>> i think that's a greater stress. >> i guess i would like to ask my colleagues here, we haven't addressed a pretty significant portion of iraq, and that's the neighbor to the east, pakistan. and we know that pakistan has provided a safe haven for al qaeda as well as others. we are dealing with rapid population growth a highly illiterate population, a very young population, any country that has been -- by the way, they possess nuclear weapons, and the company -- country that has been devastated by floods. is there any of that medical expertise that we have developed in iraq and used in afghanistan that from a goodwill perspective we are bringing to pakistan when the keys to developing a relationship with pakistan was trust and that building of goodwill in the population, is

that a consideration? we haven't even discussed pakistan up here. >> to give a brief comment, i think in a scenario of medical need and disaster, it's each of the physician because the mission is unchanging. and i think that enemies can reunite to save a life and respond to an environmental disaster. once the response is complete it doesn't make the negotiation diplomacy any easier than it was before the disaster to. >> let me start off. we have a war in afghanistan, and lately we have one in libya and maybe elsewhere soon. we do not yet have officially a war in pakistan, or against them. we're certainly not fighting a war against the government of pakistan. so we face a problem that we had

in the non. 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 seal 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. , 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 their perspective, they are quite satisfied to fight the pakistani taliban. they do not want afghan taliban to be their war. they do not 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 necessarily at war with pakistan. they are at war with us, or so it seems. we have not declared war on anyone, actually. so there is a greater ambiguity there and that's a possibility that could lead eventually 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 is getting old and tired and looking for a way to stop the fighting. but we have to be attentive to the signals and we have to encourage them. the second group, the haqqani group, is what karl has referred to, it is a police problem. this is a smuggling industry and

we're interfering with their business. and that's why they fight us. and they have aligned themselves recently with al qaeda but it's mainly because they want to have common cause with one of the group, and they really 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 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. it's comparable to the form of islam that's practiced in saudi arabia. in saudi arabia's islam is quite summer to the talibans version of islam it so we have 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 the problem, then we define ourselves as the ending 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, over a billion people, for the most part have very little in common with these extreme fundamentalists. 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 we will broaden the base of people who object to what we are doing. and let's be cautious here

because we are now 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. and that would be a very dangerous situation for us to be in. >> just to raise the question so than jack, so we're not fighting an ideology which would be that brand of islam, so may we talked earlier today about we hit the reset button and how do we achieve success, it's not do body counts. when we were in afghanistan, i remember making at the time this

would be less able, that success is measured in the number of police that were trained, the number of judges, new judges that were in town. is that still true? is that now the new yardstick, or the old new yardstick? >> that's a very good question. is i said earlier, the number one need a 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, having insufficient supply of calories which means they are hungry. and that seems to me given the billions of dollars that we are spending to be unconscionable, to be indefensible, but that's the fact, they are hungry. these are hungry people you see on the street. they want the 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, cow grazing rights, water rights, and land rights. so they need someone to adjudicate these disputes. and what they have is a corrupt government. and the government will occasionally send a judge along, and the judge is prone to be a recipient of bribes. alternatively, in 33 out of the 34 provinces, according to the intelligence officer at isaf, the international security 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 serpent on a motorcycle, village to village on a schedule that they know.

and he adjudicates whether this land belongs to you or the other what the weather though sheep are yours or the other person. 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, from that moment on that land is your. and his his decision is that you still and you're guilty of theft, then the sentence is to remove your right hand. because that's the sentence that is allowed under the koran. and 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 into afghanistan. the actual number i would argue is quite a bit more than that because there's 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. and given the fact that after all these years and investing all that money we have so little to show for it. that's the last point i would make about transition to afghan lead as part of our strategy. the president has called for the. this transition effort was announced two weeks ago, the president of afghanistan announced that we are transitioning to provinces, and sheer which is in the east, and a couple of towns, a part of

kabul province and two other counts. 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 put into. and legitimately 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 for the future. >> i just want to, remind me talking about money. the british navy ruled the oceans for several centuries, three or four. and the primary innovation that allowed them the supremacy on the seas was the invention of the bank of england, and it killed edge law which allowed the english teams and the

government later to finance a very expensive military organization. no one else could keep up with them. when they were doing this they were able to do this because england was a net creditor nation, the largest in the world. i the end of the first world war, england had ceased to be a 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 ever 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 america afford? how many wars, how long, how deeply can we go without -- >> yeah, 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 cost that we are able to bear, but at some point if we continue to be in debt we are not going to be able to do it so we have to look back, if you're a strategy shift to say, how do i shore up the fundamentals so i can carry on what's going on. that goes not just military policy, that goes to economic policy. >> we've gone about an hour, and i would like to spend the bulk of the rest of our time to invite people to come to the microphones that will soon be set up in the aisles. and in previous years the highlight of the symposium has been the questions that come

from the cadets, and i hope you'll be forthright and the vocal and inquisitive of our panel. so i invite you to begin doing that. what kind of in state will you all be comfortable with the if the withdrawals begin by 2014, where should the counterinsurgency effort, the diplomatic effort, the development effort, give me a ballpark for a reasonable four-yard line to 40-yard line for u.s. withdrawal in afghanistan. >> i think we now have experienced 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, you're

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 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're 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 in iraq. so that's part of the strategy. it's not working so well. we need to back off from that

and says let's operate more from our bases. i think we are investing huge amounts of money in training the afghans. we need to look at how we are trained him and what we are training them to do. karl has made a wonderful point, they need police more than they need army. but we are training a bigger army than a police force. and that may mean something we need to take a second look at. they also need to be practical about what we're trying to get them to do. we are replacing soviet jeeps which have this very simple six cylinder engine with humvees. now, humvees our great vehicle, not necessary for afghanistan, but they need a computer to test them when they go bad. and to use a computer you have to be able to read, but 30% of the males and 10% of the women can read. so we have to teach them to read in order to fix the humvee when they can fix the russian jeep without being able to read.

we make a jeep that is may be simple enough our could be made simple enough to sell to the afghans, or give to the afghans. we don't need to re-create the u.s. army model in the afghan national army. and then we really need to focus on the movie force. there's something called the afghan local police program. it's not that people try this over the centuries, 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 sure is this a local policeman or -- he's not wearing a uniform, or he is the one of our guys, or is he a bad guy. it's a difficult problem but is probably citable. so we need to refocus that, and i was a bowl our troops men 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 us running the show. so they are not incompetent at defending their villages. and if they have to do it they will do it. but i will never forget a british soldier who 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 hoping 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, he said the afghan kid that 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 a rifle. why am i doing this?

that's a fair question for soldiers to be asking. >> we've got the watches and they have the time. >> i'm a novice i came up with this little scenario. it's 1863, and we're in atlanta, georgia, and everybody there is a strong protestant and they are fighting against the government in washington, d.c.. and the french arrived and they don't speak english and they are very strong catholics, and as far as the people in atlanta are concerned, the women dress like prostitutes but they are here to build a school and to help. >> 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 he's. i've to question considering -- we got the three priorities in afghanistan, security which would be our burden to bear as

department of defense, but we also talked about the food and the legal system or framework. it seems to me, with this being a comprehensive approach to this issue may be the military shouldn't be the supported effort, maybe we should be the supporting effort or possibly a usaid our state department or some other lead governmental agency to kind of guide us through there. as we talk about the 19 your with an automatic weapon, might not be the young man or young woman that we want to tackle that problem. thoughts on that. >> i was really impressed when i made this trip last april to two or the detention center, which was created which you could not get to during my first trip to

afghanistan. so this is a gleaming white, concrete, barbwire, looks like a county jail, essentially that everybody can see. and they mean it that way so that the afghan citizens can say that for my angle is because he got picked up in this raid, and they can come in now, get on the telephone and sit in a plexiglass and talk to him, and he has some council and then beginning. it's kind of hard to get out of that jail. they are not letting guys out just because they think they are innocent. so that's one step forward to greeting this judiciary that's good. but 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 in those jails. i don't know, jack, we met that irish -- who was that, the aid

worker, the irish woman, you know, she was an lashkar gah which is one of the cities that was in the transition. it shows what an individual can do. this was an incredibly dynamic british woman. 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 willpower, money, some u.s. money but mainly british money. and a willingness to listen. this is something we're not the strongest at. to listen to the afghans and to ask the greg mortenson question from his book, "three cups of tea," what is a unique? and and the answer is he's consistently security first, and then there's a checklist of things. quite often the judiciary

capability is on that list. so we are not going to train law schools. we're not going to great law schools have lawyers and judges in the near term, but they are not demanding that. they could set up, they had tribal systems for judging situations. we have impose 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 they were traditional court in botswana. and you were offered that as your option or you could go to the western-style court. but you suffered -- you are disrespecting the elders in your village if you chose the western-style court. you were saying i don't trust their judgment. and so most people went to the traditional court and they came up with traditional answers to traditional problems like land ownership, water and cattle which is what people were worried about. i think we over engineered the

answer. >> i was just thinking the answer to this question, 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 nine international organizations. nato is not quite as good as the united nations, as we all know with political issues, but if you actually are supported by providing security to an international organization and the money is flowing through them to try to do some good and you remove yourself, it's pretty hard for the bad guys to get any good pr by attacking, you know, women, some english ngo. and i think the thing we have to remember is that terrorism is actually a problem for the whole world. and we are making it look like a war and actually giving these terrorists the cachet of being

warriors and being a legitimate warriors against the united states. we should treat them as criminals and we should, in fact, put them in criminal courts and not give them the privilege of being tried in military courts. and begin to the worldview of ships that they are attacking solid international organizations who mean nobody no harm, and we won't get credit because people will say we didn't give him the money, but think about how make tanks and trucks we sent to russia who did all the heavy lifting and, of course, told their troops this wasn't coming from the united states, but we beat hitler. so let's get straight about it. >> we're also going to be taking questions from our internet audience, so is there any of those from our internet audience, questions, please send those in and represented will come to the microphone. over here. >> one of the issues around intervention is the theory that you either intervene in the

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 talibans explicitly 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 intervention trying to keep the peace between, among the posh tunes, the thai sheiks and the specs at this point? and my follow-up question is do you see elements of the northern alliance reconstituting every army because they also see the clock ticking? they also see the trend april 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 if we leave tomorrow, yes, i conjure always belligerents would beat each other to get a stakeholder in the country again. i see the taliban of the 1990, early 2001, their interest really in furthering their own sense taliban is him within own country. and it was, in fact, i was always amused and surprised when i did my interviews, that the afghan taliban was called, call them foreigners, coming from across the border to make trouble all over the place. so, go ahead, jack. >> i fully agree. i agree with you that that is one of the scenarios that's

quite likely. into a civil war. i wouldn't say that they haven't completely disarmed anyway. they put their weapons away. their heavy weapons are gone. there's also a bit of ambiguity here because the afghan national army which we are financing has a very, very few pashtun officers. they have few more pashtuns 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 11.2 billion.

next year it's going to be down to 9 billion. and then 6 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 terms of its complexity as i said earlier. >> over here. >> good afternoon. my question is in light of the concerns, the 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 than expected pace in terms of national interest and international image in the global community? >> could you just define reactive damage control? >> yes, sir. as far as addressing the issues

of where we clearly know we have made that much progress, strategically, and we have exhausted a lot of means. >> the question, what do we want? we started out there in october 2001 just simply to shut down these training camps, which al qaeda had been running and sponsored with a nod of the taliban. the question all of us in this audience have to ask is, well, it's not what we have to ask. it's we have to face. are you happy in afghanistan in the south which is very fundamental where women have very few rights as we recognize them, the northern part of the country, more cosmopolitan, more literate. however, in the long run, in the macro view is a country that is largely stable, that's not fostering terrorism.

it doesn't contain a power vacuum. that's where i think i am headed, because i -- increasingly see fewer and fewer options. so, and i think that's probably what we thought might happen all along. 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 with "horse soldiers" came out, the publicist, the publishing house had to remind the reporters and so on and the united states that we are even in afghanistan. so it wasn't until president obama's speech, december 7 i believe, 2009 after mcchrystal's ultimatum essentially in august of that year when suddenly everyone realize we're about to

put more troops in that country, the whole america woke up and said what's going on? i was a little bit annoyed to be frank because i was following this, and it's a problem that we created to our own intention. it's a statement more than an answer to your question. >> one thing we look at what we want, what we have tried to impose on this nation, maybe its different perspective what's realistically achievable. do we need to ask the question a different way as opposed to an imposition of what we won't? >> one of the unspoken undertone here is that they really has been a struggle between conventional army and unconventional army about what to do in afghanistan, and essentially the conventional side one. although counterinsurgency in some ways as many unconventional warfare things built in, and i

remember early on talking to people doing my research what we should do in afghanistan is go after the powers, the centers of gravity, ignore the borders because people in charge and when he thinks it nor them as well. really tried to create change. one of the buzzwords i heard from people in special forces was insurgency is a social problem. these are guys who are trained to shoot, move, maneuver and they see this as a social problem, and one of them later went on to change 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 are telling us in three or four years we're going to fly to another country we don't speak the language, understand the social mores and can fix their social problems, too.

so i always was rooting for those guys because using all kinds of different forms of power, soft and hard, to really look at this and the centers of gravity, you know, and to be happy with solutions that may be gray and not necessarily lack and white. >> i wish is going to say you start talking about soft power, think about our experience as a western country with south africa. we never went to war in south africa. they had a horrible social problem called apartheid, but there was enormous pressure put on the south african government to make changes there. and it took not six years. it took 30, i don't know when apartheid started, or do years ago, 50 years ago. but through simple things like we're not going to play their rugby team anymore which is embarrassing to rugby players in south africa, how come? because you have the social problem that we disagree with.

the international committee, through economic pressures, through social pressures actually help 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. >> on the half of massive diplomacy program in kabul, afghanistan, with task force 2010, his question is what can be done to reduce the widespread corruption in the afghan government? their several ongoing efforts in the area come 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 a lot of financial control on that money, so you are pretty much asking

for what you get. i mentioned the figure 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 funds, the surplus funds which are of the lower level, not billions of dollars but are millions of dollars in many places. and we give those funds to make great officers, lieutenant colonel's or lieutenant commanders, and was a 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 are in a war zone, and we have tried to remain liberal in giving people the opportunity to use money as a weapon effectively. let's put it carefully, use money as a tool of war. but we didn't have to be realistic about whether they will be able to be accountable for that money. the endemic corruption of the high-level corruption that exists in afghanistan is going to continue to exist. president karzai in a meeting that i attended was questioned about corruption, and his response was, well, 70% of the funds that you put into afghanistan are not funneled through my government. so who did you give your money to? it's a fair question, and it's

not a completely genuine one because there was plenty of money left over when you look at the 30%, but there's a lot of money disappearing in this process. and there are a lot of houses being built in kabul, multi-story mentions in land that's been for senior officials of the afghan government. and nobody can explain have someone with a salad of $11,000 a year in building a multimillion dollar mansion they are or other matches are being built in dubai are purchased in dubai i people running kabul bank. and kabul bank happens to be where we put all the funds for pay of the afghan national army. now, some of that money may not be there when we need it, when they go to withdraw it. this is a situation where there's a tremendous flow of money, $171 billion a year. you need a financial -- a lot of

financial control and oversight and i think those oversights that we made, we didn't put those things in place. i want, since i have the floor, let me just add one point. i may have created an this impression that anything that i'm critical of, that the blame belongs to mid-level and junior officers and ngos and soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. and that could be the first of -- the furthest thing from my my. the responsibility for the mistakes being made to rest with the generals, admirals, senior diplomats, ambassadors. since the people on the ground are doing their damnedest best they can to execute the orders they have, and those orders are very tough and ambiguous, difficult orders. i don't want anyone who is wearing a uniform today to walk out of here feeling like they had been tarred with the brush. anything that they're trying to

do, they are trying to do it as best they can get 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 is doing being on the line for all of us, but additionally for bringing his brain to war and having the integrity to try to participate in this symposium. for our benefit to hear one of the ground-level frustrations of corruption, among others, that i heard. and additionally, to be there to try to foster the sort of thought process, is this something we can do. i want to bring up something specific about the corruption, and also falling on the needs of the food, water, judicial system, policing, none of which sounds like soldiers jobs. and think back to the past two

decades, jack, 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 stick in judicial rewarding of the carrot. and besides the one service that i'm involved with, medical, which is a very viable service, building hospitals, i think additionally a service which lead to future leaders and future stability is education. and so, these schools and vote for health care providers and educators, a system that keeps them in the country so there's not a brain drain. because that will 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 future that is greater than your own, i think that does lead to a pride in one country. and so may be generating some of those aspects in afghanistan, as an external pressure you get more of this, if you're 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 afghans which are not jobs employed by insurgents. i don't know if you have any comment on that. >> over here. >> good afternoon. just one thing i want to say is we have 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 whole board, what is your opinion on the current situation in libya? first started off saying we're not going to have a no-fly zone, and that the is involved, the french winning, the british went in, we sin and tomahawk missiles and now we're striking troops on the ground. we are blowing up tanks and that kind of thing. and now originally saw we've got u.s. cia operatives on the ground. are we not following our objective? what is our objective? and how can we -- how do you guys believe, how can we stick to our objectives? >> all right. well, i am not an active state department officer so this will not be a state department 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 someone carrying a gun fighting a libyan army a civilian? or is that person a combatant in a disorganized or unorganized force? we are in a very ambiguous situation, and we are 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 a statement that could be interpreted to mean that's what we intend to accomplish. i'm not clear that that's what

we intend to accomplish. what has been accomplished is that nader with a great struggle inside nato, which they 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, plus several non-nato nations are involved, the tarmac -- qatar. so it's not just us fighting this war. the commanding officer of the task force is a canadian, a canadian air force officer who is 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 exactly how far are we going to go with this. if this is a legitimate mission, to depose a horrible dictator as

well as the mission in iraq, then what about syria? as another horrible dictator who was killed thousands of his own people already. that's clearly known, and documented. you don't have to stop with syria. you could go to yemen. you can go to a lot of places in the world. and oh, by the way, the, 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 aren't 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 lost the ideals but they're being applied situationally. yes? >> good afternoon. 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 discussion in the media, the president has not 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 the work in a tactical point of view, whether it provides as the advantage to on the in a historical point of view, whether americans might feel that we've seen this show before. we armed them and it comes back to bite us in a few years. and a financial point of view, if we can't afford it? >> since i have nothing to do with the state department or anything, i can say whatever i damn please, and -- [laughter] if you agree with me been a brilliant, and if you don't agree with you, he's a novelist, what does he know? 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 gadhafi had even gone on record as saying he was going to hunt them down house to house. now, what can we do about that? well, we did what we could about that. and i think we stopped that from happening. by the use of judicious use of air power. so i thought that was pretty good. i think that we can also maintain that. in other words, it's like all right, we are these people on the eastern side of the country who are by the way a different tribe, and we can keep gadhafi's forces at bay with very little money and very little expenditure of life, if any, simply by if any of his troops pop up, some red line that we put in to death as a you cross this, now, the tomahawks and let

those people sort it out. but we can at least protect the people you are trying to do a nation 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 that we just don't want wholesale slaughter to go on, particularly if it's a movement in the way of our ideal. and i think we can hold the line there, but to say we want gadhafi out or we don't want him out, just like none of our business is the way i look at it. >> good afternoon. i briefly had the privilege of traveling to egypt and jordan and meeting with students at both university of jordan in amman and american university in cairo. and i sat in some the classes and one of the main things i took away from this expense was how outraged they are not the words muslim and terrorists can be lumped together in the same category. with that being said we recently

have seen the determination and bravery of this generation with the revolution, particularly in egypt. and i was wondering, what kind of role, if any, you see young middle easterners playing in the global fight against terrorism? >> well, i think your experience is fascinating. we keep talking about these new problems we're facing about the combatants being part of the population itself, you know, we're not fighting asymmetrical line of troops, 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 and saying this, everyone hears about, it's the kind of ground truth that is just as important as any kind of satellite map of weapon and placement anywhere. i mean, i really believe that. so the answer, that's the way of answer, the future is what you just did, more of that.

i know that, i don't know the exact figure, but the amount of the youth population in the middle east is huge, under 30 i believe, it's usually unemployed. so, i want to step back just for a moment and look for years through the wider lens of the telescope. what are we trying to achieve your? we're trying to achieve peace and stability throughout the world so that people are not killing each other. that's ultimately what we are talking about. so, what these folks want our jobs at the future. we can give them all that. if we start to really think about how to spend less tax dollars to send armaments overseas, it's another way to approach an antisocial problem. jack, you 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 -- >> they were very welcoming and in general we never met any sort of hostility at all. i'm facebook friends with a lot of the know, and keep in contact with them. we never got any sort of -- were the main things we talked about was america's foreign policy, and really, i mean, they are 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, since it was such a stimulus in egypt in particular. [laughter] and i think to go back to public diplomacy, one of the strongest programs was the scholar program and this was financing visitors 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, in iran particular, there's a large young population that is a potential source of alignment between our countries, a potential source of a lime and our goals. >> in the interesting thing is in 10, 15 years when you're not in a senior leadership position, those relationships that you form 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, so we'll come to this site. >> i'm with the vermont national guard. my question is directed specifically at mr. segal. you mentioned earlier that pakistan's lack of involvement in combating taliban forces on the afghan border is due in part

to the fact that pakistan is or to combating insurgency within its own borders. if that's the case then why is the pakistanis isi continued involved in supporting insurgent activity in afghanistan, and even more in kashmir regions to the north? if you would like i could provide specifics. >> in the interest of time, i'm a little for my with the situation. it's a fair question. there are many pakistan's at play here. there is a fundamentalist population, which is concentrated mainly in the hill. the isi has used the war in afghanistan for its own purposes. isi being the military intelligence element which is not complete under the control of the government, one would say. the government, the civilian government is weakened and pretty corrupt. and pakistan has for the fastest publishing growth rates in the world. and also one of the fastest

widening gaps between rich and poor in the world. and it's a nuclear state, nuclear power. so, we have a very strong interest in it not being destabilized, and not becoming a fundamental state. if you think that's impossible, you need to look back at history at general halleck who was a fundamentalist and he didn't have nuclear weapons. he mysteriously died in an airplane crash along with the u.n. ambassador. but they have a history of having a fundamentalist in charge of that country. and it would be a different world indeed if they take over the nuclear weapons supply. and they're very suspicious, as what we're 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 the pakistanis would have no doubt about why. on the other hand, the indians would say the embassy in kabul has been attacked three times, every time by a pakistani. so there's a war going on in kashmir. difficult problem. >> good afternoon. i'm a senior here. for the past semester during this semester i've been working on a senior seminar project on university history. i've been interviewing alumni who have served in iraq and afghanistan and one is stationed there right now, lieutenant colonel lockhart. she is in charge of the whole bunch of engineering projects 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 we they can build their own infrastructure. to me this seems like a really great idea, and i'm just trees what you think about that and how do you think we can expand from it so they can take over with the more expensive projects as well? >> it is a part of our program. and all of our expenditures we have a buying afghan when possible strategy. and it's not as simple as it sounds because you have companies and that really are not there, or companies they really can't deliver. there was a u.s. army chevy contract given given to an individual for $125 million. and it turned out he owns no trucks. but that said, he was a son of a governor minister, so the contract stood. you know, you get into very corrupt situations because it's a fledgling economy, and there

are not clear rules for 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 are going to adjourn the session. i would like to thank our panel for the very deep engagement with a lot of questions. [applause] >> and i would like to thank carla for organizing the benefit our like to thank admiral schneider, the norwich trustee, the donors, and not least of all the cadets, you all here, our future is in your hands and we hope that today has been at least a small contribution to getting some necessary insight for what lies in your future. thank you very much. [applause]

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