butted 1942 the germans were published and that was tough philosophical argument about a suicide. >> the life-saving had was a reference. but otherwise the book was published but they came back and he went back down to breeze better and for the endeavor the occupation to join the public newspaper and was very, very active with the resistance movements at the end of the

war about everything from collaboration and in 1941 a book called the plague the bubonic plague. that is as far as i am concerned, that is an allegory of the occupation in france. . .

i think one of the great -- probably the greatest writer about the moral and ethical complexities of living under occupation. >> yes. >> could you help us -- >> i'll try. >> and explain what it was like for the jews under occupation, and i know it's a very big topic but i don't think we all know exactly what it was like. >> i didn't know a lot of these before i started.

i tried not to make this book about the jewish experience, although it's a major chapter in the book about the jewish experience, because i wanted to show that the jews weren't the only ones who lived in this environment of anxiety and tension, demoralization, et cetera, but there was no doubt that they were the targets of nazi able policy. we first have to recognize there were two kinds of jews in france. immigrants, many of whom had pled poland and germany during the '30s and gone to paris, which is seen as the sight -- site of human freedom, and the french were the first nation to

give full civil rights to jewish citizens in 1793. right to vote, right to own property. et cetera. so, the french had this reputation. french jews felt confident that their country would protect them and many of them were imprisoned in the camps. the immigrant jews were, of course, very nervous and apprehensive, as they should be, and at first the effort -- the germans were very canny. the effort was to round up only immigrant and foreigners, especially german jews. but it became quite clear right after the government was founded -- if remember, the french signed an armistice, the only nation to sign an armistice with germany, and was allowed to keep about half of its geography

under french control. roughly from 1940 to 1942. and they began, because there was a government filled with antisemites -- they began passing laws soon, antiset met tick laws before the germans even asked them to. so a strong strain of antisemitism in france as that time, as there was in all of europe antisemitism is not a french disease. and at first the fritz jews thought they'd be protected. the rich jews thought the germans were only interested in the riffraff. be poor jews thought the germans were only interested in rich jews. there was a lot of tension in the jewish community. there were many yous who become so assimilated, like they had been in germany, they didn't even remember they were jewish.

it needed these racial laws to be passed to be reminded in fact they were. it wasn't until -- so there were some roundups but generally french jews were spared. mainly because the germans didn't want to upset the french government because they needed the riches of france for their war machine. france was by far the richest nation in europe, and they were stealing everything, lowing motives -- locomotives, horses, cattle and wheat. they didn't want to have a huge uprising, anden the germans made a bad mistake, and they imposed the wearing of the yellow star in june of 1942. by every jew, french or foreign,

over the age of six. every jew had to wear the same size star. there weren't little stars for little kids. same size star for every jew. and see those children -- you can still see the photos -- to see those yellow stars -- the government to its credit refused to impose the yellow star in occupied france. i say to its credit because it's not totally to its credit. it deputy want to tick off their population either. but i think french men finally began to realize they couldn't hide anymore. every time you met someone with a yellow star you had to make an ethical decision, i do a thumbs up. smile, speak to them? many gentiles write, didn't even know they were jews. they were living next door and i

didn't know they were jews. they're jews now. for the first time this catholic church, six bishops, spoke out against the rounding-up of specially children and women. they didn't speak out totally against the rounding up of jews, but children and women. not the catholic church per se but many of the leaders, french leaders. took them until 1942 to do that. that -- seeing all these perfectly normal frenchmen -- i'm not talking about the jews from eastern europe. i'm talking about people who lived in france for 200 or 300 years, as well as people from eastern europe. walking around with yellow stars, meant that every family had to deal with this issue. every general tile family had to deal with this

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> 10:00 start, i think we'll begin the session this morning, anand gopal has been a journalist for the "christian science monitor" and reported for harpers are the nation, in the new, foreign policy and other poxes. gonial is a fellow at the new

america foundation and will speak about this first book "no good men among the living: america, the taliban and the war through afghan eyes." >> so, my book, the subtitle of the book is wow the war through afghan eyes." i want to explain about how i got to the point of wanting to write other book threw the eyes of afghans and what that means. before i start that i want to tell you about a story about the first time i meat member of the taliban. this is back in 2008. and at the time i was sort of traving around the country side on a motorcycle, and i got contact with a taliban commander. this is somebody who is fighting against the u.s. military. he was an insurgent commander.

and so of course i was fascinated and very interested to try to understand what motivates these people in -- if you remember, the taliban very famously had a draconian 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. 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 afghan. so i went out those mountain. took basically a day to get to the top, 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 and had cloths in their laps, and i took out my notebook and started interviewing the commander and asking him questions like, why are you fighting against in the u.s.? what kind of society do you want? what's your assessment of the 1990s regime, when the taliban were in power. he gave me terse boilerplate answers for all of them but at some point he stopped me and he told me, you're actually the first foreigner that i've ever met. and of course the first american i've ever met. so can i ask you some questions? and i said, yeah, sure. so he started asking me questions like -- this is 2008 so president obama had just announced a -- 2009 -- president obama just announced a troop surge. so he asked me why is your president wanting to surge troops to our country in so i tried to explain to him about u.s. political, geopolitical

concerns and domestic politics. then he asked, why did your country come to afghanistan first place. he knew little about 9/11. so i tried to explain to him about 9/11 and what that was about and the war on terror. then he started asking me questions about cultural in the united states. he asked me, i heard that in the u.s. women walk around naked and nobody controls them. and i said, that's not exactly correct. and i tried to explain to him the differences in culture between the u.s. and afghanistan. at some point he asked he, have you ever seen a film, the titanic. i said, yes, and he asked me, how come you country doesn't make movies like that anymore? it turn out he was a big fan of eye "the titanic." and as we are many taliban members. they traded it around and people

would go and get leonardo di caprio haircuts and that was the first inkling i got -- the categories in my mind in thinking about taliban and the politicalact ors, gets complicated when you talk to people and hear stories on the ground. that is really the sort of underlying theme of my book, which is that the category 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 if you try to think about them that way. came to afghanistan in 2008. i had actually switched careers. i used to deifies seconds, but i lived across the street from the

twin towers and on 9/11 i saw the attack and knew people who were killed in the attacks. so since that time i was always interested and fascinated about -- by our policy in to 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. so in 2008 i decided to switch careers and moved to afghanistan as a free lancer, and at the time, if you went to afghanistan, usually you lived in kabul, which is a relatively cosmopolitan city compared to the rest of the country and relatively safe. the war is taking place in the south and east along the border with pakistan for the most part. 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 covered the war but wasn't actually able to cover the war. so at some point i decided to take a different tact and i grew out my beard, bought a motorcycle, and i hit the road and went down to the south, to the areas where the war was being fought, and i took advantage of afghan hospitality, which is very extraordinary, and i was able to live in various villages with tribal elders and village heads, usually three or four day at a time. i'd be passed from one village to the next in the process of that i met men, 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 to answer is this. the taliban regime is one of the worst, most radical draconian

regimes in recent memory, and they were defeated very easily after 9/11. took just basically two months of an air campaign to cause the taliban to crumble. and most afghans i spoke to welcomed the defeat of the taliban. they wanted the u.s. to come and save them from the taliban. yet five or six years later they started supporting the taliban. the taliban grew from defeated force to a very powerful insurgency which exists to this day, which is still fighting u.s.-backed troops, meaning the afghan army and there's a few u.s. soldiers still in afghanistan. the question is, how did that happen? what were the transformation? what caused that to happen? s the the question i try answer in the book, and i do that by trying to get the afghan perspective. so i collected hundreds of interviews and life stories. many of which i included in the book but there are three in particular 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, his name is john hoe ham man kahn. the u.s. called him jmk for short himself life was interesting because he was school janitor in the 1970s, illiterate. and the soviet union innovated afghanistan in 1979, and once that happened it ushered in a cataclysmic upheaval of that society, and the reverberations of that still sort of echo today because a lot of the sort of islamist radicalism we see in the world sort of comes from the experience of the soviet invasion of afghanistan in in the 1980s. once the sowf jets invaded the cia and various other intelligence agencies flooded the country with gucks guns andy

and help create a class of warlords, and jmk, is one of those people. somebody who rose from being a school janitor to becoming a very powerful warlord who operated in southern afghanistan. wednesday the -- once the over yets left, the warlords that we had armed turned the guns on each other and ushered in a bloody civil war, which jmk was participant of. the taliban rows as a reaction to the civil war, and pushed aside all the warlords and in many cases arrested them. they arrested jmk. they threw him in jail, tortured him, and in fact when i asked him about -- describe the port torture you suffered. he said the worst was nothing physical. it was in fact the fact that they taliban wouldn't let me pray in the jail cell. so psychological torture and physical torture. jmk was scheduled to die to be executed by the tall gap

government in december of 2001. and the book picks up his story from the moment in the he is scheduled to be executed. and he is trotted out to the execution yard but is saved in the last moment. don't want to tell you how but he is saved and he is 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 rows to riches and powers through this eye lines with u.s. military. so that's the first character that i focus on. the second is a house wife, named gila, and she grew up in kabul in the 1970s, 1980s, and if you look at photographs of kabul today, it's -- still a lot of of destruction there. a lot a has been rebuilt but

nothing compared to how it look in the '6s so and '7sod and it was surprising when the first saw this because i had this idea of afghan 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 actually majored in economics and then graduated and took a job as a teacher. in the mid-'90s the civil war broke out, the civil war between the warlord wes had armed, and it caused untold amounts of devastation in kabul 50. thousand or 60,000 people killed, and she was nearly killed in that.

she moved to the south and found the cultural morays were different than what she was used to in kabul. so the came to a village in which culturally women were not allowed outside the house. 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 tall gap -- this is during the civil war, and i asked her, how did life cheng when the taliban came to power. she said, didn't change. i was still locked any house. i asked how did it when when the taliban was removed. she said, didn't matter. i was still locked in the house. so three different periods, the taliban rule, the post 2001 americans or, in all three periods she was left inside the house. she is an extraordinarily capable woman and she found ways to get out of the house, and the

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

kabul. the third, which is somebody who i met in kabul and he is a taliban commander, his name is mullah cable. cable because in the 1990s he was in charge of disarming newly conquered populations in afghanistan. and he used to walk around with a big whip, and if you had weapons in your house, -- and in afghanistan everybody has weapons in theirs house, a normal thing -- if you had weapons he would whip you. that was his name, cable. he was a pretty fortunate frontline commander. in 2001 comes around, taliban are overthrown. he leaves, quits the taliban at that point. tries to blend into civilian life. tries to get a job as a cell phone fixer, cell phone operator. he opens up his own shop. but something brings him back to the taliban. by 2005, 2006, he rejoined the

taliban. at this point the taliban is now an insurgency fighting against the u.s. and he becomes a major antiamerican commander and that's the stage he was when i met him. the story of how he comes back to the taliban is a story of the war in afghanistan. that's sort of the thesis of the book, is 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 what the circumstances were on the ground at the time. the u.s. invaded -- it wasn't even really an invasion. more of an aerial campaign in october of 2001. and within six week they had pretty much bombed all of the taliban military infrastructure. keep in mind this is not a country that had a lot of infrastructure. so they bombed all of it, and by december the taliban had crumb belowed. what is very interesting, very surprising to me, as i was

researching this history, was that by december of 2001, the taliban were defeated and they essentially surrendered wholesale to the u.s. they tried in droves to switch sides. they sort of reputaded the taliban and this is not just a rank-and-file. this is also leadership. repudiate it the taliban and tried to pledge allee jap to the u.s. backed government of hamid karzai. now i know from studying afghan history this shouldn't be that surprising because in a country that's been at war for now 35 years almost, the main prerogative is to survive. people frequently switch sides. for example, when the soviet union withdrew from afghanistan in 1989, a lot of the people who had called themselves communists, who are supporting the soviet union in afghanistan, rebrand themselves as islamis, mew gentleman deep, and -- mujahideen, and joined the other side out of survival instinks.

it wasn't that the taliban all of a sudden embraced the western project but recognized to be able to survive they have to pledge allegiance to the new authority. so they all quit the taliban, repudiated the taliban and joined the afghan government of hamid karzai, and i have, for example, a transcript of a press conference given by one of the major taliban leaders at the time in 2001, basically asking people from religious institutions in madras not give donations to to taliban and if you have donations, give them to the afghan government. so one after the next taliban commanders were in public ceremonies handing over their wins to the afghan government in some cases directly to the u.s. forces. some began working with the u.s. forces to try to help stabilize the situation. and so you had a situation that you had a circumstance in early 2002 in which there were no more

taliban. the taliban effectively ceased to exist as a military and political entity. at the same time al qaeda, which was the other main reason why the u.s. invaded -- al qaeda had fled the country. moats of. the had again to pakistan, some to iran. there was no more al qaeda left, so no taliban and no al qaeda. however, there were tens of thousands of u.s. troops on the ground with a mandate to fight a war on terror. these were mostly special forces soldiers. the cia and others. who were there with mandate to fight a war on terror but didn't have an enemy to fight. this is a contradiction. the way this contradiction was resolved was actually the way in which the war sort of reconstituted itself, and the contradiction was resolved through the alliances the u.s. made with various local actors, and call them warlords essentially. so, at the time almost all intelligence that the u.s. is getting was sourced from local

warlords, people like jmk, character in my book. so, cia or special forces operators would ask jmk, okay, who are the taliban in your strict? in your glair and he would say this person, this person, that person is a taliban. in fact most of them weren't taliban or the actual taliban were work with the afghan government. so what happened is that really the people who are personal rivals of the warlords became falsely labeled as taliban. i want to give you a couple of examples of those show how this worked in practice. one example is about a person -- a person named s-h-h-h harimmudny is a baker, now about 90. when i met him he was in this late 80s. i lived him because he lived across the street from where i philadelphia kandahar. and he was a baker, would wake up every day at 4:00 a.m. to

knead dough and to make afghan flat bread and that's what he did. and he had been a u.s.-backed mujahadeen commander in the 1980s against the soviets. but after the soviets 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 his bakery and said, are you sharif? he said, yes, and they said, you're a terrorist irs, come with us. they handed him over to the u.s. forces at kandahar airfield, the main u.s. base in the area. there -- this is 2002 so this is quite common at the time -- there he was tortured by u.s. soldiers. he had metal hooks inserted into his mouth help was electrocuted. but he insisted on his innocence and he was released eventually back to the custody of the afghan militia men.

the militia man took him to a private jail in kandahar city and they hung him upside-down by his feet for 20 or 22 hours a day. and they would come at various pointness the day and whip him with big cables. the person hanging next to him was a very prominent tribal elder. not a taliban member, just a tribal elder who was being whipped and died of his wound. after a week or so of this, sharif realized why this was happening, and he realized because the militiamen came in and told him, we'll let you go -- we know you're not a terrorist. we'll let you go if you give us x amount of dollars. so he had to borrow -- his family had to borrow money, raise founds and he bought his freedom and was released. the problem is opposite he paid he is marked for life as somebody could be exploited for this kind of money. so automatic could months late her was arrested again, handed-to-troops again, tortured

again, then transferred back to this underground prison, hung upside-down once more. whipped and beaten and then had to pay again. this happened three or four or five times. he told me, i used to put away money for himer tour and imprisonment the way you might put away money for buying a new car. he was eventually left alone after 2005 when the intelligent commander who worked with the cia, was killed in a suicide bombing by the taliban. that's one example. another example is somebody else i know very well, rahula, from the northeastern part of the country, and his name means lawmaker or parliamentarian. he had somebody who had been elected to parliament in a previous incarnation of the local government. he was maybe of the northern alliance, a group of warlords

and commanders and rebels who were fighting -- resisting the taliban throughout the '90s. so when the u.s. invade fled 2001 we support it the northern alliance and he is one of the people we supported. so has want an antitaliban fighter. in fact he had many family members killed by the taliban during the 1990s and hated the tall began deeply. however, once the u.s. and british forces set up bases in cue far province, which is where he is from, they were handing out contracts, to bring gravel to put on the base, have militia men guard the base. so a lot of contracts'ing handed out. what happened is there was a lot of competition amongst local elites to try to get these contracts. he was trying to get a contract. in fact he got a contract to

eradicate opium poppies from the british. there oar strong men and warlords trying to get contracts as well. so what happened is this encentavossed a system in which people -- incentivized a system in which people could falsely accuse others of being a taliban so they can be eliminated and they could get the contracts. that's what happened to him. he in june of 2002 gave a very well-publishized speech in a big council that was there to elect hamid karzai as interim president, and he gave a speech in support of hamid karzai and in support of the u.s. and saying, it's great that the international community is here and supporting us and we need to support them so we can make sure the taliban never returns. shortly after that, when he was in his home province, he was arrested. he and his loons were arrested -- lieutenants were arrested and sent to guantanamo. and the reason he was arrested is because one of to rival commanders in the 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, aarrest him. so he was arrested and spent six years in guantanamo, as way as his lieutenants. today if you go from the area where he is from it's mostly antiamerican, protaliban but not before. a place that they taliban had difficulty conquering but a bus of instances like this. a third example -- i think probably this is in my mind, the most galling example, is there was a young arab man named aljenko, who fled an abusive home in the 1990s. he sought to flee his home and heard that if you go to afghanistan -- when the afghanistan is still controlled by at the taliban -- go to

afghanistan and then find your way to a western embassy you can declare asylum and then you can be taken to the west. that was his idea, his plan. so, he went to afghanistan, maybe 10999 or so, and with the intentions of doing this. however, he was quickly arrested by the taliban and essentially they were, whoa are you, what are you doing here? he was an arab so they said we're turning you over to al qaeda. so they did. and in al qaeda's custody he was tortured severely. he had underwent simulated drowning. they videotaped it. electrocuted him. all videotaped. and eventually he confessed to being an agent of the cia and massad, a forced confession, and he was only 16 or 17. imprisoned. fast forward to 2001. u.s. invasion. taliban is overthrown. how have aljenko and six or

seven other people like hick, 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 the went to the u.s. forces and said we have these guys and they handed them over to the u.s. forces. the u.s. send the guys to guantanamo, and aljenko was in guantanamo for six or seven years to add insult to injury in 2003, i believe, the u.s. -- maybe 2008 -- the u.s. found the videotape of him being tortured by al qaeda, and they found his sort of forced confession, this was played by john ashcroft to reporters 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 recognize it it was actually the opposite. so, with these sorts of instances happening -- i'm giving you three examples. this is taking place again and again and again.

two consequences to this. one was that the warlords that we had alied with became ultra powerful and up extra -- ultra wealthy and used the u.s. to consolidate their position. the second consequence is you had two different afghanistans, the haves and have-notes. thes have were those afghan communities that had commander or warlords with links or good ties to the u.s. military, and the have-not were communities without the links or ties. if you look at today where the insurgencies i strongest it's in the latter places, the afghan communities without good ties or link0s are warlord or commander who had the ear of the u.s. military. the pattern became entrenched by 2004 and 2005 and that's still the war we're fighting today. 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 side because they weren't very strong. one person i met named shaw. a taliban commander in the 1990s, and he surrendered in 2002 and in a were publicized ceremony with reporters he handover his weapons and he had his subcommanders and food soldiers hand over their weapons and signed an agreement with the local afghan government saying that, 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. so that is what happened. however, about a couple months later, afghan militia men showed up at his house, arrested him, took hick to the underground prison i when, and hung him upside-down and whipped million and beat him and this continued for weeks. they kept saying you didn't hand over your weapons. he kept saying, i don't have any

weapons. eventually he was forced to get his family to sell their livestock to raise money to buy weapons, and then they handed it over the afghan militia men and he was released, but once you do that you're marked as somebody who can pay. so he was arrested again a few months later, hung upside-down this shame charade, they raised money and won his freedom. this happened here to or four times and then he finally got wise to the fact he would never be left alone. so he flowed pakistan. and there's already many other former taliban members like him, and they were talking about that would do about this, and they -- through this process the taliban reconstituted itself. and once they reconstituted themselves they had a willing audience in those communities that didn't have access to the u.s. military, to the communes that suffered the most from the warlordism, and that is where taliban insurgency grew at

first. and that's -- by 2005 you had a full-blown insurgent general si. once the taliban returned to afghanistan they became just as oppressive as the warlordded but now you have gun men and it's very difficult to get rid of gunmen. so, what ended up happening is you had people who are caught between the sides. either you're living in one area where the side has good ties to the afghan government and the u.s. military and you're being treated extremely poor i by the taliban, accused of being a spy, being summarily executed, or on the other side you're living in a community that has good ties to the taliban and you're being accused of bag terrorist and being summarily tortured and executed. so this is what is going on. so civilians find themselves increasingly squeezed between the sides and that's -- without giving away too much of the book, that's how the book ends, is looking at hela as somebody

who was a civilian, one of the three characters the book. who is trying to navigate between these horses, between e between the taliban and warlord, and what you find is people have to make very difficult choices, which means you have to ally with various sides at various times and they threat of the war. people who may support at the taliban but not because the think the taliban off anywhere positive vision for the future but because it's just out of protection from warlords that we're backing. others support the same warlords as a way of protecting themselves against the taliban. today there are -- when i last counted, close to 250,000 men under arms in afghanistan that we, the u.s. government, is paying for. that includes the afghan government, the police, and a whole array of militias.

a raid against them is -- nobody knows how many, maybe tens of thousands of taliban being supported by pakistan, and neither side is really strong enough to defeat the other. you have 250,000 people on the u.s. side, and they're better armed. they're not going to be able to good into every single tiny little village and uproot the taliban. on the other hand the taliban, even though they have tens of thousands of people have support from pakistan, they're not going to be able to good in and march into kabul or some of the major cities and kick out the government. so, what you have is two entrenched sides in a war of attrition that looks like it will continue in perpetuity and that's a bleak note but that where the book ended, is looking at that prospect. the u.s. is going to have bases in afghanistan for many, many

years to come because they just signed the agreement, and this is the longest war in american history and looks like that it will continue to go on for years and years into the future. thank you. [applause] >> we now have about 15 minutes to are questions, and i will remind you we need to end the session around 10 can 55. and i would like tree mind everyone we -- remind everyone we have microphones. >> were there not american members of the american military saw things as you did and if there were, why were they unable

to change the policy that you described? policies. >> i think there's two reasons for that. one is that just like me, members of the american military probably recognize this as far too late but a the sense -- this is what happened only came afterwards, years after. that is the first reason. the second reason is the way that the u.s. military is structured, there's a tension between short-term interests and long-term interests, and to people who are serving on the ground and not just for the military but also for the state department as well, there is an impetus for short, term gains this. warlording build this school or well ask then you do your tour, maybe you get a promotion after that and go back home. and the next person has to deal with the consequences of the

footprint that the person who built the school actually systematically uprooted half of the other tribe to do it. and so the long-term picture is something that i think washington is not very good at, and that has been a major problem and i think it continues to be a problem. >> some of us here in this country are confused as to why the former leader, karzai, seems to bitter about american participation, given the fact we seem to have supported him over many years, can you explain the basis for that? >> that's a really good question. on the one hand, i think he is very hypocritical because he is part of the very system that he helped create the very system he decries. for example, the corruption and the warlordism and all these things. and also he was put into power

by the u.s. he wouldn't be there if the u.s. didn't put him into power. on the other hand, i think there is some merit to his criticisms in the fact -- insofar as that for every dollar that the u.s. spent on the central government in afghanistan, they spent an equal amount outside of the central government on warlordded and strong men. that created a very weak central government. so, for example in 2002, people used to call karzai the mayor of kabul, with good reason. it's because 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 not my book, he had a private militia of thousands people. he rented the land on which the u.s. military built the base. he was extraordinarily wealthy,

powerful, and also an influence ton the province because of the reason is explained. falsely accusing people of being taliban or al qaeda. people the afghan government north just karzai, others recognize he was an eninfluence but he was so proffer there was little to do eventually he was moved to another province children was very luke contract tariff province to be governor of because it has a border and you can take duties from border trade. so, there's a sense in which karzai is very embittered by the fact he was left to be an extremely weak president and still expected to succeed, and i think that's valid. at the same time, you know, he also played the sort of same game that the u.s. -- he 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 are the same as the u.s.', which is to have a client regime in the country. depends on what type of client regime. and pakistan -- i think pakistan wants a regime in place which is not pro india or not friendly to india and is preferably pashtun but not pashtun nationalists and keep in mind there are hundreds of millions of pashtun on both sides of the to border and in the '60s and '70s there is was movement of pashtun nationallallism which advocated pashtuns joining into one

country, which would necessarily imply the breakup of pakistan. and there's this underlying fears that drive pakistani policy in afghanistan. another question is why not let them do that? today pakistan's proxy is the taliban, and i don't think -- we don't want the taliban to rule afghanistan. i think that's -- i mean, from a moral sense. i think we would say we don't want the taliban to rule afghanistan, and there's so many other communities that would be excluded from the political process if the taliban ruled, which is the same problem today, which is why the taliban are strong, because there's so many communities that have been excluded from the american order, and we don't want reproduce that. there's been a war for so long. so for that reason, we can't -- we don't want to just apakistan to have its way in afghanistan. what is ideal is negotiated settlement between the various sides, given there's so many hands in the cookie jar, it's

going to be difficult for this to happen but that's 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 this has become a tradition over the years because of the many conquests. there are other cultural traditions in place today that help people like hela november navigate this horrible reality they're faced with, of trying to choose sides that will help them for a while? >> i think this act of switching side has almost become a cultural tradition because it's a country been at war for 35 years. i'm 34. so it's been going on longer

than i've been alive, and there's many millions of afghans who live in a world that only knows world and devastation, and so this is how cultural motif come out this kind of milieu, so i think that this sort of tendency to switch sides or to support both sides is almost like cultural tradition. take hela, for example. she is somebody who worked for the united nations secretly in 2003 and 2004 because her village didn't believe that women should work. so, she secretly had a job with the u.n., helping women -- helping register women to vote. two years late sher she was also secretly supporting the taliban, and you could read about why she does that in the book, but that is -- i asked her -- it was jarring to me when i learned