come from eastern europe. i'm talking about people who had lived in france for 200 and 300 years as well as people from eastern europe. walking around with yellow stars, seeing little kid goes to school with yellow starts. maintain every family had to deal with this issue, every gentile family had to deal with this issue. mommy, my friend has a yellow star. what does that mean? or the little jewish boy saying, mommy, what is a jew? why die have to wear this? that changed attitudes, and the german racial policy became obvious. people were saying, there but for the grace of god go i'm other. a pros -- protestant. i'm a muslim. maybe they'll do that to muslims. that was major mistake but for

two years -- the last jews were sent to auschwitz from paris a week before the liberation. questions? >> well, you have been a great audience. i really appreciate it. the become is for sale back there. [applause] >> thank you very much.

>> journalist an inside gopal is the author of "no good men among the living" from the perspective of three men, taliban commander, warlord and a village house wife. the book was a national book award finalist. the author talked about the book at the southern festival of books. this is an hour. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> i think we'll begin the session this morning. anand gopal has been a journalist for "the wall street journal" and christians science monitor. he is a fellow at the new america foundation and will

speak to us today about his first book "no good men among the living: america, the taliban, and the war through afghan eyes." anand will be signing books directly following the session. >> thank you. can you hear me? so, my book -- the subtitle of the book is "the war through afghan eyes. " i want to explain to how i got the point of wanting to write a book to you the eyes afghans and what that means. but before i start that it want to tell you a story bet the first time i met a member of the taliban. this is back in 2008, and at the time i was sort of centralling around the countryside on a motorcycle, and i got contact with a taliban commander, somebody who is fighting against the u.s. military.

an insurgent commander, and so of course i was fascinated and very interested to try to understand what motivates these people and if you remember the taliban very famously had a regime in the 1990s which outlawed women's education, which kept women in the homes, which was -- they had people walking around with whips, seeing how long your beard was, and so i was interested in trying to understand what would possibly motivate somebody to join such a frankly ridiculous seeming regime. and so i made contact with them, and he and his unit were based on the top of a mountain in rural afghanistan. so i went out to this mountain and it took a day to get to the top, hiking. and when i got up there, i went through a sort of narrow trail and went to a small village at the very top, and sure enough, sitting in one of the houses were a group of taliban fighters, 12 or 13 fighters, and

i went inside and sat down, and they were all sitting cross-legged. has cloths on the laps. i took out my notebook and started to interview them, the commander specifically, ask question highs are you fighting against the u.s.? what kind of society do you want? what is your assessment of the 1990s regime, which is when the taliban were in power. he gave me terse boilerplate answers but at some point he stopped me and he told me, you know what, you're actually the first foreigner i've ever met. and of course the first american i've ever met. so, can i ask you some questions? i said, yes, sure. so he start asking me, questions like -- this is 2008 so president obama had just announced -- actually 2009. president obama announced a troupe surge. he asked me, why is your president wanting to surge troops to our country? so i tried to explain to him about u.s. political,

geopolitical concerns and domestic politics. then he asked, why does your country come to afghanistan in the first place? he knew very little about 9/11. so i tried to explain to him about 9/11, and what that was all about and the war on terror. and then he start asking me questions about culture in the united states. i heard that in the u.s., women walk around naked and nobody controls them. and i was, that's not exactly correct. and i tried explain to him the differences in culture between the u.s. and afghanistan. at some point he asked me, have ever seen the film "the titanic." i said yes help asked me, how come your country doesn't make movies anymore? he was a big fan of the movie, as were many members of the taliban. the 1990s they outlaw the titanic but a it was popular amongst the members of the

taliban and they traded it around and people would get leonardo di caprio eric cutted and those were the categories in my mind in thinking about at the taliban and afghanistan and political actors. they get complicated when you talk to people and hear stories on the ground and that was really -- that is really the underlying theme of my book, which is that the category that we have come to think of as defining the war on terror, which is -- there are terrorists there are good guys, bad guys. it makes a lot of sense sitting over here, but when you're on the ground, these categories are remarkably fluid, and in fact, they don't often make sense when we try to think about them that way. so i learned that story -- it took me many years to come to that understanding. came to afghanistan in 2008. i switched careers. i used to do physics but i lived

across the street from the twin towers and on 9/11 i saw the attacks and knew people who were killed in the attacks. so since that time i was always fascinated about -- by our policy in the middle east and south asia, and i was following the war against al qaeda from afar, and i was always sort of dissatisfied with my level of understanding of what was happening. and so in 2008 i decided to switch careers and i moved to afghanistan as a free lancer, and at the time, if you went to afghanistan, you -- that means usually you lived in kabul, which is a relatively cosmopolitan city compared to the rest of the country and it's relatively safe. the war is taking place in the south and the east along the border with pakistan. for most part. and so my time as a journalist in kabul was mostly going to press conferences and writing up 500, 600 word stories about what was happening in the countryside. and so very quickly i got

frustrated by the lack of access to what was actually happening. i had come to cover the war but wasn't able to cover the war. so at some point i decided to take a different tact and grew out my beard, i bought a motorcycle and i hit the road and went down to the south to the area where where the war was being fought and took advantage of afghan hospitality, which is extraordinary, and i was able to live in various villages with tribal elders and i would be passed from one village to the next. in the process of that i met managers, many people, hundreds of people, and heard many stories, and the stories i heard challenged the preconceived notions i had about what the war was about. so, essentially the problem -- the question i tried answer was this, which is that the taliban regime is one of the worst, most

radical draconian regimes in recent memory, and they were defeated very easily after 9/11. it took just basically two months of air campaign to cause the taliban to crumble. and most afghan is spoke to welcomed the defeat of the taliban and wanted the u.s. to come and save them from the taliban. and yet five or six years later, some of these same afghans started supporting the taliban. the taliban grew from a defeated force to a powerful insurgency which exists to this dade which i still fighting u.s.-backed troops, meaning the afghan army and there's a few u.s. soldiers still in afghanistan. and so the question is, how did that happen? what were the transformation? what caused that to happen? that's the question i try answer in the book, and i do that by trying to get the afghan perspective. and so i collected hundreds of interviews, and hundreds of life stories. many of which i included in the bach but there are three in particular that i focused on.

one is the story of a warlord, or politician, who is also a warlord, who is aligned with the united states military. he is a very powerful man, hi name is john mohammad haun. the u.s. used to call him jmk for short, and his life is very interesting because he was school janitor in the 1970s, ill literal also. and the soviet union invaded afghanistan in 1979, and once that happened. it sort of ushered in a cataclysmic upheaval of that society and reverberations of that echo today because a lot of the islamic radicalism we see in the world sort of comes from the experience of the soviet invasion of afghanistan in the 1980s. and once the soviets invaded, the cia and other intelligence agencies flooded the country with gucks and money, and in the process -- with guns and money

and in the process created classic warlord, and jmk, the character in my book, is one of those people. rows from being a school janitor to becoming a very powerful warlord, who operated in southern afghanistan. once the soviets left the various warlords we armed turned their guns on each other and ushered in a bloody civil war and jmk was a participant. the taliban rose as a reaction to the civil war and pushed aside all these warlords and in many cases arrested them. and they arrived jmk, threw him in. >> tortured him, and in fact when i asked him about -- describe the worst type of torture, he said the worst was nothing physical. it was in fact the fact that the taliban wouldn't let me pray in my jail cell. so the psychologicaller to tour and physical torture. jmk was scheduled to die to be

executed by the taliban government in december of 2001. and the book picks up his story from the moment in which he is scheduled to be executed and he is trotted out to the execution yard, but he is saved in the last moment. i don't want to tell you how but he is saved and able to leave the prison and in the next few years becomes a major u.s. ally, and he becomes extraordinarily wealthy as a result of the alliance with us. and so the book is -- a third of the book is about his story and how he rose to riches and power through his alliance with the u.s. military. that's the first character that i focus on. the second is a house wife named hela, and she grew up in kabul in the 1970s, 1980s, and if you look at photographs of can l today, it's -- still a lot of

destruction. a lot hat be rebuilt but nothing compared to the 1960s and 1970s. i had this idea of afghanistan being a devastated country, sort of -- but in fact, before the 1979 invasion of the soviet union, cities like kabul were extremely cosmopolitan, well-developed. women were going to school. women like hela were going to university. she majored in economics and help then graduated and took a job as a teacher. in the mid-'90s, the civil war broke out. the civil war between the warlords we had armed, and it caused untold amounts of devastation in kabul. 60,000 people were killed. and she was nearly killed in that, and so she and her husband and her young son fled the city to the countryside, to the deep south, and when she got there,

and the book picks up the story from when she flees, and when he got to the deep south she found the cultural morals were radically different than what she was used to and came to the'll which culturally women weren't allowed outside of the house, women weren't working, women weren't allowed to go to school, and she was more or less a prisoner of her own home for ten years. and this is before the taliban came to power. this is during the civil war. and i asked her, how did life change when the taliban came to sister she said didn't change. i was still locked in my house. i said how did the life change when the taliban were removed? she said, it doesn't matter. i was still locked in the house. so for three different periods, the civil war, taliban rule, and the post 2001 american order in all three periods she was more or less left inside the house. but she is an extraordinarily capable woman and she found ways to get out of the house and she

found ways to work in secret. she opened up a secret girls school for girls in the village, and at great risk to herself she taught them reading and writing and math and sewing and other things. the book describes her difficulty in setting up the underground schools and difficulties being a city woman, urban woman, with that experience in the conservative countryside in 2004, her husband was killed by members of the u.s.-backed afghan government because of corruption, and so she was left as a single woman with four sons, and it's a very precarious position to be in because usually you're forcibly married to brother of your deceased husband or to somebody else. so she needed to escape her village and she wanted to find a way back home to kabul, and so the book in large part is the story of her trying to find her way back to kabul.

the third character is somebody who i met in kabul and he is a taliban commander. his name is cable. cable because in the 1990s, he was in charge of disarming newly conquered populations in afghanistan, and so he used to walk around with a big whip, and if you had weapons in your house, and mind you in afghanistan, everybody has weapons. just normal. if you had weapon inside your house, he would whip you. so that was his name, cable. he was personality front line commander. he -- important frond line commander. 2009, taliban are overthrown. he quits the taliban and tries to blend into civilian life. tries to get a job as a cell phone fixer, a cell phone operator. he opens up his own shop. but something brings him back to the taliban.

by 2005, 2006, he rejoins the taliban. at this point the taliban is now an insurgency fighting against the u.s., and he becomes a major antiamerican insurgent commander and that's the state he was when i met him. and the story of how he comes back to the taliban is a story of the war in afghanistan. and that's sort of the thesis of the book, why did these people come back and start fighting against the u.s.? and so to explain that, i want to take you back to 2001 and explain the circumstances on the ground at the time. the u.s. invade -- wasn't an invasion. more of an aerial campaign in october of 2001. and they -- within six weeks they had pretty much bombed up a ol' the taliban military infrastructure. this is not a country with a lot of infrastructure so they bombed all of it and by december the taliban crumbled. now, what is very interesting, what is very surprising to me as

i was researching this history, was that by december of 2001, the taliban were defeated and they essentially century rein dead wholesale to the u.s. they tried in groves to switch sides. they sort've repudiated the taliban, and this not just the rank-and-file. this is also leadership. repudiated the taliban and tried to pledge allegiance to the new u.s.-backed government of karzai. enough i know from studying afghan history this shouldn't be that surprising because in a curch trithat has been at war for now 35 years almost, the main prerogative is to survive. so people frequently switch sides. when the soviet union withdraw from afghanistan in 1989, a lot of people who had called themselves communist, who are supporting the soviet union in afghanistan, rebrand themselves as islamis, mujahideen, and joined the other side. and out of survival.

out of survival instincts. in the same way it wasn't that the taliban embraced the western project but recognized that to be able to survive, they have to pledge allegiance to the new authority. so the quit the taliban, repudiated the taliban and joined the karzai government. i have a transcript of a press conference given bay major taliban leader at the time in 2001, basically asking people from religious institutions not to give donations to the taliban because the taliban were no more and said if you have in the donations give them to the afghan government. so one of after the next taliban commanders were handing over weapons to the afghan government and some cases directly to the u.s. forces. some gain working with the u.s. forces to try to help stabilize the situation. so you had a situation, you had a circumstance in early 2002 in

which there were no more taliban. they effectively sealed to exist. but at the same time al qaeda, which was the other main reason why the u.s. invaded, al qaeda had fled the country. most had gone to pakistan. some of them had again to iran. there's no more al qaeda. so no taliban and no al qaeda. however there were tens of thousands of u.s. troops on the ground with mandate to fight a war on terror. mostly special forces soldiers, who were there with map debt to fight war but didn't have an enemy to fight. this is a contradiction, and the way this contradiction was resolved is actually the way in which the war sort of reconstituted itself. and the contradiction was resolved through the alliances that the u.s. made with various local actors, and i call them warlords essentially. so, at the time almost all intelligence that the u.s. was

getting was sourced from local war lords. people like jmk, a character in my book. so, cia or special forces operators would ask jmk who are the tall been in your area? he would say this person and this person and that person. in fact, most of them weren't taliban or the actual taliban were working with the afghan government. so what ended up happening is that really at the people who are personal rivals of the warlords became falsely labeled as taliban. and i want to give you couple examples of this. one example is about a person named should riff hudin and he is a baker. now he is almost 90 probably. when i met him he was in his late 80s. i met him because he lived across the street from where i philadelphia kandahar. he was a baker and woke up at

4:00 a.m. to knead dough and make afghan flat bread. and he had been a u.s.-backed mujahideen commander in the 190s against the soviets. but of the seive yets left he gave up his weapons and lived his life as a baker. one morning, militia members of the afghan government showed up at miss bakery and said, are you hadin? he said, yes, they says you're a terrorist. and he said, what is happening in they wouldn't explain help had a gun to his head. they handed him over to the u.s. forces at kandahar airfield, the main u.s. base in the area, and there -- this is 2002 so this is command at the time. there he was tortured by u.s. soldiers. he had metal hooks inserted into this mouth. electrocuted, but he insisted on his innocence and so he was released eventually back to the custody of the afghan

militiamen. the militiamen took item to a private jail and hung him upside-down by his feet for 20 or 22 hours a day. and they would come in at various points and whip him with big cables. in fact the person that was hanging next to him was a very prominent tribal elder. not a taliban member, just prominent tribal elder who eventually died of his wounds. after a week or so of this, he realized why this was happening, and he realized because the militia men came and told him we know you're not a terrorist. if we'll let you go if you give us x amount of money. so hi fadly had to raise funds and he bought his freedom and is released. the problem is that once he paid, then he is marked for life as somebody who could be exploited for this kind of money. so, a couple months later he was arrested again, handed over to u.s. troops again.

tortured again, then transferred back to this underground prison, hung upside down, whipped and beaten and food pay again. this happened four or five times. he said he used to put away money for his tour tour and imprisonmentlike like you might put away money to buy a new car. he was see rentally left alone after -- eventually left alone after 2005 when the intelligence chanter who worked closely with the cia, afghan intelligence commander, was killed in a suicide bombing by the taliban. that's one example. another example is somebody else i know very well, wakiel and he is from the northeastern part of the country, and wakiel means lawmaker or parliamentarian. somebody who had been elected to parliament in a previous incarnation of the local government there. he was a member of the northern alliance, which was a group of

warlords and commanders and rebels who are fighting, resisting the taliban, all through the 90s. so when the u.s. invaded in 2001, we supported the northern alliance and he is one of the people we supported. so, he was an antitaliban fighter. in fact he had many family members killed by the taliban the 1990s and hated the taliban very deeply. however, once the u.s. and british forces set up bases in cue kuhnar province, they were handing out contracts to bring gravel to put on the bed of the base to help build -- to surround the base, to have militia many guarding the base. so a lot of contracts being handed out by foreign entities there. and so end up happening there was a lot of competition amongst local elite to try to get these contracts. he was trying to get contracts. in fact he got a contract to

eradicate opium poppies from the by. other strong men and warlords were trying to get contracts as well. so what happened is this incentivized system in which people could falsely accuse other people of being members of taliban so they can be eliminated from the scene and they can get the contracts 'and that's what happened to him. he in june of 2002 gave a very were publicized speech in a big council that was there to elect hamid karzai as interim president, and he gave a speech in support of karzai and in support of the u.s. and saying it's great that the international community is here supporting us and we need to support them to make sure the taliban never returns. shortly after that, when he was in his home province, he was arrived. he and his lieutenants were arrested and they were sent to guantanamo, and the rope he was arrested is because one of the rival commanders there in that area had a son who spoke

english, and that son, who had good ties with the foreign forces and through him the rival warlord said this person is a member of al qaeda. so he was arrested and he was removed. he spent six years in guantanamo as well as many of his lieutenants. today if you good to that area where he is from, mostly antiamerican, protaliban, but wasn't before. this is a place the taliban had difficulty conquering and it's because of instances like this. a third example -- i think probably this is -- in my mind to the most galling example. there was a young arab man named aljenko who fled an abusive home in the 1990s. an abusive stepfather, and he sought to flee his home and heard if you go to afghanistan -- when afghanistan was controlled by at the taliban -- go to afghanistan and

then you find your way to western embassy or declare asylum. and then you are taken to the west. that was his plan. so he went to afghanistan, maybe 1999 with the intention of doing this. however, he was quickly arrested by the taliban, and essentially, who are you, what are you doing there and he was an arab so they said we're turning you over to al qaeda. so they turned him over to al qaeda. and in al qaeda's custody he was tortured severely. he had underwent simulated drowning. they videotaped it. electrocuted him. and eventually he confessed to being an agent of the cia and massad. obviously a forced confession. then he was handed back over to taliban and imprisoned help ways only 16 or 17. so he was imprisoned. fast forward to 2001. u.s. invasion. taliban is overthrown. you ljenk expo six or steep

other people like him, arabs in taliban custody who the taliban believed were spies. but the taliban are gone and the locals didn't know what to do. so they went to the u.s. forces and say we have these six or seven guys and handed them over to the u.s. forces. the u.s. them straight to guantanamo, and so jenko was in guantanamo for six or seven years, and to add insult to injury in 2003, i believe, he -- the u.s. -- maybe 2002 -- the u.s. found a videotape of him being tortured by al qaeda and they found his sort of forced confession. this is played by john ashcroft to reporter is with the audio off as an example of the u.s. making progress on the war on terror. it wasn't until much later that people recognized it's actually the opposite. so, with these sorts of instances happening -- this is taking place again and again and

again. two consequences to this. one was that the warlords that we had aye alied with became ultra wealthy and essentially used the u.s. to eliminate they're rivals rivals and to consolidate their position. the second consequence you had two different afghanistans. the haves and have-notes. the haves were those afghan communes with commanders or warlords with links or good ties to the u.s. mary -- military and have nots did not have links to the tie, and if you look at the where the insurgency is stronger, this the latest places, those communities did not have a warlord or chapter with the ear of the u.s. military. and so this pattern became more or less entrenched by 2004 and 2005, and that's still the war we're fighting today. and i mentioned that the taliban had all surrendered and tried to switch sides. and so all this is happening and

they're watching this happening, and even despite this they tried in many cases to stay on the afghan government's side because they weren't strong. i met a man named shaw, taliban commander in the 1990s and he surrendered in 2002 and in a were publicized ceremony with reporters he handed over his weapons weapons and had his subcommanders and foot soldiers hand over their weapons and signed an agreement with the local afghan government saying that i -- if i agree to abstain from political life you agree to not arrest me and i'll sit at home and preach in my mosque. that's what happened. however, bat couple months later,off militia men arrested him and took him to prison and held him upside-down and whipped million and tortured him and kept saying, we know you have more weapons and he kept saying

i don't happen knee. weapons. eventually he was-for-ed to get his family to sell their livestock to raise money to buy weapons on the black market. so they bought them expanded them over and he was released. but once you do that, you're marked as somebody who can bay. ...

those communities that suffered the most from the moralism and that is what they taliban insurgency did at first. you know and by 2005 you have a full-blown insurgency. once the taliban return to afghanistan they became just as oppressive as the warlords that they replace them by this time you have gunmen and it's very difficult to get rid of them. so what ended up happening was you had afghan civilians today who were caught between the sides. either you are living in one area where this site has good ties to the afghan government and the u.s. military and you are being treated extremely poorly by the taliban and being accused of being a spy spy and some i really executed were on the other side you are in a community that has ties to the taliban and being accused of being a terrorist and tortured.

this is what is going on so civilians find themselves increasingly squeezed between these various sites. without giving away too much of the book, that's how the book ends is looking at hela as someone who's a civilian, one of the characters in the book, who is trying to navigate between these forces between the taliban and the warlords. what you find is that people have to make very difficult choices which means they have to ally with various sites at various times. that's the reality of the war today is that you have people who may support the taliban but not because they think the taliban offer any positive vision for the future but because it's out of protection from rapacious warlords that we are backing. there are those that support the same warlords as a way of protecting themselves against the rapacious taliban. today there are when i last

counted close to 250,000 men under arms in afghanistan that we as the u.s. government are paying for. it includes the afghan government, the police and a whole array of militias. a raid against them, nobody knows how many, maybe tens of thousands of taliban supported by pakistan and neither side is really strong enough to defeat the other even though there are 350,000 people on the u.s. side and they are better armed. they are not going to be able to go into every single tiny village and operate the taliban. on the other hand the taliban even though they have tens of thousands of people in support for pakistan they are going to fail to march into kabul or herat or some of the major cities and kick out the government. so what you have is too entrenched sites out in a war of attrition that looks like it will continue essentially in perpetuity unfortunately.

i know that's a bleak note that but that's sort of where the bookends is looking at that prospect. the u.s. is going to have places in afghanistan for many years to sign an agreement and this is the longest war in american history. it looks like it will continue to go on for years and years into the future. thank you. [applause] >> thank you anand. we have 15 minutes left and i want to end the session around 10:00 to 10:55. i want to remind everyone that we have two microphones. if you have a question if he could make your way to either one of those two microphones that would be great. thank you.

>> yes, where they're not american, members of the american military who saw things as you did and if there were why were they unable to change the policy that you describe? >> i think there are two reasons for that. one is that just like me members of the american military recognizes one far too late because the sense that this is what happened only came afterwards years after. that's the first reason but the second reason is the way that the u.s. military structured. there's a sort of tension between short-term interest on long-term interest. and so people who are serving on the ground not just for the military but also for the state department as well, there is an impetus to have short-term gains which means you know you ally

with this warlord here because he will be able to clear the area or he will be able to build a school or a well or something like that. the new two year tour and you get a promotion after that and go back home. the next person has to deal with the consequence of the fact that the person who built the school actually is systematically uprooting half of the other tried to do it. so the long-term picture is something that i think washington is not very good at and that has been a major problem and continues to be a problem. >> some of us here in this country are confused as to why the former leader karzai seems so better about american participation given the fact that we seem to have supported him over many years. could you explain the basis for that? >> that's a really good question. i think i'm the one hand i think he is very hypocritical because

he is part of the very system that he has helped create the system that he decries. for example the corruption and warlordism and all these things. and also he was put into power by the u.s.. he wouldn't be there at the u.s. didn't put them into power. on the other hand i think there is some merit to his criticisms insofar as for every dollar that the u.s. spends on the central government in afghanistan they spent an equal amount outside the central government on warlords and strongmen and these people saw that ended up doing is creating a weak central government. for example in 2002 people used to call karzai the mayor of kabul with good reason. in 2002 and 2003 he was extremely weak and the warlords around the countryside were much stronger and they were stronger only by virtue of their relationship to the u.s. military. the governor of kandahar who i talk about in my book he had a

private militia of thousands of people. he rented the land in which the u.s. military built a base. he was extraordinarily wealthy and extraordinarily powerful and he was also a malign influence on the province because of the reasons i explained, falsely accusing people of being taliban or al qaeda. people in the afghan governments recognize he was a maligned interest at that point he was so powerful that there is little anyone can do. eventually they removed him but they had to remove him to another province into which was a very lucrative profits be a governor of excess they had a border customs duties, and we take duties from border trade. there's a sense in which karzai is very embittered by the fact that he was left to be an extremely weak president and still expected to succeed and i think that's valid. at the same time he also played

the same game that the u.s., that he is accusing the u.s. of doing so there's a degree of hypocrisy in that. >> how would you describe the self-interest of pakistan and if their intention is to control and rule in afghanistan, why not let them do so? >> i think broadly speaking pakistan's interest in afghanistan is the same as the u.s. which is to have a client regime in the country. the difference is what type of client regime in pakistan, think pakistan wants a regime in place which is not pro-india or is not friendly to india and is preferably pashtun but not pashtun nationalist and keep in mind that there are hundreds of

millions of pashtuns on both sides of the border and in the 60s and 70's moving to pashtun nationalism which advocated all of the pashtuns joining into one country called passion a stand which would necessarily imply the breakup with afghanistan. their underlying fears of pakistani policy in afghanistan. the question is why not let them do that and today pakistan's proxy is the taliban and i don't think, we don't want the taliban to rule afghanistan. talking from a moral sense i think we would say that we'll not the taliban to rule afghanistan and there are so many other communities that would be excluded from the political process of the taliban world which is the same problem today which is why the taliban is strong. there are so many communities that had to be excluded from the american order. we don't want to reproduce that which would be a recipe for continual poor in this country and there isn't a war for so long. for that reason we don't want to

just allow pakistan to have this in pakistan. what would be ideal is a newish -- negotiated settlement between the various sides. given there are some in the in the cookie jar is going to be difficult for this to happen but at least have something to aspire to. >> at the beginning of your talk you said that the taliban when they were initially defeated put down their arms, surrendered were prepared to declare allegiance to the u.s. because it had become a tradition over the years because of the many conquests. are there other cultural traditions in place today that help people like hela navigate this horrible reality that they are faced with of trying to choose sides that will help them for a while?

>> yeah. i think the aspect of switching sides has almost become a tradition just because this is a country that has been a war for 35 years. if you think about it, i'm 34 so it's been going on longer than i have been alive. there are many millions of afghans who lived in a world that only knows war and devastation. this is how cultures are formed or culture motives come out of this kind of milieu. actually i do think the tendency to switch sides or to support both sides is almost like a cultural issue. take hela for example. he was somebody who worked for the united nations secretly worked for the united nations in 2003 in 2004 because her village believe that women should not work. she secretly had a job at the u.n. helping register women to vote. two years later she was also secretly supporting the taliban.

you can read about why she does that in the book but you know it was very jarring to me. i was very nervous, how did you do both of these things? it came second nature for her because she had four children and she had to survive. there were other cultural institutions which also helped the administration and deprivation of war. for example there's an institution of dispute resolution through titled -- tribal councils and religious councils that exist in afghanistan and more use has to be made of the sort of local dispute regulation mechanisms to help resolve local conflicts. right now most of the time there's a local conflict. let's say you and i have a conflict over land because there is no land use. this is a country that doesn't have official records. the way we resolve that today is

by shooting each other if i happen to have access to the afghan government i will say you are a member of the taliban. or if you are a member of the taliban i say he is a spy with the u.s.. that's how these things tend to be resolved but there is a long history of other types of dispute resolution mechanisms and tribal councils which more effort should go into helping support. >> i'm confused about the role and effect of the u.s. military. from what i heard you say when they first came in 2001 after 9/11 that led to the taliban and al qaeda leaving the country but by their continued presence and their errors or activities or whatever happened that led to them coming back. i'm wondering what do the people of afghanistan, what would they

want for the u.s. military, to stay or to go and has the effect of lowering -- what it's been the effect of lowering the number of troops there? has it been better or worse for these situations? >> you know it's complicated because as i said before afghanistan is a very divided society. first of all that's important to recognize the war in afghanistan is only being fought in half the country. roughly speaking the south and the east in pakistan in the north which is also violent but generally it's half the country where the war is being fought. i went back in april, february and april i went to drive down to the south of the war zones and i was interested in this question now is asking people, the time the question was should afghan government signed a bilateral security agreement with the u.s. and legalize an

extended u.s. presence? most people, 90% of the people i spoke to in areas where the worse for being fought oppose any such agreement because the logic was they may not like the taliban but the logic was that's one less shooting here. so people think about their families and that's what they felt. on the other hand if you go to the areas where there is no war which is in northern afghanistan in kabul and other places its opposite. people want the u.s. to stay because they view the u.s. as a buffer against the war encroaching upon their territory. people were like the government should sign this agreement to want the u.s. to stay. in both cases though the logic was about what'll keep us safe? it was ideological. it wasn't a vision of what afghan should look like. it was what will keep us safe. people in the north live through tremendous suffering in the 1990s under the taliban and

before that in couple people lived in suffering under the civil war. people in the south are living through tremendous suffering now and they want to do anything they can to see that stop. you have two different communities. you don't get that in the news media however because unfortunately most journalists tend to speak to people who are in the cities or in the north because that's where it operates. the good of the south of the different story. >> this relates to his question. is there a solution and what should, in an effort to be -- what is a wise solution the u.s. can take? steppes? >> i was reminded of the israeli novelist. he was talking about israeli complex but i think it applies

more so to afghanistan. it talked about to traditions of tragedy in literature. one is the shakespearean tragedy and what is the jacobian tragedy. you remember the shakespearean tragedy at the end of the day everybody is dead. everybody is miserable and check off at the end of the day everyone is miserable but they are still alive. if we could find a way to get a jacobian tragedy that would be a success. what would that take? two things are important. number one is that there has to be a serious effort to negotiate a settlement with all sides. i think the prisoner exchange from one time over bergdahl was an excellent step in the right direction from that regard. i say that while knowing that there are so many different hands in the cookie jar and so many different niches that they be a negotiated settlement would

never of happened that even if it would never happen aspiring to it and policy towards it can yield positive benefits i think. so i think that's important number one. number two we as a the u.s. need to change fundamentally our relationship with afghanistan. it's the case today that the afghan government is not unable to raise taxes so the budget for the afghan government comes through employment aid. in other words the international community is propping up the government. if we stop paying for the african government it would stop today in a massive civil war. this is a question of sustainability. this is a question of how to make it the afghan government or the afghan society to have this independent economy so that one day they can disengage. in this goes back to the tension between short-term and long-te