>> we are so concerned about losing an air force guy, and we could care less about the guy on the ground. >> from its ineffectiveness. these systems can't do close support. they can't respond to a guy who is being ambushed, unicom in some narrow valley. this is pure old-fashioned bombing mentality. this is like world war ii strategic bombing is what you were behind drones. >> taking it down to a level of assassination. >> i'd like to make a comment. >> the common denominator between the three of us is we all work very closely with john come and get a great saying that comes to the heart of your

question. machines don't fight wars. people do and they use their minds. you're talking about a war where machines to fight wars and people don't, and they don't use their minds. >> on that note i think we want to thank these heroes both for the truth and for the taxpayer, the three of you who have spent your life at this work. i want to invite the audience for thanking you for all of your work. [applause] >> you can download a pdf version of the pentagon labyrinth for free. go to cdi.org. visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see your online. type the author of the book title of a search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also shoot anything you see on booktv.org easily by

clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online from 48 hours every weekend with the top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> from the 16th annual colby military writer symposium in vermont a panel of authors and veterans discuss the future of afghanistan. this last an hour and 45 minutes. >> thank you for being here today. it's really a pleasure to be here yet again. to visit yet another urgent topic, relevant to so many of you here in this room today, future citizen soldiers who will be heading down range in the future to deal with these problems and issues and challenges. so we welcome you. we welcome our internet audience and we also welcome c-span book tv viewing audience. i'll introduce our panelists. afterwards will be having a book

signing in the neighboring ballroom. you are all welcome to come over and take that opportunity if your book collectors to obtain signed first editions and maybe explore more deeply some of the perspective you here today. you have another pale this year whose depth of expertise is matched by the diversity. i'm going to introduce the panel again. opposite myself, dr. christopher coppola received his commission as reserve officer in the u.s. air force in 1990. he served as the two gulf wars and deployed in iraqi freedom in 2005 and 2007. in iraq dr. coppola work as a trauma surgeon at a combat support hospital at the lad air base 40 miles north of baghdad. he has completed humanity

emissions to brazil and haiti and now resides with his down in pennsylvania where he is in practice as he civilian pediatric surgeon. he published a memoir of his time in iraq entitled "coppola: a pediatric surgeon in iraq." is a 2008 graduate. welcome, doctor. [applause] >> donna mcaleer is the award-winning author of the groundbreaking book "porcelain on steel: women of west point's long gray line." is also an inspirational speaker addressing the conflict and leadership, strong role model, team building and breaking boundaries. donna graduate from west point in 1987, served in germany as an army officer before you speak she left the service in 1991 to pursue an mba at the university of virginia's darden school of business. from there she moved her successful professional career

in corporate consulting and global logistics. she committed herself to a pursuit of the unique opportunity in 2000, to represent the united states i in the 2002 winter olympic games as a bobsled driver there she finished fourth in the olympic trials. welcome. [applause] >> jack segal as u.s. army, the it -- vietnam veteran. he server 22 years as the scene just diplomat at the state department including service as national security council director for russia and eurasia. he served 10 years with nato including work as foreign policy advisor to nato's afghanistan commander. is a visiting distinguished fellow of national defense

university and a lecturer at northwestern university college. welcome. [applause] >> karl marlantes is a graduate of yale university, a rhodes scholar at oxford, and a marine veteran who served with great distinction in vietnam when he was awarded the navy cross, the bronze star, two navy medals for valor, two purple hearts and 10 air medals. his novel, "matterhorn" it was a bestseller. entertainment weekly, esquire and the "washington post." "matterhorn" is the recipient of this year's colby award and we're very proud to have karl marlantes with those today. thanks. [applause] >> and finally nearest to me here is doug stanton. doug is the author of two new

times bestsellers, "in harm's way: the sinking of the uss indianapolis and the extraordinary story of its survivors," and the extraordinary story of the survivors. and "horse soldiers: the extraordinary story of a band of u.s. soldiers who rode to victory in afghanistan." his writings have appeared in esquire, "the new york times," the "washington post," and other national publications. he's a founder of the national writers series, the book festival bring great conversations to life of america's greatest writers. his recent book "horse soldiers" spent more than three months on the new times bestsellers work. he lives and writes in michigan. welcome, doug. [applause] >> so our topic today is the

uncertain future in afghanistan, assessing the conflict 10 years later. it's worth pointing out now the u.s. has been present with its military in afghanistan longer than the soviet union did in 1989. i think it's reflective of this. there was a moment to your or so ago speaking to troops in helmand province, general mcchrystal reflected on the intensity of emotions brought on by the memory of the attacks of 9/11. he told his audience, i'm sure you can all recall what you were doing on that fateful day. seizing the moment, he turned to a soldier nearby and said, i'll bet you remember what you're doing on 9/11. the soldier replied, yes, sir i was having my braces removed. i was a young kid then you're a wise veteran now. american forces have been there for 10 years. i think we ought to start at the

beginning. remind us, doug, if you will, "horse soldiers" is all about the competence of the special forces soldiers working for the allies. in its earliest days. why don't you walk us through that moment. what was the sense of mission and how is that mission carried out? >> the sense of the nation in 2001 in september and october of that year was very broad. many of us may know that the united states is total response to those attacks of 9/11 were initially just 12 u.s. army special forces soldiers asked to land secretly in afghanistan, link up with anti-taliban militia fighters led by various warlords who we had kept contact with since the sony withdrawal in 89. it was a broad mission. they had been trained as special forces soldiers are to work independently to think any network style, often being the

only senior ranking american on the ground, they affected the very brilliant tactical victory in achieving in about eight weeks with the pentagon initially thought would take a year and a half. it's quite stunning, bob woodward in one of his books, went down, involved about 300 personnel, followed very quickly by thousands, convention troops, about $70 million. and as i said, a very short timeframe. special forces had never been used before as a lead element in any kind of deployment in the united states history. and so just before i stop here, just to set the stage of it, think back to october of 2001 and the 19th of october, 12 of these guys land, helicopter landing zone 60 miles south in

northern afghanistan. the chinook takes off. they watch their counterparts, their indigenous counterparts stepped out of the gloom dressed in rags and roads, and you know, so some not wearing shoes. this is very much a ragtag army. the united states was the underdog insurgent in that fight outnumbered and outgunned by taliban forces that basically owned 90% of the country. so i think we will finish this conversation today about talking about how we did so little -- so much back in with so little. and how today we seem to struggle to do a whole lot with a whole lot more, and may not be quite so successful. >> part of the accomplishment back then was the fact we had a government, we had a government who is willing to serve as our target. very clarifying fact. >> their mission was very broad, to go -- here's what it was for those of you who write operation

order to get them. it was to make the country unsafe for the taliban. how broad can it be? just don't go off the road essentially and don't break the law. they do that. and what they brought to this battle was supreme closer support, which however is debatable, a bomb dropped from 30,000 feet may not be technically close air support, but it was guided by these lasers. so essentially the early part of this war is basically a western lasers, because they rode horses, believe it or not. and had no wheeled vehicles to speak of. >> and what was the strategic missions in? what was the purpose be? to secure the country and make it unsafe for the taliban and/ and/or/the al qaeda training camp which have been offering

their in the power vacuum which basically had festered and grown during the previous years of civil war. i will note that when these special forces soldiers joined by conventional troops, as well, rode through town on horseback into the cities to colonel mark mitchell at the time noted in a journal that he felt like he was back in his grandfather's time in world war ii because the locals would come out to the street, were lined the street and waiting, waiting can be, throwing papers. the kids loved everybody. i mean, we had that country on our side at that time and place. it was quite a stunning moment. >> and though the government was overthrown with relatively seemingly slight effort on her part, the strategic mission was not there, coverage by the moment, wasn't? it carried over into more

ambiguous -- >> the next days would have been cease of combat creation of everything that makes a society. and today counterinsurgency strategy there is troops meant to protect the senate in places like helmand province, which jack does quite well. what he's missing is the police force. if you drive in any american city and to go to the county see, what do you see? the courthouse. we take for granted, but the whole world really revolves around the courthouse. those are the two, as far as i'm concerned, to missing letters in that country still, a police force which does not terrorize his own population, and a judiciary that kind of educate land and water disputes. >> jack, do we bring you in on this now? ask you for your assessment. now 10 years on, mostly strategic mission then and what

we find ourselves today relative to that? >> no, thank you very much. doug may very interesting statement when he defined the special forces mission is to make the country unsafe for the taliban. some of you whom i've met here, i've made the point that the word david means student of islam. and so a group of tel aviv are called taliban. so if we define our mission is to make at this place unsafe for the believers of islam, we define the population and particularly the male part of the male population as our enemy. that ambiguity that was built into the initial mission, we became somewhat more careful about for a while. we begin to talk of the insurgents but more recently we have gotten sloppy again and we get to talk about defeating the

taliban. and if you are a religious muslim and have an obligation to protect the holy karana and protect religion, then you are obligated to engage in jihad, holy war, against their religious -- so if we are not cautious about what we defined as our objectives, we trace such a broad spectrum of possibilities that we can manage to define everyone in the population as our enemy. that is not our intent obviously. and if there is, in the definition, the title of his presentation, an uncertain future, it is with the uncertainty of well, what future are you trying to create. and i'll tell you if you're on the right road. so the lack of clarity is a consistent problem here. the president in march 2009 said

our objective in afghanistan is to disrupt, dismantle and destroy al qaeda, and to prevent al qaeda from attacking us or our allies from afghanistan or pakistan. i did not hear talibans in that mission statement. but we tend to confuse these two things. if al qaeda is the enemy -- al qaeda who attacked us clearly, when that attack took place, the united states through the state department contacted the taliban government and said turn over al qaeda to us. and they couldn't do it for religious reasons, but had they done it we would not have attacked afghanistan. had they simply done that little thing, turn over bin laden and his gang to us, you would not have been a war in afghanistan. because we ignored what we

considered the human rights abuses of afghanistan forever, the whole time they were in power which is more than four years, and was only when it became a base against us it became our enemy. so i think we have to focus on that and say, well, what exactly are we trying to achieve as probably the real challenge ahead of us now. >> this isn't the first time you wonder what our mission might be and why we might be somewhere. you, like karl marlantes, served in did not. and you write about in a piece that you wrote, talked about this moment of befuddlement. i can no longer explain why we are here. are we at that moment in afghanistan right now? >> i think, you know, i spent a lot of time with people with a lot of stars on their shoulders. so they're sure about what they're doing. but i also have the vantage of

traveling around the country with one of those generals, and i asked the people at the end of the day when the kind of settling down for the evening, i will approach young officers and young soldiers and asked the question my father asked me when i was serving in did not, he sent me a letter, and he said are you making any headway? i was in my second tour. i didn't serve with anyone with new the distinction of my friend karl marlantes, when the second highest medal of dollars you can win in our country, and i greatly respect that. but i had to answer my father's letter, and i sat on it for a month before even tried. i would go to the gate or to the mess hall and i would ask young soldiers and officers, are you making any headway? an occasion i would get one who would say yeah, we're doing okay in this little village that we are working on. but quite often i would get, i

don't know, i don't know what headway is here. and so, i think that's a very unfair to our soldiers. if they cannot clearly defined their objective, we do not deserve to ask them to go out the front gate in the morning. it's up to us, the decision-makers, the leaders, political leaders and military leaders, to clearly define why you ask anyone to put their life on the line. and if we can give them a straight answer, they should be inside the barbed wire doing whatever else they can do, perhaps trained the afghans to defend themselves. >> yeah, i'd like to weigh in all but on this. you're talking about fundamental and confusions. if you think about what a warrior is, a warrior is a person who, first of all, chooses a side.

the warrior clearly knows that these are my people and those are my enemies. and he will risk his life and limb to use violence, to try and stop the people who are trying to do violence against his people. that's a warrior. a policeman were also risk of life and limb, but they cannot choose sides. they have to be on the side of the law. if a policeman chooses sides, it's called corruption. we have fundamentally confuse the role of the warriors with the role of the police, and we've put warriors who are trained to oppose another side into a situation to act as policemen where there's no agreed upon laws. they have to be on the side of the law. if you don't to the state been

in any state union, the people who are inside will alternate did you say is to kill or is against the law to steal? they all agree. there's an agreement on the law. we put people are trained as lawyers into a situation where there's no agreement. it's perfectly justifiable to cut a woman's is off if she's humiliated her husband in some way. oh, which while are we dealing with? and the second thing is, if you have policeman who are trained, they're genuinely more mature, infantrymen are young. would you take a 19 year old incident into a troubled neighborhood in with an automatic weapon? it's not like he's going to do a very good job. he clearly knows who they are, he will do a magnificent job. that's what 19-year-olds do. so we don't get over this fundamental confusion we're going to be finding ourselves in

situations time and time again where we are putting people who are trained one way into a role that has met the requirements to make that will successful. >> and clarity of purpose in battle is a real force multiplier. in the middle of "matterhorn" you have this moment where u.s. officer suddenly realizes and begins working over the fact the north vietnamese army unit he is opposing our confuse with a sense of purpose and mission. and you offer this observation, you write for the americans that kind of clarity was a thing of the past. the marines seem to be killing people with no objective beyond the killing itself. that left a hollowed feeling. this cycle of this dynamic can quickly detach itself from larger strategic missions, especially missions with ambiguity, counterinsurgency.

>> i think it's absolutely parallel between vietnam and the current war in afghanistan, because they don't world war ii. my father, my uncle, they all thought. are we making progress? yet, we took while canal and we had the mary on. it was clear what we're doing. you go to vietnam and it's becoming like i'm clear. so how do we measure success? i am clear in my own mind that body count is a very bad measure of success. first of all it's immoral. the warriors job is to stop the other side from using violence. and when it other side of stopped doing it, then you are done. and the job is not to kill the other side. sometimes you have to go people on the other side to dissuade them from doing what they are doing. that's the bad part of it, but

the objective should not be killing people. that's not a proper objective. is just inhumane. we have to remember that yeah, all is fair in love and war. but not all is there. there has to be humanitarian perspective on it. second thing is about body count which i think is the north vietnamese who were very clear about what they wanted which was a stout, were prepared to have any number of people died in order to accomplish that mission. the military could say welcome we won the battle, really a wonderful ratio. politically, all the americans cared about was the five dead americans. that's the other side of the body count issue. they will be here politically, nobody will care about how many of any we kill. built care about how many of our sons and daughters died.

that's another bad thing. than in the book i take some time with humor honor. they are easy to many but those kind of measures, easy to fake and you never know the accuracy. >> donna, can we bring you and you on the question of leadership, maybe? and how they have to conduct themselves in these situations where the enemy blends in, the enemy doesn't offer itself the battle. how is west point and its leadership education adjusted to this quest you graduated west point as the soviets were getting their tails kicked in afghanistan. now, here we are. what can we learn from them? what are we learning from the expense of the past 30 years? >> you bring up a good point of why we study history. we study history so we don't make the mistakes of the past, and it seems like many of our elected officials have neglected to study history.

sitting through carl's presentation today, i can't think of a more appropriate focus that every soldier should be frankly required to read. a big part of the education at west point is going to be study of history as i'm sure here in norwich with a military history curriculum, but also the importance of cultural awareness. and i think we saw a very early on general john abizaid was in com commander, he's the only general in our u.s. army flew in every. he really put an emphasis on the cultural awareness and understanding of the anthropology. and i think as we now look forward 10 years, maybe it was something we have neglected. when we look at afghanistan, it's not a country really understood. there has been no history ever

of a respected national government. it has been a tribal system. and so that importance of that understanding of the enemy from all perspectives is really what the foundation of a liberal education is about. and i think you at norwich, at west point, and hopefully so many of our other institutions of higher learning, that ability to study in multiple disciplines, take disparate information. and as a young officer, be able to make decisions based on incomplete information, that's what so viable about the training and the course of study. and it's important to be able to solve problems in an engineering perspective as it is to be able to speak another language. the military academies in norwich are providing what is truly a liberal arts education. and hopefully creating our

soldiers, state people of the future. >> your book is sort of a profiled and courage and women in uniform, "porcelain on steel." what challenge to women confront entering a society such as afghanistan whose culture is closer to the ninth century than her own century? >> i think you'll find at any service member, reason women served is the same as men, to get an education and to be part of something higher and greater than themselves. i think certainly not thinking from expense from battle, the challenges women face i want to be equal partners and members of the varsity team, not the jv team. and the challenge right now is, we have some issues with regards to how women can be utilized in situations. we are seeing now, many of you

are probably familiar with what the marines are deploying called female engagement teams. these are groups of servicewomen who are going in to different villages and tribes and acting as human intelligence collectors. the results of these have been mixed, certainly in the more urban areas. they have been well received on as a third gender. in the rural areas it's a completely different situation there. and i think trying to understand and relate to that is a big challenge. >> the unforeseen fx of these engagement teams, different situation being was what happens in those rural areas of? >> exactly. this is a society where women are completely marginalized. and i think that's tough for western women to comprehend, particularly our servicewomen. this is something over four or

five centuries. this is not, you know, recent creation. and so understand that mindset, one benefit is the military, particularly with its counterinsurgency strategy, is learning i think have to use its human capital assets better and to really take advantage of different populations within the military to hopefully exploit that intelligence. >> last november, nader leadership agree that afghan forces, ready or not, what have full responsibility for security in the country by, was at the end of 2014? and i read that and then i read an article in "the wall street journal" recently about how tribe so sometimes taught american soldiers by saying you have to watch, we have the time. could you expand on this, maybe

jack, this idea of strategic patience and the degree to which we might not have enough of it? >> yes. it's classic counterinsurgency problem first of all. from the outset, it's nowhere not going to be there for ever. that may been doubtful with regard to colonial powers like britain, but certainly from the perspective of the afghans who have been invaded repeatedly over the centuries, and eventually the invading armies have left. and they know that we are leaving. they have a sense that we're going to leave him relatively soon, but we didn't announced in november at the nato summit we would be leaving the combat mission in afghanistan by the end of 2014. that was quickly caveat it to say we would continue in a supporting role for quite some time after that.

the setting of a timeline has a double edged sword and can put pressure on the government to improve its performance, and it is much room for improvement with our allies in afghanistan with the afghan government. but it also tells of the enemy, who could use what's known in military as the most dangerous strategy. the most dangerous enemy strategy would be to withdraw from the battlefield and disappear. because then it would create the illusion that the dispute has been settled, and in a few years we would speed up no doubt the withdrawal because it would be all quiet and we would get out. then they would resume their insurgency. we have not solve the fundamental political issues that underlie the inserted. we're not doing that by putting in more soldiers. to the credit of the leadership, they understood that and they

began to increase the civilian side of the effort. and so that today there are 1100 civilians operating in afghanistan on behalf of the u.s. government. as opposed to 150,000 troops. so it's still not a very good ratio to win in fact we have to back up and say what are the basic needs that we're trying to address. and an afghan village like a vietnamese village, the people want security. they want to eat enough food at the end of the day, and they want to have a situation, let me say, or security first of all. they wanted to be local security. they want their village, police, by the people. we enter a village in our body armor and our gear and we look like invaders from outer space. i was once in an afghan village with my four-star general

partner, and this guy we're talking to asked our interpreter, are the russians? he didn't know that the russians had left. we are back hundreds of years time when we go into these villages. we see living conditions which i described as like living in the 14th century, very low hygiene, very poor health, no education, no literacy. and so, to put out front page u.s. marine corps or army officer, and i would add i met many navy and air force officers in these situations, it's really quite a mismatch. it's quite unfair. they don't know enough about the situation to understand the people they're talking to. and the people that we're talking to our viewing us as another set of foreign invaders. we are well-intentioned, and i

would turn to chris in a minute to ask, to add, to describe how we do a lot of good things. we try to do a lot of good things. we repair bridges. we build roads. we provide health care, which he can describe. we build schools. we do all sorts of things that we intend to be good deeds. but as the book three cups of tea by greg mortenson describes, before you can build a school you have to build a relationsh relationship. and we'll have time to build a relationship so we build schools. and without a relationship, school is something we have in planted in a foreign plant rather than something the afghans themselves have build on their own. and that to me is a fundamental flaw in the strategy that we are presently employing. i will turn to chris perhaps on

the medical side. >> i'd also like to say thanks to jim, steve and karl for welcoming us. now, beyond the plenary session of this panel, i do have to remark that the past two days doing and with the cadets and their classes has been an incredible expert, just to step out of line and become a student again momentarily. to witness the future military leaders and citizen soldiers of our country. it's something that is a stand and certain makes me proud to be involved. and as i look across at the other panel members and seek professional soldiers, authors, historians, leaders, diplomats. and me as a physician who is now the military service, as a civilian have excelled in pennsylvania, i'm essentially a country doctor, jim. but i'm happy that i am involved. what i would like to add is a

perspective that's going to somewhat mirror what you all have been saying, is that afghanistan is a country of the contradiction. the modern times, the living situations. the fact it has a border, but the people see a tribal and family identity above that national identity. and that my colleagues, people that i worked with in the hospital in iraq are currently working in hospitals in afghanistan tell me that they are seeing the same injuries, the ied blast injuries, the all too common child who's picked up a land mine or unexploded ordnance who has had their hands dramatically amputated. and seeing the patient have been brought in from some of the remote villages with simple medical conditions like a hernia has gone on for 10 years with no one to fix them. or in unintended wound that has gone dan gray.

-- dan green. what i'm been able to stay involved with my colleagues to create a remote and virtual set of specialists. so the young doctor starting out facing a difficult problem is able to reach out via the internet at also the electronic store and for doctors which are essentially our medical actions to draw on the wisdom of not only are thousands of other cash the treatment from our experience, but also the many from the those before us. so it's an honor to continue to try to be useful in that manner. but i would say that knowing that civilians in an area torn by war are more vulnerable by far than the combatants and will bear the majority of the deaths and casualties. and additionally noting that our young professional soldiers will

do any task, no matter how horrible the personal sacrifice, the effort involved and the pain involved. that we do owe it to them, both of those soldiers and those vulnerable civilians in the area, to try to see through this uncertain future. because as the time goes on the cost of lives destined to be. so it's a strong duty, those of us who are active involved in military and civilian leadership, and also citizens of our nation, to apply our best thoughts and efforts to this problem. >> chris, maybe you could do something further about the state about the state-of-the-art battlefield medicine in 2011. how is the system set up and how does it come to be a system of, say, a platoon out on patrol 100 miles from the nearest major base, comes under attack and sustained specialties, described was what happens and and how

these cases eventually work their way up the line to you may be in balad are also to give the cadets a sense of how advanced the state of art it is right to speak with like my college were unfortunate to the develop an of -- so many other surgeons before me who went to war, giving us transfusion, penicillin, vaccination, to help people people live -- to help keep people alive. what we've been able to do is develop a system, both within our hospital, with the proper specialist, and outside the hospital with logistics, to have a 90% survival rate for any true because your hospital, 98% chance of leaving the hospital on. it translates to a survival of wound rates of apartment 93%. the gap is those who aren't able to make it to the hospital from the time of their injury. and it's something we're very

proud of. it's a high level of survivor than any other war. it does result in a problem of many veterans returning to home life with lost of limb. but i'm impressed again and again at the young men and women who surmount those obstacles, and is not a 70 year-old abg. it is a 20 year old entity will be on the bike, running a marathon. but to speak to some of the specifics of our recent experience. we had the pipeline come and that is level one which is a small fort search within that into about six operations the for depleted. and then level three, level three is a center which has specialized trauma care from the general surgeons cardiac surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, and our facility in balad it was 19 different specialties. from that to level four, that's

our transport on a 141, one stabilize back to the united states level five, walter reed. now, that pipeline in and the pipeline out, that's what let us get that high rate of survival. additionally, by putting us, putting the surgical specialist in the theater by helicopter within 20 minutes of any point in the country helped us. in afghanistan the transport time is a bit slower. the terrain is worse, the weather is worse, and the hospitals are clustered. specific techniques with their hospitals, we found a resurgence of early application of turning pages including the one in a special forces self applied tourniquet has saved lives because the patients don't bleed out. and the rapid transport lets us say that when it hasn't been blown off.

we do something called a vacuum assisted dressing. this will be watertight come as expunged and applies continues back into the wind. instead of changing the dressing every 12 hours, allowed entry of bacteria entered, the one continue is drained of contaminants. and specialist techniques like shunting a broken vessels, and transactional techniques, passing a cancer through the grown and fixing a fistula. fixing hemorrhage in that would. something that's only available in specialized trauma centers here in the u.s. we have on the battlefield. those techniques are being employed today, and in those whose witty as much a doctors are applying them, about 60% of the patients are civilians. >> as a battlefield doctor had to do with the fact that medical ethics will sometimes compel you to treat insurgents? how do you square this with a duty as an air force officer?

and then, you know, work through some of the ambiguities air force because that's what a really compelling aspects that come through in your book. >> to be a military physician, which is a in a credible privilege an incredible honor and one i'm very fortunate that i was able to do that work, the most important work i know i will do in my life, it's following two code, code of an officer, code every physician. and i was a additionally, the code of the american citizen, and in my own personal beliefs. taking care of an insurgent, taking care of an enemy detainee, it didn't break any of those codes because once that detainee was within our custody, it was our responsibility, my personal responsibility if they could survive to make them survive. on a personal level, when i treated detainees whom i know had moments before attempted to drive a vehicle borne ied into

her own pace, when i treated detainees i later found out have personally killed patients that i had treated and a child that i treated, that was a very personal crisis to a very difficult thing to face. but the code of a doctor an anda code of an officer as a military physician, a geneva convention noncombatant, there is no conflict. it was my duty, a duty -ites want to do. and i would say that although might expect if they've been troubling and intense, being a physician, a surgeon at home and being a surgeon and a deployed environment, although it was more intense, it was still the same job. i think our soldiers sometimes face a greater stress when they are moving from one occupation in the u.s. and specialty, to be moved to the deployed environment where the job is to be a killer, a lawful killer for the military. i think that's a greater stress than i ever had to face.

>> i guess i would like to ask my colleagues who we have addressed this very significant portion of iraq, and has just neighbors to the east, pakistan. and we know that pakistan provided a safe haven for al qaeda as well as other terrorists. we're dealing with rapid population growth there, a highly illiterate population, a very young population, and a country that has been -- by the way, they possess nuclear weapons, and the country that has been devastated by floods. is there any of the medical expertise that we have developed in iraq and use it in afghanistan that, from a goodwill perspective, would bring to pakistan, that building of goodwill and the population, is that a consideration? we haven't even discussed

pakistan in here. >> to give a brief comment, i think it is very of medical aid and disaster, like i told the rest of our panelists, it's easy to be a physician because the mission is an change. and i think enemies can reunite to stabilize and respond to an environmental disaster. once the response is complete, it doesn't make the negotiated diplomacy any easier than it was before the disaster. >> let me start off, we have a war in afghanistan and plainly we have one in libby and maybe elsewhere. we do not yet have officially a war in pakistan but we are certain of finding against the government of pakistan. so we face a problem that we had and did not. we have a sanctuary across the border from afghanistan, where

terrorists or insurgents can freely move back and forth. people ask, why don't you see of the border? and i say well, okay, let's seal the border from maine to key west because that's the length of the border between pakistan and afghanistan. so roughly speaking. so that's obviously an impossible task. so we need the cooperation of the pakistani government to stop the cross-border insurgency. the problem though is from the perspective, they are quite satisfied to fight the pakistani taliban. they do not want afghan taliban to be their war. they do not want -- attack with very energetically, let's say, anything having to do with the afghan taliban. there are other terrorist groups and insurgent groups and smugglers who operate across the

same border, the haqqani network, and they also are not necessary at work with pakistan. they are at war with us, or so it seems. we have not declared war on anyone actually. so there is a great ambiguity there, and that's a possibility that could lead to a negotiated settlement. it's clear to me that, for instance, one of the big insurgent groups fighting americans in particular in the east that they're getting tired of looking for a way to stop the fighting. but we have to be attentive to those who don't and we have to encourage them. the second group, the haqqani group, is what carl referred to them it's a police problem. this is a smuggling industry. in the industry with their business. that's why they fight us.

on they have allied in social easily with al qaeda but it's mainly because they want to have common cause with one of the group and we don't have anything to do with the taliban. taliban is the most complex of the problems. and they operate on both sides of the border because these talib, these believers in islam exist in the hills of pakistan, just as much as they do in afghanistan. they are trained in religious schools which are located mainly in western pakistan. they are financed by countries in the gulf region. they teach a form of islam that is extremely conservative. is kabul to the form of islam as practiced in saudi arabia. and saudi arabia's islam is quite similar to the taliban first of islam. so we had to recognize that this is an accepted form of a world

religion in a particular part of the world. and again i would say that if we try to define that as a problem, then we define ourselves as the enemy of that segment of islam. we are not at war with muslims and we have to be very clear about that as well. the muslims of the world of over a billion people, for the most part very little in common with these extreme fundamentalists. they are not -- that's not the form of religion that they practice. but if we push people and we define them as our enemy because they are muslims, or in this case because they believe in the holy koran, then we will create more and more enemies in that community, and then we will broaden the base of people who object to what we are doing. and let's be cautious here because we are not at war in another muslim country. we had a war in iraq, which is

almost ending, maybe. we have a war going on in afghanistan. we are firing hellfire missiles into western pakistan. and now we are dropping a lot of ordinance in libya. so, if you want to be a conspiracy theorist and you're a muslim, you can say i think these americans are at war with islam their and that would be a very dangerous situation for us to be in. >> just to raise the question so that jack, if -- were not fighting an ideology which would be that brand of islam, so maybe we talked earlier today about we hit the reset button and what is it, how do we achieve success, it's not do body counts because -- when we were in afghanistan, i remember thinking at the time, this would be last april, that success was measured in the

number of police that were trained, the number of judges, the new judges that were in town. is that still true? is that now the new york state over the old yardstick? >> that's a very good question. as i said earlier, the number one need is the security. the number two need is food. nine years, 10 years into this war, 40% of the afghans go to bed hungry. according to u.n. statistics. they have an insufficient supply of calories which means they are hungry. that seems to be given the billions of dollars that we're spending to be unconscionable, to be indefensible. but that's the fact. they are hungry. is a hungry people you see on the street. they want to security, they want food. and then they want to judge. that seems to be a strange thing in hierarchy, but this is a country without a clear title to things like food, water, cattle

grazing writes, water rights and land rights. they need somebody to adjudicate these disputes. and what they have is a corrupt government and the government locations had a judge along and the judge is prone to be a recipient of brides. alternatively in 33 of the 34 provinces, according to the intelligence officer at isaf, the international secure the force, 33 out of 34 provinces have a shadow government, and insurgent government, and insurgent governor appoints a judge, a religious scholar because under this form of islam the only thing that counts is the koran. that's all the law you need. so this judge makes a circuit on a motorcycle, village to village, on a schedule that they know. and he adjudicate whether this

land belongs to you or the other person, whether those sheep are yours or the other person's. people need that. and he never accepts bribes, and he carries out his sentence on the spot. so, if the decision is that land is yours out from that moment on that land is yours. and if his decision is that you still enjoy guilty of theft, then the sentences to remove your right hand. because that's the sentence allowed under the koran. so it's clear, it's unambiguous, it's quick and it's free of bribery. i don't want to make that sound better than it is, but it's what people want. they want a decision. they don't like bribery. they don't like corruption, and they are surrounded by it. and we continue to feed that bribery and corruption. we funnel huge amounts of money into afghanistan.

the official number is $171 billion this year into the war effort in afghanistan. the actual number i would argue is quite a bit more than that because there's some things not included in that number, but whatever the actual number is it's a bundle even for the united states to invest in afghanistan. given the state of our own economy. given the fact that after all these years of investing all that money, we have so little to show for it. the last point i would make about transition to afghan lead as part of our strategy. and the president has called for the. this transition effort was announced two weeks ago, to the president of afghanistan announced that we're transitioning to provinces, one in the east and the towns part of kabul province, and the city of herat and the city of lashkar gah.

that means for cities and to provinces out of 34 provinces. that is not a lot to show for the amount of effort that we have put into it. and it would legitimate call for people to ask, if that is the pace at which we're making progress, then we really have to consider what our options are in the future. >> i just wanted to sort of just reminded me when he is talking about money, the british navy ruled the oceans for several centuries, three or four am a and the primary innovation that allowed them to supremacy on the seas was the invention of the bank of england, and a guilt edged out which allowed the english kings and the government later to finance a very expensive military organization.

no one else could keep up with them. when they were doing this, then able to do this because england was a net creditor nation, the largest in the world. by the end of the first world war, england had ceased the creditor nation and have become a debtor nation. the united states became the largest creditor nation in the world, and by 25 years later, we have something like 6000 capital ships. the british, 600. and as an aside, the canadians were third with around 400. today, we are the largest debtor nation in the world, and the chinese are the largest creditor nation. i think we have to think about some very fundamental issues behind military strategy, which is how do we finance all of this. >> so how much war can't afford? how deeply can we go?

and what bearing does a have a mission? >> without jeopardizing our fundamental security, which is our ability to put out highly expensive technical weapons. we don't do asymmetrical war. we are able to project power because of these enormous costs that were able to bear, if some point we continue to be in debt we are not going to be able to do it. and so we have to look back, if you're a strategist you have to say how do i shore up the front so we can carry on what's going on. that goes not just military policy, that goes to the economic policy. ..

>> if withdrawals begin by 2014, where should the counterinsurgency effort, the diplomatic effort, the development effort, give me a ballpark, you know, what's a reasonable 40 yard line to 40 yard line for u.s. withdrawal in afghanistan. anybody want to start with that? >> okay. [laughter] thank you all. [laughter] i think we now have experience there. we have a small base of people who certainly admire and appreciate what we have tried to do. we have three distinct enemy groups or insurgents who are not necessarily going to quit. so we have to say, okay, part of

this strategy is handing over to the afghans, as i said before. i think we could accelerate that. i am not convinced personally that patrolling in afghan villages is getting much for us, given the price of it. i think too often we are unfamiliar, so unfamiliar with the situation that we are really at such a disadvantage that we are, we are easy targets. and we also operate from bases, so we are commuting to the war which is something general petraeus said we shouldn't do. and we were able to stop doing that in iraq. it's much more difficult to stop doing that in afghanistan because we cannot embed in their villages. they will not allow it. where you were able to embed in small towns and cities of iraq. so that part of the strategy's not working so well. so we need to back off from that and say, okay, let's operate more from our bases. i think we're investing huge

amounts of money in training the afghans. we need to look at how we're training them and what we're training them to do. karl's made a wonderful point, they need police more than they need army. but we are training a bigger or army than police force, and that may be something we need to take a second look at. where they also need to be practical is about what we're trying to get them to do. we're replacing soviet jeeps which have this simple six-cylinder engine with humvees. now, humvees are a great vehicle -- not necessarily for afghanistan -- but they need a computer to test them when they to bad. and to use a computer, you have to be able to read. about 30% of the males and 10% of the women can read. so they need to be able to fix a jeep without being able to read. we make a jeep that could be

simple enough to sell or give to the afghans. we don't need to recreate the u.s. army model in the afghan national army. and then we really need to focus on the police force. and we are starting to do that. there's something called the afghan local police program. it's not new. people have tried this over the centuries in afghanistan. of equipping and arming the local police. it creates some problems for you because if you're in the air and you're on a bombing mission and you see a guy with a rifle, you've got to be see is this a local policeman, or is this -- he's not wearing a uni-- -- uniform. it's a difficult problem, but it's soluble. i would say pull our troops mainly into the bases and let them do the training from our big bases, and let the countryside be under afghan control. it was under afghan control before we arrived. they defeated the soviet army

with money and some weapons from us, but not with our, not with us running the show. so they are not incompetent at defending their villages. and this they have to do it, they will do it. but i will never forget a british soldier who i asked one day, are you making any headway, and he said if i go through another afghan village and i see a kid my age sitting in the shade while i've got my body armor and i'm humping down the road and waiting for the next ied to go off, i might put a bullet in that s.o.b., and the guy was laughing at him. the afghan kid he saw his age was laughing at him. he thinks he was laughing at him. he probably wasn't. but that's what was going through his mind. and here's this guy just my age, he should be the one with the rifle. why am i doing this? and, you know, that's a fair question for our soldiers to be asking. >> we've got the watches,

they've got the time, that's the answer, right? >> they just came up with -- i'm a normallist, so i came -- novelist, so i came up with this scenario. it's 1863, and we're in atlanta, georgia, and everybody there is a strong protestant s and they're fighting gwen the government in washington -- against the government in washington, d.c. and the french arrive who don't speak english, and they're very strong catholics. and as far as the people in atlanta are concerned, their women dress like prostitutes. but they're here to build a school and to help. [laughter] >> do we have any questions? please, come forward if you'd like to contribute to the conversation. >> i don't want our guests to get off that easy. got a question concerning the comprehensive approach. we talked about the three priorities in afghanistan; security -- which, obviously, would be our burden to bear in the department of defense, but we also talked about food and

the legal system or framework. it seems to me with this being a comprehensive approach to this issue, maybe the military shouldn't be the supported effort, maybe we should be the supporting effort for possibly usaid or state department or some other lead governmental agency to kind of guide us through there. as we talked about the 19-year-old with an automatic weapon might not be the man or woman that we'd want to tackle that problem. thoughts on that. >> i, i was really impressed when i made this trip last april with jack to tour the parwan detention center which was created not far from the bagram detention center which you could not get into during one of my first trips -- my first trip to afghanistan. and so this is a gleaming, white concrete, barbed wire -- looks

like a county jail, essentially, that everybody can see. and they mean it that way so that the afghan citizens can say, that's where my uncle is because he got picked up in this raid. and they can come in now to the -- get on the telephone and sit behind the plexiglas and talk to him. and he has some counsel, and they have a hearing. it's kind of hard to get out of that jail. they're not letting kauais out -- guys out just because they think they're innocent. so that's one step forward to creating this judiciary that's good. now, to do that we've had to pour lots of money into the country to secure areas where you might want to build those courthouses and those jails. and i don't know, jack, that's, that's -- we met that irish, who was that, the aid worker, the irish woman who was -- >> yeah. she was in one of the cities

that's been transitioned. it shows what an individual can do. this is an incredibly dynamic british woman named wendy cameron. she had a lot of experience in afghanistan, and she went down to lashkar gah which was a british base, and she created a little island of stability in that city through sheer will power, money -- some u.s. money, but mainly british money -- and a willingness to listen. this is something we are not the strongest at. they, to listen to the afghans and to ask the greg greg mortenn question from his book, "three cup of tea," what is it you need? and the answer is always, consistently, security first. and then there is a checklist of things. quite often the judiciary capability is on that list. so we're not going to train law schools, we're not going to create law schools and have

lawyers and judges in the near term. but they aren't demanding that. they could set up -- they had tribal systems for judging situations. we have imposed a foreign system in the country. and a different model. and if that's not working, we can go back. i served in southern africa, in botswana, and there were traditional courts in botswana, and you were offered that as your option, o or you could go to the western-style court. but you suffered the, you were disrespecting the elders in your village if you chose the western-style court. you were saying, i don't trust their judgment. to most people went to the traditional court, and they came up with traditional answers to traditional problems like land landownership, water and cattle, which is what people were worried about. i think we've overengineered the answer. >> i was just thinking in answer to this question that it would seem to me that the fundamental

way to approach this is that we have to stop being cast as the enemy, and the easiest way to do that is to just move behind international organizations. nato is not quite as good as the united nations because, as we all know, there's political issues. but if you are supporting by providing security to an international organization and you remove yourself, or pretty hard for the bad guys to the get any good pr by attacking, you know, women from, you know, some english ngo. and i think, you know, the thing we have to remember is that terrorism is actually a problem for the whole world, and we're making it look like a war, and we're actually giving these terrorists the cache of being

legitimate warriors against the united states. we should treat them as criminals and we should, in fact, put them in criminal court and not give them the prim of being tried -- privilege of being tried in military court. and we won't get credit because, you know, people say we didn't give them the money, but think about how many tanks and trucks we sent to russia who, of course, told their troops this wasn't coming from the unite. but we beat hitler. so, you know, let's get straight about it. >> we're also going to be taking questions from our internet audience, so if there are any of those from our internet audience with questions, please, send those in, and a representative will come to the microphone. over here. >> one of the issues around intervention is the theory that you either intervene in a country overwhelmingly and impartially, or you do it with less force, but partially.

one of the things that the panel has not addressed today is the fact that the taliban explicit hi in the 1990s -- exprison sitly in the 1990s was an expression of pashtun ethnic pride and, basically, a kind of resurgence after the chaos following the soviet withdrawal. do you see the united states' role in terms of policing or as intervention trying to keep the peace between the pashtun -- among the pashtuns, the as the quicks and the use becks at this point? and my follow-up question is do you see elements of the northern alliance reconstituting and rearming? because they also see the clock ticking, and they also see the united states' role, you know, at some point being pulled back. do you see them getting ready to refight the civil war of the early 1990s? >> yes, i do. see them, you know, if we were

to leave tomorrow, yes. the country that all these belligerents would be at each other to be the stakeholder in the country again. i would say, though, the taliban of the 1990s, early pre-2001 was not pan-arabic. their or interests were really in furthering their own sense of talibanism within their own country. and, in fact, i was always amused and surprised to when i did my interviews that the afghan taliban would call the other, call them foreigners. would come in across the border to be, to wage, to make trouble all over the place. so, you know, i -- go ahead, jack. >> fully agree, doug. and i would, i agree with you that there is that, that is one of the scenarios that's quite likely of a disintegration of

the situation after we leave into a civil war. i would say that they haven't completely disarmed anyway. they've put their weapons away, their heavy weapons are gone. there's also a bit of a ambiguity here because the afghan national army which we are financing has very, very few pashtun officers. they have a few more pashtun soldiers because they pay, but we have been unsuccessful in recruiting officers out of the pashtun community. so we can be seen as arming the northern alliance in what we're doing now, and we're not doing this cheaply. the budget for this year, this year is $12 billion for training and equipping the afghan national army. last year it was 13.2 --11.2 billion. next year it's going to be down to nine billion. and then six billion from every

year thereafter for the foreseeable future. the argument being that that's cheaper than keeping the u.s. troops there. but to me, that is an unsustainable force both in size and in terms of it complexity, as i said earlier. >> thank you. >> over here? >> good afternoon, ma'am, gentlemen. my question is in light of the addressed concerns during our discussion, do you recommend that we strategically do a reactive damage control, or do you recommend us kind of withdrawing or stepping back a little bit? and if so, what considerations do we expect the face in the terms of national interests and international image in the global community? >> could you just define reactive damage control? what you mean? >> yes, sir. as far as addressing the issues of where we clearly know we haven't made that much progress and strategically and we've

exhausted a lot of means thus far, sir. >> well, the question -- >> go ahead. >> what do we want? i mean, we started out there in october 19, 2001, just similar my to shut down these training camps both which al-qaeda had been running and sponsored with the nod of the taliban. the question all of us in this audience have to ask is what will we -- well, it's not one we have to ask, it's one we have to face. are you happy with an afghanistan and a south which is very fundamental and where women have very few rights as we recognize them, a northern part of the country more cosmopolitan, more literate? however, in the long run in the macro view is a cup that is largely -- is a country that is largely stable and is not fostering terrorism and doesn't

contain a power vacuum. that is where, i think, i'm headed because i increasingly see fewer and fewer options. so, and i think that's probably what we thought might happen all along. but it's so interesting to me when the monthly death toll in afghanistan exceeded for the first time that of iraq on a monthly basis which i think was in june of 2008, nobody was paying attention. and when horse soldiers came out in mid 2009, the publicists and the publishing houses had to remind the reporters and so on in the united states that we were even in afghanistan. so it wasn't until president obama's speech december 7th, i believe, 2009, after mcchrystal's own ultimatum, essentially, in august of that year when suddenly everyone realized we were now about to put more troops this that country can, america woke up and said, oh, my god, what's going

on? the i was a little bit annoyed, to be frank, because i'd been following this, and it's a problem that we, that we created through our own inattention. and i'm, that's a statement more than an answer to your question. >> doug, one thing we look at what we want, what we've tried to impose on this nation. maybe it's a different perspective what's realistically achievable. and is it, do we need to ask the question a different way as opposed to an imposition of what we want? >> well, i mean, i think one of the unspoken undertones here is that there really has been a struggle between the conventional army and the unconventional army about what to do in be afghanistan and, essentially, the conventional side won. although counterinsurgency in some ways has many unconventional warfare things built in indoctrineally. and, you know, i can remember

early on talking to people doing my research, well, what we should do in afghanistan is go after the centers of tbrafty, ignore borders because the people in charge in running things ignore them as well. really try to create change. one of the buzz words, the buzz phrases i always heard from people in special forces was insurgency is a social problem. these are guys who train to shoot, move, maneuver, and they see this as a social problem. much as -- and one of them who later went on to teach in the counterinsurgency program at west point said, listen, we can't even solve teen pregnancy and drug use in the united states, which is a social problem. so you're telling us in three or four years where we don't understand the language or the mores and kind of fix their social problems too? so i always was rooting for those guys because using all

kind of different forms of power, soft and hard, to really look at this and move centers of gravity, and i'm, you know, and to be happy with solutions that maybe gray and not necessarily plaque and white. >> -- plaque and white. >> i was just going to say, you started talking about soft power. think about our experience with countries like south africa. we never went to war in south africa. they had a horrible social problem called apartheid, and there was enormous pressure put on the south african government to make changes there. it took not six years, it took 30 -- i don't know when apartheid started, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, but simple things like we're not going to play your rugby team anymore which is embarrassing to south africa. how come? because you have this social problem we disagree with. the international community through economic pressures, through social pressures

actually helped an enormous amount to move that country out of apartheid. and i think that we can take some lessons from that particular success. we didn't need to put troops in. >> i have a student on behalf of the masters in the diplomacy program, he's caleb king, currently located in kabul, afghanistan. his question is, what can be done to reduce the wise spread corruption in the afghan government. there's several ongoing efforts in this area and the u.s. government and nato. how does the panel see these as succeeding? >> well, where there is a flood of money pouring into afghanistan and not a lot of financial control on that money, so you are pretty much asking for what you get. i mentioned the forget of $11

billion to train and equip the afghan national army. some of that money is spent in the united states buying equipment, but some of it is spent shipping that equipment, and a lot of it is spent building buildings in afghanistan. you've got to equip your people who are handling cash like that with the expertise and the tools to control those funds. and we have not done that at all. we have commanders emergency response sundays, the cerp funds which are millions of dollars in many places, and we give those funds to mid-grade officers, lieutenant colonels or lieutenant commanders, and we say this is your money to spend, and you have to account for it, but it's, basically, yours. this is very unfair because then we go back a few years later and say, well, what did you do with

the money? what happened to that concrete that you bought? you're in a war zone, and we've tried to be fairly liberal in giving people the opportunity to use money as a weapon effectively. let's put it differently, use money as a tool of war. but we then have to be realistic about whether they'll be able to be accountable for that money. the endemic corruption, the high-level corruption that sprises in afghanistan -- exists in afghanistan is going to continue to exist. president karzai in a meeting mg that i attended was questioned about corruption. and his response was, well, 70% of the fund that you put into afghanistan are not funneled through my government, so who did you give your money to? it's a fair question. it's not a completely genuine one because there was plenty of money left over when you look at the 30%, but a lot of money

disappearing in this process. and there are a lot of houses being built in kabul, multistory mansions, and land that's been expropose rated by senior officials of the afghan government. and nobody can explain how someone with a salary of $11,000 a year can build a multimillion dollar mansion. or other mansions are being built in dubai or purchased in dubai by people running kabul bank. and kabul bank is the, happens to be where we put all the fund for the pay of the afghan national army. now, some of that money may not be there when we need et, when we go to draw on it. this is a situation where there's a tremendous flow of money. $171 billion a year, you need a lot of financial control. and you need a lot of oversight. and i think those were oversights that we made, we didn't put those things into place.

could i, i want to -- since i have the floor, let me just add one point. i don't, i don't -- i may have created the misimpression that anything that i'm critical of, that the blame belongs to mid-level and junior officers and ncos and soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines. and that could be furthest thing from my mind. the responsibility for the mistakes that are being made rests with generals, admirals, senior diplomats, ambassadors. the people on the ground are doing the damnedest best they can to execute the orders they have, and those orders are very tough and ambiguous, difficult orders. but i don't want anyone who's wearing a uniform today to walk out of here feeling like they've, thai been tarred with -- they've been tarred with a brush. anything that they're trying to do, they're trying to do it as best they can in an incredibly difficult and harsh and demanding environment.

>> please, i'd like to take a moment to quickly say thank you to caleb. and, obviously, for what he's doing being on the line for all of us, but additionally, for bringing his brain to war and, you know, having the integrity to try to participate in this symposium for our benefit to hear what are the ground-level frustrations. of corruption, among others, that i've heard. and additionally, to be there to try to foster this sort of thought process of is there something that we can do. and i want to bring up something specific about the corruption and also following on the needs of the food, water, judicial system, policing, none of can which sound like soldiers' jobs. and think back to the past two decades and, jack, i think you may be able to comment on this. as an outsider, i felt i was

witnessing a pillaging of state department budget. and, perhaps, a loss of reliance on what used to be called soft power and probably is better described as public diplomacy. now, i would suggest that one of the solutions for the frustration of the corruption would be the carrot and the stick and judicial rewarding of the carrot. and besides the one service that i've involved with, medical, which is a very valued service -- building the hospitals -- i think additionally a service which leads to future leaders and future stability is education. and so the schools and both for health care providers and educators, a system that keeps them in the country so there's not a brain drain. because that is going to be the true future of a country. and speaking as a citizen, as a parent knowing that your children will be safe and have some sort of a chance for a

future that's greater than your own, i think that does lead to a pride in one's country. and so maybe generating some of those aspects in afghanistan as an external pressure you get more of this if your corruption happens to stay out of boundaries which are going to be interfering with our national security. and maybe, also, would have more jobs available to afghanis which aren't jobs employed by insurgents. i don't know if you have any comment on that. >> over here? >> good afternoon. air force rotc. i just want to say we've seen in america's history that in recent conflicts there's been a great difficulty in defining objectives. it seems like we're having a hard time saying what is the objective, what are we supposed to be doing? and for the board, for the whole board, what is your opinion on the current situation in libya?

we first, you know, first neil started off saying, okay, we're going to have a no-fly zone, and now the u.s. is involved, the french went in, the british went in, we sent 110 tomahawk missiles in if, and now we're striking troops on the ground, we're blowing up tanks and that kind of thing. i recently saw we've got u.s. cia operatives on the ground. are we, are we not following our objective, and what is our objective? and how can we, how do you guys believe, you know, how can we stick to our objectives? that's my question for the board. [laughter] >> all right. well, i, i'm not an active state department officer, so this will not be the state department's answer. i can only go by what the president told us on television, that this is a limited mission to prevent the killing of innocent civilians.

clearly, that is a carefully-crafted statement, and it is difficult to define what a civilian is in libya right now. is a, is a someone carrying a gunfighting the libyan army a civilian? the or is that person a combatant in a disorganized or unorganized force? we're in a very ambiguous situation, and we're in a very tight spot because at the end of his statement the president ended his address to the nation by saying that we think gadhafi has to go. and that is, that is a statement that could be interpreted as meaning that's what we intend to accomplish. i, i'm not clear that that's what we intend to accomplish. what has been accomplished is nato, with a great struggle inside nato which i have been

aware of, has now agreed to take on the entire mission. so it is now a nato mission which is useful because it means we have 27 other nations supporting it, plus several non- nato nations are involved. qatar has agreed to send some aircraft, uae is going to be involved. so it is not just us fighting this war. the commanding officer of the task force is a canadian, a canadian air force officer who is a part of nato. so i think we've made some progress there. but i would caution all of us as voters and citizens to question the congress as to, well, exactly how far are we going to go with this? if this is a legitimate mission to depose a horrible dictator as was the mission in iraq, then what about syria?

as another horrible dictator who's killed thousands of his own people already. that' clearly known -- that's clearly known and documented. and, you know, you don't have to stop with syria. you can go to yemen, you can go to a lot of places in the world. and, oh, by the way, in ivory coast at this moment there's a civil war breaking out which we completely ignore because it's in africa. and i can't think of any other reason why we're ignoring it. and it is, the violence there and the death toll there is much higher than anything that's happened so far in libya. >> we have lofty ideals about their being applied situationally. yes. >> good afternoon, ma'am, gentlemen. i had a question and also something about the libya/middle east situation, but more about the merits of arming the people.

there's been some discussion i've seen in the media, the president has not really said whether or not we will send arms or other sorts of weapons over to the libyan people to help them fight against the libyan army. but i want to know what you thought the merits of it were in a tactical point of view, whether it really provide us the tactical advantage to arm them, the historical point of view, whether americans might think we've seen this show before and it comes back to bite us and the, obvious, financial point of view if we can afford it. i'll take my question sitting down. >> well, since i have nothing to do with the state department or anything, i can say whatever i damn please -- [laughter] and if you agree with me, then i'm brilliant. if you don't agree with me, well, a novelist, what does he mow? but it seems to me that the question about libya is that it's not -- the president was faced with a very difficult thing which is that these

revolutionaries were in danger of being exterminated. and gaffe be my had even gob -- gadhafi had even gone on record saying he was going to hunt them down house to house. now, what can we do about that? we did what we could about that, and i think we stopped that happening by the judicious use of air power, so i thought that that was pretty good. i think that we can also maintain that. in other words, it's like, all right, look, we've got these people on the eastern side of the country who, by the way, are a different tribe from the people on the western side of the country. and we can keep gadhafi's forces at bay with very little money and very little expenditure of life, if any, simply by the minute that any of his troops pop up some red line that we, you know, put in the desert and say you crossed this, down come the tom tomahawks, and then let those people sort it out. but we can at least protect the

people who are trying to do a nascent democracy. what they understand by the word democracy, we have no idea, and that's why we shouldn't get any further involved in it than saying we just don't want wholesale slaughter to go on, particularly if it's a movement in the way of our ideals. and i think we can hold the line there. but to say we want gadhafi out or we don't want him out is, like, none of our business is the way i look at it. >> yes. >> good afternoon. i recently had the privilege of traveling to egypt and jordan and meeting with students at both the university of jordan in aman and american university in cairo. and i got to sit in on some of their classes, and one of the main things i took away from the experience was how outraged they are that the words muslim and torist can be lumped together -- terrorist can be lumped together in the same category. with that being said, we recently have seen the determination and the bravery of this generation with the

revolutions, particularly in egypt, and i was wondering what kind of role, if any, you see young middle ianers play anything the global fight against terror im-- middle easterners. >> well, i think your experience is fascinating, and we keep talking about these new problems we're facing about the combatants being part of the population itself, and, you know, we're not really, we're not fighting a symmetrical line of troops and weaponry. and what you just did by going over there is really, i think, one of the keys to the future. i mean, you coming here and saying this so that everyone hears that is a kind of ground truth that's just as important as any kind of satellite map of weapon placement anywhere. i mean, i really believe that. so the -- that's by way of answering. the future is just what you just did, more of that. i know that -- i don't know the

exact figure, but the amount of the youth pop ration in the middle -- population in the middle east it's huge under 30, i believe, right? and it's hugely unemployed. so i want to step back and look at the wide lens of the telescope and say what are we trying to achieve here? we're trying to achieve peace and stability throughout the world so that people aren't killing each other. i mean, that's, ultimately, what we're talking about. so what these folks want are jobs and a future. we can't give them all that. that's really, if we start to think about how to have to spend less tax dollars to send armaments overseas, it's another way the approach it as a social problem. jack, want to say anything to that? >> if you don't mind expanding a bit. do you have any impression of what they thought of you and what effect your presence made on your counterparts? >> um, i mean, they were very

welcoming, and in general we never met any srt of hostility at all. i'm facebook friends with a lot of them now, and i keep contact with them. i mean, we never got any sort of -- one of the main things they talked about was american foreign policy and really, i mean, um, they're a little confused with how we go about things, but in general they understand why we are fighting terrorism. >> i wonder if some of our problems maybe could be solved by facebook? [laughter] since it was such a stimulus in egypt in particular. and i think to go back to public diplomacy, one of the strong programs was the visiting scholar program. and this was financing visitor from other countries to spend time in u.s. universities. it's not the only way to meet some of our national security goals, but it was a strong method. and i think if you look at other countries in the region and in iran in particular, there's a

large young population that is a potential source of alignment between our countries, a potential source of alignment in our goals to peace. >> and the interesting thing is in ten, fifteen years when you're in a senior leadership position, those relationship that you formed in that classroom and on that exchange are going to become critical. so it's not just today, it is a significant investment in our future. >> we are coming up against our hard limit. i'm going to say we have time for two more questions. we're going to come to this side. >> good afternoon, ma'am, gentlemen. my name is matthew kay with the vermont national guard. mr. segal, sir, you mentioned earlier that pakistan's lack of involvement in combating afghan forces is due to the fact that pakistan is already combating

insurgency in it own borders. if that's the case, why is the isi involveed in the kashmir region to the north? if you'd like, i can provide specifics. >> in the interest of time, i'm a little familiar with the situation. it's a fair question. there are many pakistans at play here. there is a fundamentalist population which has not, is concentrated mainly in the hills. the isi has used the war in afghanistan for it own purposes, isi being the military intelligence element which is not completely under the control of the government one would say. the government, the civilian government is weak and pretty corrupt, and pakistan has one of the fastest population growth rates in the world. and also one of the fastest widening gaps between rich and poor in the world. and it is a nuclear state,

nuclear power. so we have a very strong interest in it not being destabilized and not becoming a fundamentalist state. and if you think that's impossible, you need to look back in history at general si y'all hook who was a fundamentalist, and he didn't have weapons, and he mysteriously died in an airplane crash along with the u.s. ambassador. but they have a history of having a fundamentalist many charge of that country. -- in charge of that country. and it would be a different world, indeed, if they take over the nuclear weapons supply. and they are very suspicious that that's what we are really focused on and that we intend to take those nuclear weapons away from them. so this is a very unstable mix. and you added kashmir to the picture. india has 16 consulates in afghanistan, and you would ask why? and the pakistanis would have no doubt about why.

the -- order, the indians -- on the other hand, the indians would say that their ministry has been attacked three times, every time by a pakistanny. so there's a war going on through proxy in afghanistan. it's a difficult problem. >> yes, sir. >> good afternoon, ma'am, gentlemen. i'm a senior here, my name's jeff morning, and for the past semester i've been working on my senior seminar project. i've been interviewing alumni that have served in iraq and afghanistan, and one of those is currently stationed there right now, lieutenant colonel arcari. she is in charge of a whole bunch of engineering projects over there, and she recently told me in my most recent interview with her that any project -- i believe the number she gave me was under $4 million -- is given to afghani contractors that way they can build their own infrastructure. to me, seems like a really great

cd, and i'm just curious how you think we can expand from that so they can take over with the more expensive projects as well? >> it is a part of our program in be all of our ec pendtures we have a buy afghan when possible strategy or policy. and it's, it's not as simple as it sounds because you have companies that really are there or companies that really can't deliver. there was a u.s. army shipping contract given to an individual for $125 million, and it turned out he owned no trucks. but that said, he was a son of a government minister, and so the contract stood. there, you know, you tibet into very -- you get into very corrupt situations because it's a fledgling economy, and there aren't clear laws or banking regulations and so on.

it's a good idea, and we should do a lot more of it, and we should be cautious about where we spend our money. >> thank you very much. >> i think on that note we're going to adjourn the session. i'd like to thank our panel for their very deep engagement with a lot of questions. [applause] and i'd like to thank carla for organizing the panel, admiral schneider, the trustees, the donors and not he's of all the cadets, you all here, who our future is in your hands, and we hope that today has been at least a small contribution to gaining necessary insight for what lies in your future. thank you very much. [applause]

>> is there a nonfiction author or book like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> tomiko brown-nagin is the author of "courage to dissent. " professor, what was the importance of atlanta in the civil rights movement? >> guest: right. well, atlanta has not been discussed very often in the civil rights movement, although it was the home to several national civil rights organizations and the place that i wanted to explore because i thought that it would be a success story. it's usually considered of interest only pause it was the home -- only because it was the home of martin luther king jr. but i wanted to the explore atlanta because i knew that it was a home to a sizable

african-american middle class, many black colleges, and i thought that in part because the white fathers always considered it a place of racial moderation, that it would be a good place from which to explore dynamics in the civil rights movement. >> host: what did you find? was it a success story? >> guest: well n some ways it was a success story including for many members of the black middle class who came of age after the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. but the story that i tell this my book, "counselor to dissent," is a little bit more complicated. it also shows that for many african-americans in atlanta, a city that one would think would be a perfect place to tell a story about civil rights success, it wasn't all

successful for everyone. this was a lot of failure, including for a group of african-american women who were welfare rights activists. i tell their story in the third part of the book who challenged black leadership in the 1970s saying that they had been left out of the successes of of the civil rights movement. >> host: when you use the word "dissent "in the title of the book, who's dissenting? >> guest: right. i talk about three waves of dissenters in my book at three different historical moments. the first wave of dissenters are pragmatists. they're people who are members of the african-american middle class who were interested in challenging jim crow with but without giving up the social and economic capital that the black middle class had been able to achieve under jim crow. so this meant, for instance, that they were interested in

economic, preserving their economic status, they were interested in educational equality, but they were not so interested in school desegregation because that would have meant that black teacher might lose their jobs. >> host: was there a fear by the black middle class in atlanta that they would lose what they had? ing? absolutely. >> guest: absolutely, there was, and to some extent that fear was well founded. the last third of my book which explores these dissenters whom i talk about as welfare rights activists, they're the poor themselves, i discuss how the black middle class pushed back against school desegregation because of employment discrimination or at least a fear of employment discrimination against black teachers and principals. >> host: what was the relationship between thurgood

marshall and martin luther king jr.? >> guest: wow. well, it was complicated. and this is a story that i tell in the middle third of my book where i talk about dissents who were street demonstrators and lawyers who represented them. it turns out that thurgood marshall was not enamored with student protesters. he told students at the beginning of the sit-ins, 1960, that they should not engage in street protests. he told them that they were going to get people killed, that they were invading the property of whites and was very negative towards sit-ins. and he believes that martin luther king jr. had inspired the students to go into the streets and protest, of course, for very good reason, because king's

leadership of the montgomery busboy cot in 1955. >> were you surprised, i mean, the civil rights movement is often looked at as monolithic and very in agreement. were you surprised at the levels of disagreement within the civil rights movement that you found? >> guest: you know, i was. i think that's the most surprising thing that i found in my research, just how much we don't know about the movement although many, many books have been written about the civil right era. there was so much conflict and, again, i talk about these three historical moments of conflict. so much conflict over whether to desegregate schools, how much etch sis to put on -- emphasis to put on voting rights, whether to desegregate housing, whether to engage in street protests or to negotiate with whites. these are points of contest that

historians haven't written about in part because we want to tell stories that are simple, stories that are consistent with progress, american progress and for so many years those stories have turned over -- brown v. board of education, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s -- and the long civil rights movement asks us to go back and talk about the 1930s and 1940s and then to push forward to the 1970s. and so not to stop at those conventional points in the story. >> host: professor brown-nagin, if you had to pick a date that the civil rights movement started, what would that date be? [laughter] >> guest: well, you know, historians these days are really very skeptical of picking a starting point for the civil rights movement. i can tell you that my book

begins in the 1940s in the post-war era after the war, world war ii provided a jumping-off point for civil rights activism including because there seemed to be such a conflict between pursuing democracy abroad and the states in which african-americans found themselves. jim crow not consistent with democracy. so i talk about the 1940s as the jumping-off point for the movement. >> host: published by oxford, tell us about the cover of the book. >> guest: right. i love these photographs on the book. the first photograph is of a.t. walden who was one of the south's first african-american lawyers. he's a man who's little known of today, but what i show him doing

here is challenging the white primary, the convention that excluded african-americans from voting in the democratic primary in georgia and throughout the south. so he's actually here going and trying to vote -- >> host: what year was that, do you know? >> guest: this was 1944. >> host: okay. >> guest: and as you can see in that photograph, he is squaring off against this gentleman who is the registrar, and there are a lot of people gathered around looking at this really dramatic moment in the history of atlanta. the lower photograph pivots as to the 1970s where i show a woman by the name of ethel may matthews who was the leader of the local group of the national welfare right organization. she was a strong dissenter in the african-american community. at a welfare rights protest there. and what she's saying there is

that the civil rights movement has not worked equally well for all blacks. she's demanding an adequate income, she's demanding integrated schools, affordable housing. so the cover is meant to depict the nuances of the book. >> host: professor, is ethel may matthews still allye? >> guest: she is not. she die inside 2005. >> host: did you have a chance to chat with her children or relatives or anyone? >> guest: i did not chat with her relatives, but i had extensive interviews with her which was just a joy. >> host: you did? >> guest: i did, yeah. >> host: so you've been working on this book for several years, in other words. >> guest: oh, absolutely. this book represents about a decade of work. i started on it as a dissertation and worked on it for many years, and the result is this 500-page -- [laughter] >> host: dissertation.

[laughter] >> guest: that's right. >> host: so in talking with ethel may matthews in doing your research, what was she like 30, 40 years later? >> guest: uh-huh. well, she was a remarkably strong woman, she was very passionate, chef very clear -- she was very clear in her sense that politicians of all ideological stripes, of all races had not been attentive enough to the poor. and that's what she said to me in no uncertain terms. and that was, that was quite surprising to me. she really opened up to me, i think more than anyone else whom i interviewed, and i conducted about 30 interviews for this book, that the civil rights

movement was much more complicated than even the stories that i have learned in graduate school and certainly in law school. >> host: if somebody said to you, professor, that the civil right movement was a middle class movement, what would be your response? [laughter] >> guest: well, i would say that it's an apt description in many ways in terms of its impact. i don't think that leaders of the civil rights movement like thurgood marshall, certainly not dr. king and others set out for it to be that way. they intended for civil rights legislation, for instance, for civil rights litigation to have a wider impact. but for a number of reasons the civil rights movement did end up

being most beneficial to members of the middle class. those were the people who were in the best position to take advantage of the opening up of the workplace to african-americans, of the opening up of schools to african-americans. but for those like ethel may matthews who was the child of alabama sharecroppers who just was not very well educated -- she was very smart, but not very well educated -- it was a harder, harder thing to do to try to go in and interview for jobs and be successful even after employment discrimination legislation was enacted, for instance. so i talk about those things in the book, why it was so difficult to have a successful movement that brought in,

brought benefits for a greater number of people. >> host: well, we're talking with professor tomiko brown-nay begin here at charlottesville of at the virginia fe value of the book. what is your day job? >> guest: well, i'm a law professor and a history professor at the university of virginia, a job that i enjoy very much. >> host: what do you teach? >> guest: i teach constitutional law, constitutional history. i also teach a course on education law and policy. >> host: how long have you been doing that? >> guest: at the university of virginia, for five years. before teaching at uva i taught at washington university in st. louis for two years. >> host: what's your education? you were editor of yale law review, i believe? >> guest: that's right, the yale law journal, i was an editor of that journal, so i