>> and now from the 2012 savannah book festival, greg myre and jennifer griffin discuss their book, "this burning land: lessons from the front lines of the transformed israeli-palestinian conflict." this is about 50 minutes. museum >> jennifer griffin and greg. myre have been cover international fair since they met in 1989 at aner overflowing noccer stadium in south africa i southfrelson mandela's prison colleagues received a thunderous greeting upon their release from decades in jail. on in 1993, they move to pakistani1 and often traveled to war-torn afghanistan where they were among the first toed interviewog members of an obscure new groupo called the taliban.up they landed in jerusalem in 1999 raising two daughters why they lan covering the first fighting ever between the israelis and the past and to report on every major events from peace talks tt

the palestine uprising, theytin witnessed frequent palestinian suicide bombings and israeli military incursions. ian suicided the israeli military incursion. the israeli-palestinian conflict is the basis of their new book "this burning land". miss griffin and mr. myre have been sponsored to the 2012 savannah book festival. [applause] >> thank you for their wonderful introduction and thank you to dick and judy for sponsoring a said to my sister caitlin who is a proud graduate and -- mike and enormous powers posted some events for a while we have been here in town.

is true that greg and i -- i worked for fox news and he worked for the new york times and work for national public radio and we like to say it is possible to have peace in the middle east. some people here wanted to call us the mary matalin and james carville of the middle east. greg has more hair. and a little more charm. alisha explain to you how we got to jerusalem. it was 1989 and it was the end of apartheid and nelson mandela was in prison. i was a sophomore at harvard university and decided to take a year off. i went down and met gregg. i didn't know i would meet him. and the baseball cap -- he stood out and came in to use our phone in a booth where nelson

mandela's colleagues were getting out of prison. and it was the first legal rally for the african national congress. i saw greg and we met and started dating and i was back to harvard finishing up my schooling. for two years we dated from afar and finally i moved down after graduating and for graduation my father had given me $1,000. it was a check that was supposed to last the entire year. it was going to help me launch my career as a freelance journalist. i arrived in south africa and i didn't know what it was to be dating or married to a foreign correspondent. he said to me as i arrived on friday, glad you are here but i am going to somalia because there's a famine and i don't

know when i will be back. so i was a hot headed young 22-year-old and i stewed about it for a week and took the money my dad had given me and gregg had already left and there was no communication at the time. was in flight it is today where there are e-mails and cellphone is. wasn't easy to talk. there were $30 a minute satellite phones that i did know his number and he didn't know that i was going to track him down. so i bought a ticket to kenya because there weren't any flights, there was so much gunfire in the streets that planes weren't landing. there weren't any commercial flights so i flew into kenya and went to the little airport that if you have ever been on a safari there is a little airport they use for small planes and they had unicef light on one side of the airport and on the other side there were some

planes that the drug dealers were using to take the drug are conic that they shoot in somalia and so i asked the unicef folks for a place on their flights and they said you are not an accredited journalists so i tried to show my harvard id but it didn't get me very far and they said you can go down to the other end, if you pay your weight in cuts they will fly u.n.. so i was starting to do that and one of the unicef workers felt sorry for me and got me on the flight and i landed and we did a corkscrew landing with the plane because they were trying to avoid gunfire from the street. i found great at the unicef house and surprised him. >> she is not lying. i was surprised. as soon as i got over my shock a

very profound truth settled upon the which was -- i share this particularly with the guys in the audience. if a woman stocks you all the way to mogadishu, a place with no commercial flights telephones or electricity or running water, you are out of options. if she can find you there she confined you anywhere. i quickly embraced my faith and mary jenifer and took her to afghanistan for our honeymoon. >> which i have not forgiven him. we spent our honeymoon in kabul. >> we got lodged as foreign correspondents travelling around partly by choice and partly by serendipity. we enjoyed going places.

we saw the final years of apartheid. we were there when nelson mandela walked out of prison. we saw some terrible wars in africa and somalia and mozambique and angola and we went to pakistan and spend a lot of time and afghanistan. we moved to cyprus and traveled through the arab world. we went to moscow for three years and got to jerusalem. there had been a pattern covering conflict. we got to jerusalem thinking that might continue on. is important to remember in 1999 it was different in jerusalem. it was quiet. for three years there had been no major violence. after the cold war ended in 91 the israelis and palestinians began talking to each other. they were meeting on a daily basis. as we walked around one of the first day as i was there i went to the temple mount. the place where the ancient

jewish temples were and where the golden dome of the rockabilly dismal the iconic dome of the rock has been built on top of the ancient temples. the church where jesus was crucified and buried is half a mile -- all within yards of each other. this muslim -- palestinian muslims at prayer. mostly older people older -- reading from the koran but what jumped out at me was 20 israeli soldiers, they left their guns out side but there pad around in their socks and getting a guided tour. sort of cultural sensitivity, the root -- holiest site in judaism but at a muslim holy site that has been there for

1300 years and this is part of the atmosphere. it was one of coexistence. learning to live together after decades of conflict. every day in, every morning 150,000 palestinians from the west bank and gaza strip would commute to israel. they would work there doing all sorts of jobs. construction in restaurants and gardens, manufacturing. at an end of the day they would go back. , weekend israelis would leave israel and go into palestinian towns and have a chicken lunch. they would go to get their car repaired, drive all away across the west bank to jericho where there was a casino and they gambled day and night seven days we can drive home at midnight on a very isolated road in palestinian territory without fear of anything bad happening. where is this great conflict everyone is talking about? >> before we knew that the

conflict found this. as greg mentioned we decided to start a family because this is the most peaceful capital we have lived in for a long time and i was pregnant with our first daughter and it was early and i was still having morning sickness and i got a call from the bureau. it was september 28th, 2000. the day that aerial around took the fateful walk on to the temple mount. i got a call from my bureau chief who said you need to go to the western wall. sharon is going to the temple mount. i have morning sickness. the feeling going. he said you need to go and he was right. we started broadcasting live. between -- no sooner had sharon taken those steps that rocks started flying over the wall on to the jewish worshipers who were praying at the western wall. if you haven't been to jerusalem is hard to visualize how built

on top of each other these holy sites really are. the rocks started flying. the next day the gunfire started and before we knew it we were covering the palestinian uprising. a.k.a. the intifada. as it evolved we covered numerous suicide bombings. probably 150 suicide bombings. we were at the scene of a hundred of them. there were days when one of our participants reminded me i would go to work literally with a flat jacket that would raise -- that was the reality. and amelia was born in

jerusalem. in an israeli hospital the atmosphere, muslims and jews side by side lying in blood. and unbelievable atmosphere. it was a very surreal time in jerusalem much like the feeling in tel aviv and jerusalem. the winds of war were felt impalpable and people were required to carry around gas masks so every israeli was assigned a gas mask. we would go to work with our gas masks. when i went to the hospital to give birth to amelia when you check out of a hospital you are given a certificate -- not a certificate but you are given pampers or formula for the baby. we were given a certificate for a gas mask for the baby's crib.

and we right in the book and it is no exaggeration to say it is no exaggeration to say that on the day they're born israelis begin preparing for war. you could say the same about the palestinians. >> during this time, this is part of our daily reality of you wake up in the morning and what made it different from the other conflicts we had covered is you often do when you were in a war zone you might be going to the place for limited period of time, very conscious of your safety and security and everywhere you went but here in israel and the palestinian areas you would wake up every morning and things would seem normal. everyone would get up and go to work and take the kids to school and you felt you were in a normal -- especially on the israeli side westernized society right to the nanosecond something blew up. this horrible feeling of starting a normal day knowing

bad things were going to happen. everybody had to make their own calculations about what was safe and what wasn't. you have the endwest debate. can you go to that restaurant? is that restaurant save? sit outside in a cafe because it is safer when the bomb goes off outside. it is not -- the energy dissipates in open air as opposed to close space where it is magnified if you sit inside. lease it away from the window because the glass can be as dangerous as the shrapnel from the bomb. you have these odd conversations going around. we might for example go to gaza when heavy fighting would be going on and staying in the palestinian areas, we would be down there for a week and very much war correspondent mode and on a weekend might come back to jerusalem and israeli friends

would call us and say that is crazy. what you doing in gaza at a time like this? let's go have coffee at our favorite coffee shop. we say are you crazy? that is a dangerous place. there is a place to get blown up. everyone has their calculation of what was safe and what wasn't. you would see these surreal experiences everywhere you went and going around jerusalem on a day off trying to clear your mind of everything that is happening you could get 10 or 12 or 50 security checks just like going to the airport. my favorite was going to a bank because israeli soldiers off-duty usually stolen uniforms carrying around automatic rifle and a good number of israeli civilians also carry around automatic rifles. if you go to a bank and see a security guard. delivery place of business has a security guard outside and you had this conversation that the only take place in israel. an israeli civilian would walk up with automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. security guard would look at him

and with a straight face he would say you have a weapon? and the guy with the gun would dance with a straight face no. and they both knew they were having this conversation which is i'm not asking about the automatic rifle on your shoulder. do you have a bomb underneath your jacket? so after they have that little preamble the security guard would take this electronic wand and waving around his body and say go on in. go to the teller over there. this guy with the automatic rifle would go up to a bank teller. thing about that. walked into the bank tomorrow, the citibank with an automatic rifle, go up to the teller and say i would like to make a large withdrawal and see what sort of reaction you would get. in israel nobody even blinks. this is life in israel at the time. >> it was a very surreal and every day was filled with these calculations of how to psych out

the bombers and avoid catastrophe. everything would look normal on the surface. even if our two young daughters by the time we move to the states we had never taken them to the grocery store because the grocery store was a place people gathered, it was a target and it was too dangerous. we wouldn't do is that but it was safe enough to go to friends homes and a real enough to go to the rose garden in jerusalem but if we wanted to go to the movies there with a mall in jerusalem and we would circle three or four times around the entire mall because there are five or six entrances and you want to see where the shortest line was a new -- you knew the bomber couldn't get into the theater because there was a strict security outside but didn't want to waste time being in a long line. so the weight of this pressure of constant stress, of living in

this environment. if you had moved in after a few years of fighting you would have said these people are crazy. how can you live like this. it was like the proverbial frog in hot water. turn up the heat a little each day and make the calculations and that is what israelis and palestinians to on a daily basis and that is how you live in a war zone. one night in particular it was a saturday night and we knew on saturday night there was a strong possibility that there could be a bomber making its way into jerusalem. the sabbath would fall on friday night and it would become dark and you knew that everything would be frozen for 24 hours because streets were empty out, people would be in their homes but 24 hours later when the sun went down and the sabbath ended the bomber would have already been in place and you knew people would be back at the

cafes at the pedestrian malls. everyone would come out of their homes and we held our breath on this saturday night and stayed in, and exhausted from covering the conflict and before we knew it we put and louise to sleep. shea the 6 months old at the time and suddenly there was a large explosion and we could feel the windows in our apartment rattle. we look to each other and we knew immediately what had happened. there had been a bombing at a cafe. we lived on the same street as the prime minister's residents and their with the cafe called the moment cafe. the baby woke up and we started passing her back and forth. started calling the police and i was on the phone with my fox team. already on the scene because that is what we did. with a fire drill and we knew,

we started running from the apartment, the owner of the cafe at the apartment building, and he knew intuitively that it was his cafe. this is our life for quite some time. >> we wanted to do more than compile anecdotes. we wanted to humanize the story and tell what it was like for israelis and palestinians. they have been living through this their entire lives. you could certainly go back to 1948. in the state of conflict -- they have never woken up and said this would be an ordinary day

where nothing is going to happen. there's always that possibility. there is imminent disaster and something terrible happening. it looks like it has been another decade, one that goes back six or more decades. this conflict keeps devolving and this is important revolution. there was this special moment in the 90s until 2000 when after 50 or so years of conflict the israelis finally found a way to talk to each other and there are differences -- they didn't close the gap but they're very close. this last decade cost not only physical damage but psychological damage. the two sides of the separated in ways they interact or had to deal with one another. we saw conventional wars 50 years ago and terrorism in

recent years. israel and iran confrontation, keeps changing. it was miss a decade ago. these new and evolving issues in the region. >> we wanted to show how the landscape has physically and psychologically change in the last decade. what is notable is in washington it seems every four years you have a president come in and want to try to solve the israeli-palestinian conflict and it never fails. there's always an attempt to restart talks and this belief that overnight you can bring the two parties together and do this. we wanted to show how the last decade, you have to understand the results of the suicide bombings and the occupation of the west bank by the israeli military and building of this

incredible wall of suspense down the spine of '67 borders, how that has completely separated the two sides, they're psychologically as far apart as they have ever been. it is an outgrowth of the muslim brotherhood. very different group of palestinians living in the gaza strip compared to the west bank which is a more secular minded group of palestinians. there's no one to negotiate with on the palestinian side because you have the division between hamas and the 5 top leadership. the years we spent in jerusalem, most foreign correspondents spend three years max covering the conflict because you get burned out and felt it would leave feeling there was no hope, don't want to hear about it

anymore. there is quite a dearth of writing by correspondents who lived in jerusalem. a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were working journalists. not that easy to move two jobs at once and small children and by having small children we felt we had this incredible access to digital very rare you can cross the front lines of war and drought kids off to school. there are times i would be interviewing masked gunman from the martyrs brigade and i would call greg and said can you peak emily up from preschool? i am engaged right now. it was absolutely surreal. as a result we grew to have incredible entity -- empathy for both sides and both people. >> we are talking about the things we went through in west jerusalem which is the israeli

side of the city. their palestinians and israeli. palestinian -- everybody is affected by the conflict. you can't escape. even if you just want to go about an ordinary daily life you get dragged into the conflict. there was one palestinian family in particular that drove this home. in the west bank town of lebron, very important biblical patriarchs believed to be buried there. jews leaders who questioned and muslims, very important site. there are jews were shipping every day, there is a big mosque. all in the same compound that has been divided into different parts and he karate family live near the center and probably had more daily friction than any other place because you had the situation with 500 israelis living where, got a round-the-clock by the israeli

military and 150,000 palestinians in the city and when the palestinian uprising began in 2000 the israeli military seeking to protect these israelis, the jewish settlers in this community imposed a curfew and wouldn't let the palestinians leave their home. i was there one day early on and the usual rock throwing rubber bullets were going on and on was with a photographer and we were trying to be careful but we found their cells in a narrow street and one end of round the corner came some palestinian kids throwing rocks and molotov cocktails and on the an end israeli soldiers firing teargas and rubber bullets. there is no sidewalks. houses on both sides. we were backed up against it. my photographer friend who had been hit three times in his career by israeli rubber bullets felt perfectly happy. this is exactly where he wanted to be. he was getting great pictures,

couldn't be happier. i am desperately looking for an exit strategy. so i turned around, bay on the door behind me and looked through the grill. invite us in. we start talking to the family. a lot of kids running around. look almost as chaotic in the living room as on the street. we start chatting and i find out this is a traditional family home. two stone homes. there are seven brothers raised their. they married seven wives and brought them into the home and started having kids quite rapidly. there are 70 people in those homes. there has been a curfew on a. they're not able to leave their house and go out the front door. every couple days the israeli military would drive by with a

loudspeaker and say you have three hours to go shopping, to get fresh vegetables and milk and that sort of thing and come back and a curfew be imposed another 72 hours or so. i tell this story because the israelis wanted to do this for fun. they felt they needed to do this to protect the israeli settler communities. every time i would go back i would check in on them just to see how they were doing and get an updated census count. in 2004, the neighborhood had just emptied out. there had been so many curfews and it was so restrictive that every family in the neighborhood had left. the market was closed. the schools were closed. there was -- they were virtually the only family left at that palestinian section of town. ..

490 people or more. there were now over 100. they didn't quite know exactly how many people were in the house. more than 100, more than 70 were kids. for many years they would walk out their front door and they would go right to the center of hadron, the center of their life come to school at the markets were outke there. into now if you work out your book wo into a deserted street except for several israeli soldiers who put up an airport style metal detector and aet conveyor belt n literally to go down the street is that going through airportort security although there ishere nothing in that direction. ry n if you're just trying to win their ordinary life, people draggeh sides constantly into thed conflict.friend

some of that told us that one of the unintended consequences that the israelis moving back into the west moving back into the west , bviy, try bankbombers reoccupying these cities, encircling these cities even though palestinians who weren't part of the conflict the only place their children were allowed to go and play was at the mosque. they weren't allowed to go to soccer fields. they weren't allowed -- but the israelis didn't want to be seen as keeping people from their religion so they allowed the families to send their kids to the mosque, to pray. well, these palestinian journalists didn't want their kids going to the mosque because that's where they were being brainwashed and that's where they were having -- it wasn't just as simple as going to pray. there were sometimes fiery sermons and these young

impressionable kids who had nothing to do they fell under the spell under some of these radical pressures and so it was this real catch-22 where this pressure cooker environment. the israelis thought they were beings generous by allowing the palestinian to go to the mosque but the palestinian parents themselves thought this is not where i want my child being brainwashed. greg interviewed two 16-year-old boys in the west bank town of nablus and he went up to these towns and just to give you an idea how -- there aren't any heroes in these towns. there aren't any sports stars, any michael jordans that they could look up to. all you would see in these towns would be posters of what were so-called -- these so-called martyrs, they called them saheed posters people who killed israeli wearing -- looking

militaristic and the young 10 to 14-year-old boys that's what they had to look up to and greg interviewed two boys -- they went to school every day with their photograph, their school photograph that they wanted used on their martyrdom poster if they got caught in the clashes or they decided to start throwing rocks at the israelis and if they died that day. so little boys were thinking already of how they could become a martyr, so-called, on those posters. >> there was this incredible paradox there that also was fundamental in our decision in the book and what we wanted to explain in the book and the paradox is this. you have israel, this small country that despite having constant -- being a constant state of conflict for decades has done -- made enormous strides in its development and you look at israel today, economically it is stronger than it's ever been. it's survived the palestinian uprisings, global recessions and

has a very dynamic high tech cutting edge economy. its military is stronger than it's ever been, culturally it's a very strong dynamic fascinating place. and yet israel could never get the security that it craves. it has been seeking for over six decades and wanting to wake up and say, i live in a normal country, in a normal place and nothing bad is going to happen today. and on the palestinian side, every country in the world supports palestinian statehood. even israel, the past israeli prime ministers, some more enthusiastically than others but say they would accept a palestinian state so you can't find a country in the world that opposes palestinian statehood and yet the palestinians cannot achieve a state. and in many ways they seem as far from a resolution today than they've ever been. and so we wanted to get at that and say why is this conflict dragging on and on and on since the end of world war ii when

neither side can achieve what it wants? and they don't have mutually incompatible goals. israeli security and palestinian statehood is a difficult thing to achieve but not impossible and not mutually incompatible. >> we decided it was time to come home in 2006 and you know there was the war in lebanon between the israelis and hezbollah. a soldier had been kidnapped in the gaza strip. we saw him recently who was released after five years of being held in the gaza strip. other soldiers were captured in the war. greg and i left the kids at home with a babysitter and -- >> the dhog >> and my cameraman malcolm james gave us his golden retriever while we were gone for 34 days and that was a bribe as we went up to the lebanese border but we covered day in and day the rockets coming in from lebanon. the incredible tension up in the

north of israel. and on the last day of that conflict, i remember distinctly because i was doing greta's show. it was overnight so it was about 4:00 in the morning local time and then the ceasefire was to begin to end the conflict. and so we were all waiting for that ceasefire and at 6:00 am we got a call from the gaza strip that my two colleagues from fox, a correspondent and his cameraman had been kidnapped. and they had been kidnapped we later found out by the same group that had the soldier. and immediately, we dropped everything. the israeli bureau chief was an old israeli tank commander and you could never tell eli no and he -- he and i drove down to gaza and other than the soldier i think he was the only israeli who was in gaza that day. we sort of sneaked into gaza. we started meeting with any and

all of the palestinian militant leaders. there were midnight meetings in the middle of the gaza strip where we would be taken to the home of one of the militant leaders and i remember one in particular where we showed up. it was olaf's wife and eli and myself and our palestinian journalists that we work with and in the circle were probably israel's most wanted militants. they were sitting around the only light at the meeting was from the headlights of the vehicles that had brought us because the israelis had knocked outlet the electrical grid in that part of gaza and you could hear the whirring of the drone up above and you knew you were being watched and it was nerve-wracking. the palestinian leaders were sort of thumbing their worry beads and we had an emotional moment where the wife of olaf and myself and we stood up and we pleaded -- and it was all men in this circle, and we -- we

used the sort of good cop bad cop strategy and we just laid it out for them and said they needed to release steve and olaf. and miraculously and after two weeks it was a long, long two weeks, they were released and at that point greg and i decided it was time to go home. it was also time to go home because our daughters were starting to pick up a little more on the conflict and the kind of work we did and we -- they were very good friends with the son from the "washington post," "the washington post" correspondent son. they used to play in the garden near our house. and our babysitters told us at one point that they came home laughing and they said, oh, annelise and bennie had taken the mobile phones and role-playing said annelise says there's been an explosion and tel-aviv and bennie said have you sent a photographer.

[laughter] >> at that point we realized it might be time to get back to america and with that we should probably put it up to questions. >> we'll leave at that and answer your questions. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> yes. we have a microphone making its way to you. >> i just wanted to ask you, did you know you were going to write this book when you first went there? did you keep notes or a journal or are you just relying on what you remember? >> it's a good question. no, we did not know we were going to write this book and we didn't keep any notes. the only notes we had were really the stories that we had written and we did have a good archive of that because of the pieces i'd done for fox and that greg had written. but it's amazing how memories work because the really strong memories -- they don't fade and the really -- the good stories and the poignant stories, they

stay with you. we started this book with we moved back to the states. greg started working on it in the states. i was diagnosed with breast cancer i think it was 2.5 years ago and we were finishing up the book and we were finishing writing the book while i got chemotherapy and greg would come with the laptop to the chemo ward and i would want to strangle him and i would say, leave me alone. i don't want to talk about this and he used it as a way to actually get my mind off of cancer and he -- he would say tell me about the time you were in gaza with steve and olaf and he would type the notes as we would -- and that's how we got through chemo. we finished the book during that year when we were dealing with cancer. [applause] [inaudible]

>> good question. >> yeah. writing a book with your spouse. >> we have different writing styles. i'll say that. you may notice there's some italics in the book, and that was our compromise because it was my voice. and he kept trying to edit my voice. >> the fact that she worked for fox and i worked for the "new york times" and then at npr was never a problem. it was stylistic issues like how do we want to present this story? or is this story more important than that one? it's trying to mesh your two personalities into one narrative and it took a while how to do that. >> actually, we will be honest, it was a little bit of a strained process. but this is sort of like marriage counseling for us. we're doing this tour and -- but it is hard to write a book with your spouse. and it's hard to -- for two people writing the book and you have different ways of the stories. it wasn't the details the facts so much as just the voice. >> i've not read your book but,

obviously, you make a wonderful duet. there's an image of war correspondents. it's very different than the two of you with your children. many other things have been written about hard drinking, chain smoking people sitting around the bar of the hotel. you know, i could ask you a million serious questions about your subject matter, but it's just curious to me, what did grandma say? what did the grandparents of your children have to say about your decision to live with the kids in a war zone? >> our parents were hugely supportive. in fact, they came and visited us while we were there. and oddly, you know, they were concerned for our safety but they sort of got caught up in the spirit -- the spirit of it and so they never gave us is hard time, even when we had kids there. so i really have to congratulate them for being so supportive. >> well, i think there's one

image i'll never forget and my sister katlin is sitting in the tenth row right there. and she -- when she was about six years old, and my sister cassie they were young and they came out to visit us in pakistan, and i think it was so surreal for our parents. they didn't really think about what we were doing or the danger that we were in, but we took them up to the khyber pass and i have a picture of katlin and cassie up on a camel at age 6 and whatever it was and they were being guarded by a pakistani pastun with an ak-47 around his waist and this was right up above the gun bazaar in the -- what's known as the tribal areas in pakistan. and we took them up there. and we thought isn't this -- isn't this great? it was exotic, it was wonderful. i think one of the wonderful things about the period in which

we covered wars is that it was pre-daniel pearl and i say that because the iraq war and daniel pearl's death was a real watershed moment for journalists. and it's always been dangerous to be a war correspondent going back to world war ii, vietnam, you name it. there are great, great correspondents who you can remember -- many of them lost their lives following wars. but that was a real turning point. and we feel so lucky that there was a period in the '90s that we were able to traipse around inflicts and somehow we felt that we were immune or bulletproof or maybe we were just young and naive. but we got to see things up close and personal that i'm not sure i certainly wouldn't want my children doing that today. [laughter] >> could i ask you to please stand if you have a question. >> i realize you haven't been back in afghanistan for a while but i would like your opinion on this. do you feel that based on your

knowledge of the way people live there and the way society is there, that whether the united states military leaves tomorrow, a year from now or 50 years from now, will things actually be any different? >> well, actually i was in afghanistan in december 'cause i still go back and forth with my job at the pentagon and i was traveling with secretary panetta when he was there. and i think what is quite humbling and distressing to those of us who have watched the afghan conflict, whether it was the war between the mujahedeen when we were there after the soviets pulled out or the rise of the taliban, the end of the taliban, and the last 10 years of war is that very little has changed in afghanistan in terms of at the tribal level, in terms of building any sort of a government or dealing with the corruption that is enemic there. there's a lot of good that has been done in the sense