>> thank youf very much. good afternoon. hello, kim triet hello, cohen >> c defers can you hear us? >> was that a yes or no? a no. >> very good voice. i was curious. >> we are here today to talk about "the taliban shuffle". and kim barker's strange days in afghanistan and pakistan and she was a foreign correspondent for "the chicago tribune" for six years she was in the region. she worked with me as a correspondent and for me for a brief stretch. >> you were the first foreign editor i worked for. i hated him. >> it was a mutual dislike. so we are here to talk about

this. it is a great time to be talking about pakistan and afghanistan. a lot of tension on it but let's talk about the book and then your impression of what is going on now. first question is probably what you have been thinking about. you were a foreign correspondent working mean string journalism. how is this different from that and how would you characterize this? as a memoir, what is a journalistic memoir? >> there are a lot of questions and i will try to get to all of them. this is not journalism writing. it is everything i would leave out of journalism stories. was what it was like to live over there. what was like to be a woman in the region, a female correspondent. it is a memoir match up with politics and what actually happened in the region. i did that deliberately. i felt i didn't know ten years

into this war whether anybody wanted to read another book about afghanistan and pakistan but i felt so passionately about the subject and i wanted to come up with a way to tell the story that people would find compelling. made sense to make myself the main character and that is how i treated myself. i didn't look at it and say i will only put the good stuff about me. a lot of foreign correspondents do that. nobody else understood how this place works except for me. i am very honest and a book about the fact that i didn't know what was going on, the fact that i was completely unlikable that certain points especially when i was there for too long. i behaved badly. i deliberately did that because i wanted to treat myself like the main character or in any store you write which means warts and all. i had to separate myself from this main character because if i thought about it too much i would think that is really embarrassing. july want people to read that

especially now that i am investigative reporter? is funny because i had a guy come to the office in new york the other day and he is considering working on a story with us and he is a big-time tv guide and says i'm in the middle of your book. you just broke up with your boyfriend and i was mortified. what was i thinking? >> talk about that first time exposing yourself personally. is there anything -- you are living this out and talking to people about across the country. anything you wish you had done differently? anything you might regret having put in? >> no. i am very comfortable with everything that is in there. i didn't put absolutely everything in. i feel like i protected the people, be innocent in this book. i didn't write about any afghan women. people ask why didn't you write

about the afghan women? i did that deliberately because i know every single time a book is written about an afghan woman that afghan woman usually ends the bearing the brunt of it and it usually ends up to bat for them so i only wrote about people who live felt could take it. the former prime minister of pakistan, former attorney general of afghanistan. people who really showed the corruption in various countries. farouk is the main character in the book. one of my closest friends. i wanted to give him a pseudonym and leave certain things out about him and he said no. a m farouk. he refers to as book. how is book doing? it is like its own entity. like it is that human being and we did get him to chicago. he is living in a canada and we got him to chicago in april and

he was thrilled to be here and to see chicago where he worked for so long. >> one of the themes of the book for those who haven't had a chance to read and enjoy it is farouk's macho persona and how that represents a lot of a men in afghanistan. >> that he represents afghanistan. well-intentioned, bumbling, no clue how to do this. no clue about the cultural sensitivities. i am american and farouk -- he has to get what he can while he can. so he likes telling people i am a 3-dimensional character. where did you get that? i was telling him i am trying to make this not just one dimensional, you are three dimensional and refers to himself as a try dimensional

character. >> tim mentioned the former prime minister of pakistan who has an interesting relationship or had an interesting relationship with him -- kim. he misinterpreted their relationship and her retelling history funny but also unsettling because the relationship a person might have with a source can be difficult so tell us briefly about that and the question is what has happened since then? have you heard from him? what is the upshot of this? >> we are getting married. for those who don't know the story i was front-page news in pakistan for a week. it took osama bin laden being killed to knock me off the front page. some people have heard about this story too often especially if you live in pakistan.

i meet this guy, former prime minister of pakistan, very powerful man and i met him right after benazir bhutto was killed. sharif is the opposition leader. he is someone on a need to cultivate as a source. i want him to make my phone calls. it is this delicate dance you're doing with people you are developing as a resource. you don't want to be too friend friendly, you don't want them to think you are friends. but you're friendly with that particular source and he misinterpreted. i joke around with everybody. that is the way i interact with the world and he definitely misinterpreted that and at one point -- i didn't know he was misinterpreting but at one point he asked if he could find me a friend and i said ok, he wanted to set me up on a date i thought. that is pretty funny.

i have to see how this goes so he asked my criteria and i said call and funny and smart and that lead to a question i will always remember, what do you mean by smart? so i had to explain that to him and he says but you do not want a cunning friend. i said no. who wants a cunning friend? this goes on for a couple months where it is getting progressively creepy year where he is ending phone calls by saying don't do what is it you people say? don't be naughty. who says that? nobody says that. he wanted to buy me a phone because he said my phone was tapped and his phone was tapped and i told him you are former prime minister. you cannot buy me a phone. is not acceptable and this culminated in shortly after the mumbai attacks, i kept talking

to my editor saying i think this guy is interested in me. i can talk to him anymore but i had to talk to this guy because he is the most powerful opposition leader so i went to see him after the mumbai attacks and he told me where the one surviving gunman was from. pointed me into the right village. i was the first western journalist to get to that village but during that meeting my translator was with me and he asked the translator to leave and said he had bought the a fun and eyes that i can't except the phone and we went back and forth about it and he said i want to be your friend. i said no, absolutely not and he gave me a line that i am sure is going to be used as a pickup wind for route bars in america which is hear me out. i know i am not as tall as you want. i am not as fit as you want. i am fast and i am old but i

would still like to be your friend. you have got to give him credit for honesty. i was very honest about everybody when i was leaving the chicago tribune in a blaze of glory and when i quit my job there i was very honest about the fact that i was writing a book and i knew exactly what i wanted to do and how i wanted to tell the story so this word got to him that i was writing a book and so he tracked me down and a surge in point when i was in new york. he sent an emissary to me and we went out for caesar salad and sharif called him and we're still friends, what is it with you and this word? what is it with you and freds and he desperately did not want me to write a book and i said i am writing a book and he said you know i was just joking. you can tell your country that.

and so he knew exactly what i was doing. i didn't pull any punches on that. the day before the book came out he all of a sudden got heart problems and went to london for heart treatment. he just stayed there. he was staying in london and waiting for pakistan to find out about the book so he just stays and weights and a month later explodes in pakistan and it is everywhere. he won't say a word. he does not appear in public. he is still in london. nobody from his party will answer anything about the book or about me. put out a press release calling sharif a playboy for trying to give me an iphone. i couldn't make this stuff up. every day on twitter and back-and-forth with all the

folks in pakistan. so he went back to pakistan after osama bin laden was killed. that is when he finally went back. there has been a lawsuit filed against me in the high court asking the i s i to look into my false allegations against sharif and saying it was all made off because i'm a member of the cia and it is retaliation against mr. sharif because of his stands on a case from earlier this year which means i would have had to turn around a book in three weeks. >> the final meeting with mr. sharif is funny in the book. net one point he says but we are friends, right? and we are friendly. was there any concern on your part?

he was pakistani prime minister and he does have power and he does have access to people who do things. was that a concern to you? >> no. it was not a concern to me. i deliberately changed the name of my driver in pakistan who works for somebody completely different and there's no way to find him. tammy is a character in the book who is the pakistani female journalists who wanted her name used and she knew about the stuff in there. she wanted to be associated with it. i had no fear he would retaliate. what is he going to do? once it is out it is out. there is no putting that back into the box and there hasn't been a lot of fallout personally for me at all. there have been people who suggest how could you write about that? that was private. my feeling is when you are a leader of a country we believe

occupied a position like that, that behavior needs to be recognized and won a person puts themselves out to be a very conservative fundamentalist moslem leader and he wanted to be called commander of the faithful and is hitting on western women, the way women are viewed their, the public face versus what happens behind-the-scenes, that is important to talk about and something i had access to and mail correspondence with day. >> on the theme of personal safety is your writing the book a lot of times you go back over things, you recognized how dangerous the situation was. >> i feel like the first year

after leaving, you are going through this stuff and reliving it and you are realizing that probably affected me a lot more than i thought. going to suicide bombs, seeing body parts. you don't think about it at the time because you are just running from place to place trying to file the story and meet deadlines. you don't think about what happens inside because if i am going to do this job and i still see this as a journalist, and cover these painful stories i have to feel every single story i am doing. i have to connect it because only if icy this as a real person, not just as a number can i translated to readers and make it seem like people there are just like people here and this is what it is like for them. that takes a toll on you. i couldn't face riding pakistan. afghanistan for some reason was very easy to write and i could not face riding pakistan.

it was ryder's block. i was only riding the funny bets. i didn't even put it together and then i went to visit my mother for ten days over christmas which is a great way to write a book because if you ever consider doing it you realize you have an excuse to motayrom yo .. for half the they. my mother likes to talk a lot about feelings and the motions and in like that. i would take half the day and write the book and then come and read it to her. i wrote all of pakistan in those ten days. i wrote about 5,000 words a day. it was all inside me waiting to come out and i needed my mom around almost to hold my hand and walked me through it. my parents didn't know any of the stuff i would for because you are protecting them. it was really sort of difficult people always say, oh, you wrote a funny book. what's funny about it? i correct them, parts are funny

and darkly funny, but parts are very sad, and, yeah, coming to terms with that was difficult, but now i'm all better. [laughter] >> right. all right. as you mentioned in your initial comments, another theme is the kind of feeling you have when you first get to a place and you don't really know it, and kind of overwhelmed you can feel and out of place until you kind of get up to speed. there's certain parts of the book that i think, i think you're too hard on yourself, and i think that that's probably, you know, it's just part of life; right? you don't know something until you start doing it. do you now look at this and do you know what i'm talking about? >> yeah. >> and do you look at that whole time differently, or is it still pretty much how you feel? >> it's a self-book, so i didn't want to be a hero in any of it

for the reasons i stated earlier. i think i wanted to be very honest and open about the fact i didn't know much, and it's funny how i wrote it. yeah, i'm hard on myself in places, but journalists are hardest on yourself, at least -- maybe you think you're great, i mean, i don't know. [laughter] >> not anymore, kim, not anymore. [laughter] >> we're actually very good friends, and i think the world of him as an editor, just to correct that from earlier, but, no, i mean, people read it and say you're coming off worse than anybody else in the book. that's what i wanted to do. that was the goal in doing it. there are not probably a lot of books, especially by female authors, where their memoirs and the main character is worse than anybody else. i wanted to give that a try as well. i have no regrets about anything that's in there. it's an honest book, reads very well as a piece of time it's a good history, and my narrative work.

again, i had to separate myself, the human being, from the character in here. >> sure. >> obviously, i don't put everything -- you can't do that, you know, put everything of yourself because who wants to read that naval gazing; right? we already had eat, pray, love. sorry, i didn't say that. [laughter] there's not a lot of self-reflection in here as i go through the experiences even though i had more as a human being at the time because that's not what you're doing. you're running from bomb to bomb to bomb to cover this stuff, and you don't have time for self-reflection that comes only later. >> right. so one of the things twha we're talking about earlier before the discussion began is how this allowed people to keep reading about afghanistan and pakistan even though, you know, it might be ten years on, of course, with the war, and people who might not pick up a book about pakistan are not reading it. let's talk about quickly where you think we're headed right now

in afghanistan. what's -- we've got a potential pull out of troops beginning, we've got, you know, whether there is a deadline or not is a question, but how do you size it upright now, and where do you think the u.s. needs to go? >> i stick with what i wrote in the book that we're on a path doomed to failure if we stick on the road that we're on, and so far we've been sticking on this road which is a strange mix where you put a lot more troops in, a lot of money in. we're spending now about $190 million a day in afghanistan. that's more than $2 # 00 a second -- $2200 a second. from the time we started talking, think about how much money we've spent there for an effort everybody agrees is doomed to fail. what we're doing though, a narrative is created from this. the military is creating this narrative, the obama administration creates this narrative of success that doesn't match what's getting enough of has happening on the ground.

i believe we'll pull out troops, define success, remove the goalposts, and bring everybody home. when we leave, almost immediately the civil war will start. it's not going to be the taliban marching into kabul all over again, but a civil war. the war lords empowered over there since the fall of the taliban and in kabul and amassing weapons because they see the pashtuns with weapons, and they are just waiting for us to leave. i feel it's inevitable at this point what's happening. people say, well, then, what's the solution? what would you do; right? i'm just a journalist here. i spent time in the region, but any time you give people a deadline and sigh we're pulling our troops out, it pretty much tells them, well, then we know what the time line is, how serious they are about this place. this place has been abandoned repeatedly by the west; right?

these are survivors, a nation -- two nations really of bench sitters waiting to see which way it's going to go, and as soon as we telegraph that by saying we're pulling out our troops, everybody switch. that's when things started getting really bad. my answer, fewer troops, much fewer troops, stop the drone attacks, stop the night raids, and that's controversial. those just create more enemies over there. you have fewer troops. they are just doing training. you have coordinated aid, coordinated development. right now, no one is coordinating anything over there. we pour money, and most goes into people's pockets. >> war lords included. >> right. i think we need less money, more coordination with the aids, fewer troops, and remover any sort of time line if we want it to work. if we are not willing to do that, my question is what are we doing there now? pull everybody home, you know? >> you pointed out in the book

the afghans talking about the worse time in the country, they talk about the time in between the civil war; correct? >> uh-huh, yes. >> so afghanistan, now with pakistan very much in the news with the bin laden killer. >> i write about it in the book actually where he was killed, you know, and that was a total shocker that he was there. >> it was a total shocker. >> oh, yeah, yeah. >> what about the idea the isi, secret intelligence didn't know about that, and what impact will this have on pakistan, if any? >> well, here's the deal. you can't look at the isi or the army in pakistan and the isi for those who don't know is the top spy agency in pakistan. they pretty much control everything there. it's as if there's a combination of the cia, fbi, and their entire focus is on what's

happening inside their country, not necessarily what's happening outside the country, so we would be followed. they could come to our doors. there's funny scenes of them following us around as i was getting dry cleaning. if we met with an afghan or indian, then you were on their radar. in other words, the isi is pretty much everywhere in that country, but it's not a top-down organization. it's not like as if the guy on top knows everything that's going ton below because of what happened during the 80s. they had different cells of the isi working with these different jihad groups to work across the border in afghanistan and in fighting against the soviets, so you have this mentality there to sl self-contained cells, almost like a terrorist organization, within the isi, so getting back to you question -- do i believe that the leadership of the isi and the aftermy knew that bin laden was there? no, i don't, actually.

i find that very hard to believe. do i believe that the civilian government knew he was there? no, they have no clue what's going on in that country. they had no idea. do i believe that somebody knew in the establishment that he was there? definitely. there is no way he would have been able to live in a come popped like that with 12-15 high walls with barbed wire on the top, no way he could live there without somebody knowing he was there, without some level of protection, and i think almost everybody whose an expert in that area, that's pretty much where everybody's coming down, so getting back to your question -- what repercussions does this put on the spy and everything increasingly it's obvious this double game is played by pakistan. it's going to have an effect on aid there, you know? it most definitely is. everybody is looking at this partner in the war, this partner we're sort of stuck with in trying to figure out do we want

to keep giving them money that they use to fight a war against india, not using for afghanistan? >> right. >> i think pakistan will go the way of afghanistan and that aid will be cut. we'll go back to the sort of -- just like what happened in the 80s when we cut ties a little bit, and then we'll see the fall out of that. pakistan is a much more troubling country than afghanistan because of the nuclear weapons issue, although i believe those are safe, and because of the fact that they've created this sort of frankenstein enmai coming back -- enemy coming back on them, and you see increasingly sophisticated attacks on the establishment there. we'll have to see where it goes. >> yeah, when we turned away from pakistan the last time, there was not a nuclear armed country at the time. >> it was not, no. >> so it's a totally different experience. well, we have about 15 minutes left, so i thought we could take questions from the crowd if

anybody's got something they want to bring up. >> come to the mic. >> yeah, come up to the microphone, that would be great. >> kim, what made you decide in the first place you wanted to be a foreign correspondence? >> that's a good question. i'm unlike a lot of foreign correspondence. a lot of foreign correspondence knew, know from the very beginning this is what they want to do, go overseas, study a different culture. in college they learn the language. for me, i was always just i wanted to tell stories. i always just wanted to tell good stories, and i wanted to tell the most important stories, and so, you know, when 9/11 happened, i was working at the "chicago tribune" in the chicago office and they sented out reporters to fill in different places. i knew it was a big story, and i wanted in. i volunteered with having no idea what i was getting into. their feeling was i make a joke about it in the book, but here's someone who knows how to tell

stories, let's see what she can do. >> actually you went in there and said to the editor, i'm single, i don't have ties, i'm expendable. [laughter] >> i know. [laughter] >> yes, sir. >> well, the speaker spoke of war lords that we empowered in pulling out our troops. i'm a pass vies, so i do not have troops, and so i felt, you know, misrepresented by that kind of language. you speak of it of the actions going on over there in afghanistan -- >> do you have a question? >> yes. >> okay. >> there's a line of people behind you, so -- >> yeah. the question is prefaced by the understanding that united states went into iraq to wreck it for israel, so -- >> question, seriously, this is live on tv. do you have a question? >> the question is, do you believe also that the united

states is into afghanistan and pakistan to wreck it for the benefit of israel and the general idea of world conquest. >> no, no. >> thank you. >> thank you. next question. >> i don't have a question, i just want to say i read the foreign affairs magazine with very perceptive articles in there about afghanistan, and they reiterate the point you make their development is not coordinated there. >> yes. >> the personnel are not trained in how to do development programs. >> right. >> there's a lot of money wasted. >> exactly, exactly. >> actually, that raises a good point. talk about the afghan police in the training of the afghan police in the military. i think at one point in the book you say something about it's unflattering, but what did you see there? >> i mean, god, the poor afghan police. you know, i kind of feel like we

play these huge jokes on afghanistan. after, you know, the fall of the taliban, divided up what we were going to do there, meanwhile we had our eye on iraq an what was happening there. when i say "we" and "our," i'm just using that for america or the west. we had the decision made that america was going to trade the army. the germans were going to train the police. the british were going to take care of drugs, and the italians were going to do the court system. [laughter] seriously, the italians. you can't make this up. they are known for their court system. no wonder there's a corrupt court system. meanwhile, the germans are kind of a joke over there because they will not go out of the base after dark even if they are being called to support other troops, nope, that's their caveat. they will not go out after dark. if they go out during the day, there has to be an balance with them at all times. you have these sort of decisions made.

the police training was not even thought about. the fact that you had to have police that were trained until about 2006 and 2007 and the americans realized, oh, shoot, these guys are on the front lines, and then they've gave training, and oftentimes it was three weeks, and to get police, they would duodown the street and say, okay, we pay only about, maybe $60 a month, $100 a month. do you want to be a police officer and be on the front lines of the war on terror? they got the no-hoax. i refer to them as moaks at one point. they go to training, and it's like they wouldn't now how to close one eye so they couldn't aim, and you had these american trainers going like -- like this and shooting, you know, the best shot we had in one class had three fingers, you know, and you know, they did things like leaning on their gun and shoot themselveses in the foot, you

know, and you just watch these guys at training, and you just find yourself trying not to laugh because it actually is a serious problem, and it still is. it's still have not figured out how to get long term training, how to get money to these guys so they are not tempted into corruption. the police is key there. >> they must have been the only afghan men who didn't know how to handle weapons; right? >> i know, i know. it's not like they didn't know how to fight over there; right? >> sir? >> yes, in writing the book, researching and everything, did you fine that there's a direct correlation between the problems we're facing now and our failed policy in the 80s in army, the regime, and also putting bin laden in the position that became because we trained him, we armed him. he was our man.

do you think that's why also they wanted him dead and not brought back for trial? >> a lot of questions there. [laughter] let me start with the 80s question. i mean, there's no doubt that there's a reason it's called history and it leads to where we are today. there's no doubt that everything that's happened in pakistan and afghanistan is a result of supporting these groups in the 80s and then abandoning these countries. thars the key point. it's abandoning the countries, the idea of education, doing any sort of development there. if people had not seen the movie "charlie wilson's war" it's a pretty good movie and a good way to get a quick education as to what happened in the 80s, and you get this since is, you know, the charlie wilson character is sitting there asking for education, what would have been different if we stuck around there, if we had not just left and allowed the civil war to happen and the textbooks to stay

in pakistan that teach jihad essentially to little kids allowing these people to grow up in camps where they are just taken care of by militants. that's an apt point. as far as where the war is now, though, to be absolutely honest, it has nothing to do with al-qaeda in pakistan or afghanistan. it really doesn't. it has to do with all these different sort of groups that could have goals alied with al-qaeda, but they are local goals. it's not about world domination or attacks america wherever, but attacking inside the countries, getting rid of the u.s. government, about hitting troops inside afghanistan, so it's a bit different. as far as bin laden goes and whether we killed him to avoid bringing him back here for trial, i don't know. you know, i don't know what the decision was there. i do know there was orders to shoot to kill no matter what, and i think that there was just maybe because of everything that

happened on 9/11, everything that's happened since then and worries about what would happen back here perhaps. >> yeah, i mean, it's attorney general holder said a year ago bin laden would not be brought in alive. i think that was clear. >> yeah. >> i have a quick program you say the aid program was a failure, is it better to turn it over to ngo's? >> no. >> that would operate on a much lower price tag? >> ngo's are great, and you need them, but they are part of the chain; right? they are part of the chain. when you give money -- when the u.s.-aid is our aid umbrella group, that money goes to ngos or groups, the for-profit places who subcontract down to the afghan groups who subcontract down who subcontract down, and by the time the money is down there, it's a tenth of what it

started out as. don't get me started how the foreign community lives in afghanistan. i paint a vivid picture in the book, but what needs to happen is all the countries need to work together in a better fashion. the way you got it now is this piecemeal. the u.s. builds up one community, well, the community didn't want a well. that's great. somebody else builds a well five feet away, and that's a look of coordination and a plan. this idea of a marshall plan in afghanistan which everybody talked about for years, they have still not done this. >> thank you, sir. >> okay. thank you. >> you told us all stories about incompetence, but then you said pakistan's nuclear weapons are safe. can you explain that? [laughter] >> i do. there are protocols very much in place, and the one establishment that works in pakistan is the military structure. i mean, i think they proved that

pretty much. they -- i mean, look we might not like what they're doing, but they definitely -- they definitely know what they're doing, and there's so many protocols with the nuclear weapons, and the u.s. i remembers here are not necessarily worried about them, and i think that says something. we'll see what happens. i mean, you never know which direction that country will go, but my sense is it's just going to muddle along as is. >> so my question is, you know, as a senior reporter, have you experienced some of the challenges a male reporter perhaps don't really experience? >> yeah. >> how do you handle situations? >> punch them in the face. [laughter] >> no, actually that's kind of true. definitely female reporters have different experiences than male reporters. i'm not -- i mean, i would have loved to experience it as a man so i can say forture the differences, but my sense is as a female, especially in those countries, you know, in pakistan

at least i got grabbed more in crowd situations, pinched, grabbed, which got me access to people because people would try to pull me out of that which was helpful to my reporting, and i sometimes punched the guys who were grabbing me. i did. in afghanistan, though, it's very interesting. i think that being a female reporter in afghanistan is actually much easier than being a male foreign reporter because you're not really seen as a local woman. you're not seen as a foreign man. you're seen as sort of some kind of third sex who gets access to everybody. i mean, coal lip, if he was in afghanistan would not do stories about half the population. >> right. >> he could not do stories about women there or girls setting themselves on fire because they don't want to be married to an 80-year-old dude. you know, he can't do those stories. i get to do those stories and also the conservatives want to

see the foreign reporter there. they are charmed by the idea of you running around the country, and i challenge somebody to find the last male reporter that karzai talked to. seriously. [laughter] i don't think it's because of any sexy thing with karzai. he wants to give credit to the women who are willing to come there and tell the stories, and i think that with others that might not be the case, but women get a weird access over there, and it's just not me. all female reporters feel that way. >> we just have a couple minutes left. what happened with karzai? >> crazy town. no. karzai -- there's a couple different things that i think has happened with karzai. first of all, we set him up pretty much to fail. we love a leader who speaks english and dresses well. we do. we especially love a leader who can control their country. we like dealing with one-stop shopping which is why we like

one in pakistan and all the horrible dictators in the middle east. our foreign policy -- we preach about democracy, but we like having a strong hand to deal with. in the beginning the sense was, okay, here's the guy, also the bush administration, we loved having our guys in place. karzai was our guy there. can you remember when the iraq war happened and everybody was saying if only there's a karzai in iraq, you know? god, think about that for a minute. i think that over the years karzai is paranoids, known to be paranoid. he's been increasingly isolated, basically in the palace by himself. if you have not read the story by elizabeth reuben about him, it's a great story in the new york times magazine, and it describes how he got to this point. he's caught between the whole idea he believes inside he's a person who will save his country. he really believes, i believe, that the west is against him,

and that america is trying to kill him, and america is killing people there. i think all of these crazy press conferences he gives, he actually believes that, and that's a problem when your partner turned into the person who publicly like -- and he's always doing the wag the dog allegations of corruption in kabul bank. look at this florida preacher who set a cay ron on fire. >> yeah, there's a great observation everything is going to hell, and karzai comes in when everything is over and appeal for calm. that's his way of doing things. >> yeah, yeah. >> last thing. you mentioned charlie wilson's war, a great book and movie. i think that this is a terrific book and could be a terrific movie. i heard that there's already the rights? >> yeah, but i'm not supposed to say. >> oh. [laughter] so look for it. thank you, kim. >> thank you, colin.

[applause] thanks for coming. >> these are the best seller hard cover nonfiction book according the new york times reflecting sales since august 18th.

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