palo alto, california to hold a town hall meeting on the federal budget. they also asked about immigration and education. he was joined on stage by facebook chief executive mark zuckerberg. this is an hour and 15 minutes. ♪ ♪ >> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome sheryl sandberg. [applause] >> thank you, all. god, we've never done this. i don't know exactly where to

stand. so it's my honor to welcome everyone both here in person and who's watching online to our first ever facebook live town hall with president barack obama. [applause] >> so we've been fortune to be able to work with this administration on many issues we care about, education, jobs, technology, and most recently, the white house conference on bullying prevention. well, today we have the president for the first time visiting us. but since he's one the most popular people on facebook with 19 million likes, we feel like he's coming home. so welcome home, mr. president. [cheers and applause] >> we are honored to have many special guests joining us, house minority leader nancy pelosi.

[applause] >> there you are. our own lieutenant governor gavin newsom. [applause] >> california state controller john chang. [applause] >> united states representatives anna, john, and mike honda. [applause] >> our own mayor of palo alto, sidneyest -- sidney. [applause] >> president of the board of supervisors, david cortest. [applause] >> and assembly member, nora campus. thank you all for being here. [applause] >> so today we're going to talk about the fiscal challenges facing our country and the

difficult decisions that we all need to make together. president obama is going to take questions both from the live audience and for people online so if you are watching online, please submit your questions and even though it's facebook, no poking the president. with that, i get to call up mark zuckerberg, facebook founder and ceo. mark is going to moderate the discussion and reading the questions that you submit online. thank you all for coming. come on up, mark. [applause] [cheers and applause] >> so a lot of people all over the world use facebook to share a lot of things. you know, things about their day, things about their family, their kids, and, of course, their views on things like politics. and more and more a lot of government officials and

candidates and folks are also using facebook to share their views with the people who are following them. sorry. i'm kind of nervous. we have the president of the united states here. [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] >> so it's never been as easy in the history of the world for people to have their voice heard and exercise their freedom of speech. just post something, comment, like, but it's good to compliment that online dialogue with some face time as well. what better way to do that than by having a facebook live q & a with the president. it is our honor to welcome to facebook, the president of the united states, barack obama. [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause]

[cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] president obama: well, thank you so much, facebook, for hosting this. first of all. my name is barack obama and i'm the guy who got mark to wear a jacket and tie. [cheers and applause] >> thank you. i'm very proud of that. [laughter] >> second time. >> i know. [laughter]

president obama: i will say, and i hate to tell story on mark, but the first time we had dinner together and he wore the jacket and tie, halfway through dinner, he's starting to sweat. it's really uncomfortable for him. i helped him out of his jacket. in fact, if you'd like, mark, we can take our jackets off. >> that's good. [cheers and applause] president obama: woo, that's better, isn't it? >> yeah, but you are a lot better at this stuff than me. [laughter] president obama: so first of all, i want to say thank you to all of you for taking the time, not only people who are here in the audience, but also folks all over the country and some around the world who are watching this town hall. the main reason that we wanted to do this is first of all because

more and more people, especially young people are getting their information through different media. and obviously what all of you have built together is helping to rev -- revolutionize how people get information, process information, and how they are connecting with each other. and historically, you know, part of what makes for a healthy democracy, what is a good politics is when you have citizens that are informed, who are engaged, and what facebook allows us to do is make sure this isn't just a one-way conversation. make sure that not only am i speaking to you, but you're also speaking back, and we're in a conversation, we're in a dialogue. so i love doing town hall meetings. this format, and this company, i think, is an ideal means for us to be able to carry on this

conversation. as mark mentioned, obviously we're having a very serious debate right now about the future direction of our country. we are living through as tumultuous of a time as i've seen in my lifetime. my lifetime is a longer than most of yours so far. this is a pretty young crowd. but we're seeing domestically, a whole series of challenges, starting with the worse recession we've had since the great depression. we're just now coming out of it. we've got all sorts of disruptions, technological disruptions that are taking place, most of which hold the promise of making our lives a lot better, but also mean that there are a lot of adjustments that people are having to make throughout the economy. we still have a very high unemployment rate that is starting to come

down, but there are an awful lot of people who are being challenged out there, day in and day out. worrying about whether they can pay the bills, keep their home. internationally, we're seeing the sorts of changes that we haven't seen in a generation. we've got certain challenges like energy and climate change that no one nation can solve. but we're going to have to solve together. and we don't yet have all of the institutions that are in place in order to do that. but what makes me incredibly optimistic, and that's why being here at facebook is so exciting for me, is that at every juncture in our history, whenever we've faced challenges like this, whether it's been the shift from an agriculture age to an industrial age, or whether it was facing the challenges of the cold war, or trying to

figure out how we make this country more fair and more inclusive. at every juncture, we've always been able to adapt, we've been able to change, and we've been able to get ahead of the curve. that's true today as well. you guys are at the cutting edge of what's happening. and so i'm going to be interested in talking to all of you about why the debate that we're having around debt and our deficits is so important because it's going to help determine whether we can invest in our future and basic research and innovation and infrastructure that allow us to compete in the 21st century and still preserve a safety net for the most vulnerable among us. but i'm also going to want to share ideas with you about how we can make our democracy work better and our politics work better. because i don't think there's a problem out there that we can't solve if we decide that we're going to solve it

together. and for that, i'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to you, instead of just giving a lot of long speeches, i want to make sure we have time for as many questions as possible. mark, i understand that you have the first one. >> yes, let's start off. let's start off with the conversation about the debt. yes morning you had a town hall in virginia where you talked about your framework not only for the short-term budget issues but the longer term debt. president obama: right. >> you spent time talking about tax reform and cost cutting. you also spend some times things you didn't thing we could cut, education, infrastructure, and clean energy. my question to kind of start off, what specifically do you think we should do? and what can we cut in order to make it all add up? president obama: good. let me first of all, mark, share with you the nature of the problem. because i think a lot of folks understand that it's a problem, but aren't sure how it came

about. in 2000, at the end of the clinton administration, we not only had a balanced budget, but we actually had a surplus. and that was in part because of some tough decisions that had been made by president clinton, republican congresses, democratic congresses, and president george h.w. bush. and what they had said was let's make sure we're spending wisely on the things that matter, let's spend less on things that don't matter, and let's make sure that we are living within our means, that we are taking in enough revenue to pay for some of the basic obligations. what happened then we went through ten years where we forget what had created the surplus in the first place. so we had a massive tax cut that wasn't offset by cuts in spending. we had two wars that weren't paid for. and this was the first time in history where we had gone to war and not

asked for additional sacrifice from american citizens. we had a huge prescription drug plan that wasn't paid for. and so by the time i started office, we already had about a trillion-dollar annual deficit, and we had massive accumulated debt with interest payments to boot. then you have this huge recession. and so what happens is less revenue is coming in, because company sales are lower, individuals make less money, at the same time there's more need out there. so we're having to help states and local governments. that's a lot of what the recovery was about making sure the economy didn't tilt over into a depression by making sure that teachers weren't laid off and firefighters weren't laid off and still construction for roads and so forth. all of which was expensive. that added about another trillion dollars worth of debt.

now what we have is a situation not only do we have the accumulated debt, but the baby boomers are just now starting to retire. and what's scary is not only that the baby boomers are retiring at a greater rate, which means they are making greater demands on social security, but also -- primarily medicare and medicaid, but health care costs go up a lot faster than inflation. and older populations use more health care costs. you put that all together, and we have an unsustainable situation. so right now we face a critical time where we're going to have to make some decisions, how do we bring down the debt in the short term and how do we bring down in the debt over the long term. in the short term, democrats and republicans now agree we've got to reduce the debt by about $4 trillion over the next ten years. i know that sounds like a lot of money. it is. but it's doable. if we do it in a

balanced way. what i proposed was that about $2 trillion over ten-twelve years is reduction in spending. you know, government wastes just like every other major institution does. so there are things that we do that we can afford not to do. now there are some things that i'd like to do, or are fun to do, but we can't afford them right now. so we've made cuts in every area. a good example is pentagon spending. where congress often times stuffs weapon systems in the pentagon budget that the pentagon itself says we don't need. but special interest and constituencies help to blow the pentagon budget. we've already reduced the pentagon budget by about $400 billion. we think we can do another $400 billion.

we have to look at spending both on nonsecurity issues, as well as defense spending. and then what we've said is let's take another trillion of that that we raised through a reforms in the tax system that allows people like me and frankly, you, mark, for paying a little more in taxes. [laughter] >> i'm cool with that. president obama: i know you are okay with that. [laughter] president obama: keep in mind what we're talking about is going back to the rates that existed when bill clinton was president. now, a lot of you -- [laughter] president obama: i'm trying to say this delicately, still in diapers at that time. [laughter] president obama: but for those of you who recall, the economy was booming, and wealthy people were getting wealthier. there wasn't a problem

at that time. if we go back to those rates alone, that by itself would do a lot in terms of us reducing our overall spending. and if we can get a trillion dollars on the revenue side, $2 trillion in cutting spending, we can still make investments in basic research. we can still invest in something we call arpa-e, which is like darpa but focused on energy. what are the next breakthrough technologies that can help us reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. we can still make investments in education. so we've already expanded the pell grant program so that more young people can go to college, we're investing more in s.t.e.m. education, math and science and technology education. we can still make those investments. we can still rebuild the roads, bridges, invest in high-speed rail and