>> guest: the official publication date is december 30th. we will have the book printed and in our warehouse friday, three days from now. and we will start shipping immediately. so it may start popping up a little before the 30th in various independent bookstores, but it'll be fully distributed around the country and available on online retailers and in brick and mortar retailers and independent and chain bookstores and you name it on december 30th. >> host: and dennis johnson is the co-publisher of melville house located in brooklyn, new york. here is the cover, the senate intelligence committee report on torture. thank you, sir. >> guest: thank you. >> retired lieutenant colonel john nagl talks about the development and effectiveness of the counterinsurgency strategy that the u.s. used in iraq and afghanistan. this is about an hour. p.m.

it is a pleasure to welcome all of you tonight for the celebration of john nagl's new book. "knife fights: a memoir of

modern war in theory and practice" 11. his work is well known to you. he was the second president of c cnas and he now serves as ninth head master of the school in pennsylvania and is visiting professor to college of london. john's book "knife fights: a memoir of modern war in theory and practice" eleven i saw in proposali saw in proposal form a while ago. book on counterinsurgency and terrorism, how could it possibly be relevant to the day? but he has timing is because the lessons he has drawn in "knife fights: a memoir of modern war in theory and practice" 11 hafi in theory and practice" have

direct applicability to the questions as relevant today. he was the 1988 graduate of west point. you went on to oxford where his doctoral dissertation on counterinsurgency was later published. he served as an army tank commander in the first gulf war and returned to iraq with the first infantry division after the 2003 invasion. u.s. tasked to work at the pentagon with paul wolfowitz and david petraeus with whom he rode the now legendary counterinsurgency field manual and in the later time in the world of think tanks and the intellectual arena he became a key architect of the military's counterinsurgency doctrine and this was close to such a traumatic use during the surge in iraq. "knife fights: a memoir of

modern war in theory and practice," john's account of how difficult the approach was and the struggle was to embrace counterinsurgency doctor within the u.s. military within the czar and the defense bureaucracy and in the national-security apparatus more broadly speaking. and to draw on some of these lessons and also look at their applicability to today we have joining john steve inskeep, the host of npr's morning edition. he has written on a number of national security issues from locations as cairo, a baghdad and tehran and he has written instant city, and life-and-death in karachi and he brings out fast breaking news. following the conversation john will be signing copies of his book. if he has not signed your copy already. but before he does please allow me to turn the microphone over

to john nagl and steve inskeep. [applause] >> thank you. it is an honor to be here, to share the stage with john nagl. it was wonderful to hear about is wide and various career. thinking of various aspects of that you have been to prestigious universities and served in the u.s. army which makes you an expert in a variety of large institutions and. >> i now read a school. if you think it is hard change and are tried changing the school. >> tradition. john nagl served in iraq. part of the eight your struggle the ended in 2011 when all u.s. troops, thank god we will never have to fight fair again. realize that is dark humor and but you go into tumor to paraphrase the defense secretary you fight a war with the tumor

you have and that is what we have at the moment. john went on to serve as head master of his school. in is interesting that he was an expert in counterinsurgency. someone concluded that was good preparation for watching after several hundred boys. >> thousand boys as anyone who has been parent of a teenage boy knows, they are one unsupervised hour away from absolute chaos. >> it would take an hour? >> one other piece of business before we get to the questions here and at once to mention that john nagl has a mother. he went off to war more than once and had to tell his mom that he was going and she did not physically restrain him. >> she is not very big. >> we are going to find out because she is here. would you stand for just a

moment please. [applause] [applause] >> you write in this book that we are likely going to be for some time in an age of unsatisfying wars. what you mean and why do you think that. >> the worse i have fought since desert storm which was the genesis of this book, my military service, my thinking about warfare. i came of age when the cold war was still hot and there was still adapt when the soviet union was still a threat and while i'm studying at oxford the first time the berlin wall came down and peace broke out all over the world and saddam hussein invaded iraq and maybe

he's hadn't quite broken out and i participated in desert storm which may be the last of the great battles. it was an unsettling, fascinating and invigorating experience to beat young and to participate in that kind of war but it also seemed to me between the end of the soviet union and the very rapid demise of the fourth largest army in the world, the american military, with some allied help it seems to me to indicate real watershed in the history of conflict. no one in their right mind would take on the united states again in conventional frontal, that given what they had just seen. so i believe future enemies of the united states, the north vietnamese had taken a stern, not how the iraqi army had so unsuccessfully attempted to challenge american military

might so i started thinking than about asymmetric warfare, enemies who would avoid america's strength and attack the weaknesses, would use their cultural skills, language knowledge, tribal bases of society, improvised weapons to defeat the greatest military machine the world has ever seen. the good news is i was right and the bad news is i was right. the wars i thought after desert storm were those kinds of wars. the world has seen the lesson very clearly that you can in fact attack america's most vulnerable points strategically, its national will to continue a fight by fighting asymmetric prolonged in regular wars. i believe there is every indication that these wars will continue. they continue today. steve mentioned the war in iraq.

peter has a good piece in the atlantic monthly on afghanistan, the ongoing war in afghanistan. he hopes the lessons of the mistakes we made at the end of the iraq war are not repeated in afghanistan, the we do not again as is currently u.s. national policy pull all american troops out of afghanistan at the end of 2017 because the taliban is waiting to come back, waiting for that opportunity and if we have -- i will stop here -- if there is a guiding principle of american national security policy in the wake of september 11th is not to yields territory to terrorists in which they can plan, prepare for and conduct operations against the united states and our allies. steve felt that in your act and we are fighting back against it. i hope we don't make this a mistake in afghanistan. >> you referred to withdrawing u.s. troops. we could argue whether it had to be done or not or should not have been done. was that the only mistake at the

end of the iraq war? >> the biggest mistake at the end of the iraq war. the single biggest mistake of american foreign policy was the invasion of iraq in march of 2003. and unnecessary war. thought i don't believe uncontrived information. i think the people putting the case together were scared, felt they had missed something on september 11th and we're putting together a worst-case scenario but there was no reason deterrents could not continue to work against saddam hussein if he had weapons of mass destruction. he had an extended beyond the program in 2003. that was the worst mistake, the invasion of iraq in 2003. didn't need to be done and it was going to be done should have been done much better that was. if we plan to topple the government of saddam hussein we should have had a plan for what we were going to do once we accomplish that objective.

that said, the next really big mistake was drawn all the american troops out at the end of 2011. i was in this room as my first annual conference as president in 2009 when brian burton and i read a paper arguing after the fire, the argued the united states need to maintain a long-term security presence in iraq for 2,025,000, have a spot in the iraqi army, and political leverage against the iraqi government, against undue sectarianism and that paper looks really good five years later. we failed to follow those precepts. much smarter than me and bryan said that. >> the most ingenious it is part of the recent keep u.s. troops in iraq was to provide political lever against the iraqi government. >> american troops are not just a security guarantee. they come with political

leverage. the governments under the threat when the resources or prospective threats want the resources that come with american soldiers. access to intelligence, access to air power, logistic support, technical expertise but also the attention of the u.s. government and they don't want to lose those resources. the presence of 20,000 americans in iraq in 2012 from 2012 until now would have pushed maliki away from his worst sectarian influences. general david petraeus, used the presence of american troops, use their leverage to do that when we have 150,000 troops in iraq. we have less leverage with 20,000 of the we would have had infinitely more than we ended up having and the large part of the reason for the success of isis

in iraq has been the sectarianism of the iraqi government over the past two years and the fact that the sunnis no longer trust the baghdad government. >> host: let me ask about the war you are discussing. we are being warned he will be an unsatisfying war. no easy options, no quick options, no dramatic change in the situation. could take a long time. does it have to be an unsatisfying war? do we have to plan for that? >> we shouldn't be planning for it as poorly as we are right now. the president has been -- the other mistake in between was the invasion of iraq 2003, smaller but self-inflicted was pulling all the troops out at the end of iraq in 2011. the next mistake was not arming syrian rebels in the summer of 12. that is a tougher call. the cia just released report

indicating correctly that groups often failed, you support the rebel groups in the absence of active u.s. troops engagement and supported overthrowing government. it is not as bright a line as we were. >> those three errors, the era we are making now the president correctly stated the threat presented by isis not just to iraq but a broader middle east to the united states and he correctly stated, put out a goal, not just the military or diplomatic service, defeating and ultimately destroying isis, he is correct in that. it was required to accomplish

that objective. and unless the president steps back from no. on the ground promise, american special forces teams, inside iraqi front-line battalions, they will not push isis back in any reasonable time frame. there is urgency to this, isis is within our range of baghdad international airport, we could not give up the airport. there is some urgency to this, and a basic end means strategic mismatch. you don't have to work at cnas to appreciate that. >> host: a small bank of resources or a huge one? another way of asking whether futures make a difference for a retired military officers suggesting the other day, suggesting a small number of

troops make a huge difference because they are not the most confidence or a very large presence that would have to be talked about? >> guest: the total number of troops we are talking about are not very different from the numbers we wrote about five years ago, 20 to 25,000. we currently have 16,000 troops, ten times that number would increase the performance of the iraqi army two or three times. the enemy they are facing is not particularly skilled, it is not particularly well equipped, at the end along supply line. with the presence of those advisers in a short period of months we could turn this thing around and pushed prices back to what used to be the border between syria and iraq, a figment of the imagination. that is where the game gets tired. >> host: you sound, i don't want to put too find a point at it,

widespread opinion? >> guest: i have no doubt reflect a widespread opinion. among specialists, serving officers, among those who fought for this ground in iraq, i'm stationed in iraq from september of 2003 to september 2004, a lovely little town, and towns in the provincial capital, fighting is going on in volusia for a lovely town of which you may have heard. a pretty nice neighborhood. we fought the enormously hard for every square meter of the ground, we fought against people we couldn't see, enemies we had not been trained to identify, and heavy losses while we were doing that. it would have taken very little to have kept that ground for the

iraqi government, the united states, the american taxpayer, that our children because we put this on the credit card, i going to pay for for the rest of their lives. 35,000 wounded, many grievously, into building that government in iraq. a small additional investment means you don't have to fight for that ground again. i am absolutely confident people i know will fight for that ground again. some will be heard doing it and that didn't need to happen. [ applause]

we drew heavily on the work of peter corelli had designed a diagram to describe the counterinsurgency campaign he was fighting in baghdad in the first cavalry division in baghdad, in the timeframe. it is so powerful. the diagram describes six lines of operation in counterinsurgency. have that operation to identify certainly building station security forces, assistant economic development, providing essential services to the population but the biggest barrel of all that encompasses all those other five is information operations. ultimately in this kind of a war what we are fighting for support of the population and the belief of the population that their future is brighter by standing against the insurgency and standing with the government.

what we failed, where the counterinsurgency campaign failed late in the game in iraq was after we withdrew all the american troops in 2011 and the maliki government quite spiteful the neglected, ignored, persecuted the sunni population of that country. should be no surprise that given the actions of that government over the past several years which conducts the clear information operation against itself, against the support of the sunni population for that government that isis was able to cut through the sunni population. they thought they would be better off with isis than with their own government. >> they cut a wide swath of information. it has been suggesting that the headings of americans by isis or in some ways a sign of weakness. they could not strike out at the united states in any more effective way but there was a

powerful information message being set. >> enormously powerful information message and we should be enormously concerned. isis was thrown out of al qaeda. isis is the hot ticket, it was the startup, the entrepreneurial terrorist jihad organization in the world right now. it is attracting jihadis from all over the world including young girls from england flocking to this jihadis banner. extraordinarily effective information operation campaign and the most worrying part of that for homeland security operators was a lot of those people have western passports. they will be enormously difficult to find and catch. so in some ways what isis is doing is recreating what the

afghan militia had been created in the 1980s in the war against the soviet union after the invasion of afghanistan, created jihad central and isis is jihad central today. information campaign is far better than ours. >> you returned the drafting of this famous counterinsurgency manual and you know it there should have been a chapter on operations and there wasn't. is mentioned but not highlighted and that makes me wonder how you think the united states is doing in information operations. >> the biggest flaw of the u.s. government as a hole in the last 15 years of the war against radical islamists has been the failure to create an effective information operations organization and conduct effective information operations. nicole was primarily an economic

war, secondarily a military war, only a third war of ideas and the information agency did very good work. in the information operations campaign. at an end of the cold war we disbanded u.s. information agency, we have not recreated in a war which is primarily a war of information. that failing is the single biggest government failing, the military, i think, as only a small degree of responsibility for that, the military's big failing its failure to focus on building the capability to drain and advise military forces. as a current events in iraq demonstrate how likely to be the most often employed and most useful in american military power over the next 50 years.

>> hollywood that as a layman. one way i could read the news is the united spend some -- united states build up an iraqi army and as soon as they were left alone they fell apart. which would imply the money was wasted. was it? >> most of the money was wasted. much of the economic development money was wasted. much of the money we spent sending american troops improperly trained for counterinsurgency was wasted. a lot of the actions many units took including some actions my own unit took exacerbated the insurgency rather than clamping get down. >> on the macro scaled the trillion dollars, $2 trillion we spend much was wasted. the money we spent training, equipment, raising the iraqi army allowed him to depart in 2011 with an iraq that was recently stable, reasonably

democratic and that the president of the united states and the vice president of the united states proclaimed as an american success story. it seems so very long ago but what they failed to do with having made that enormous investment, the continuing investment, a life-insurance policy to rein in the sectarian influences of the iraqi government and continue to help standing up that iraqi army. my first book, war and rebellion is messy and slow, these long, slow, hard, and satisfying works but after the second world war, the good work, we still have american troops in germany, italy and japan, we still have american troops in korea. we don't have them in vietnam because we lost that one though they allow us to station a

carrier if their. we have american troops in bosnia. when it is important enough, when in issue is important enough for the united states to send its ground forces in that territory is important enough for the united states to continue to leave a few of them there to keep everything pointed in the right direction. this is what empires have done since the romans. it is what the united states has to do to prevent a third iraq war in my lifetime which is what we're seeing now. [applause] >> host: one other question and then i will go to the audience and i hope you can help us add to the discussion. it has to do with an anecdote you tell in the book, a bit of history i did not know. in 2004, four military contractors were captured in volusia, they were horribly

mangled. how the u.s. military should respond. you write that the commander in that area at the time wanted to go in a particular way but he was told to go in another way. what happened? >> probably the greatest fighting general of our generation, was in the first marine division. team made the model of the first marine division, know better friend, no worse enemy, first do no harm and so when you have a marine two star who understands that you can do damage when conducting military operations and that can be counterproductive, you have a remarkable man which he is and there is a reason they worked on the army and marine corps counterinsurgency. just because they fight in the

same time on the same back doesn't mean they talk to each other about how to do it. madison did pretty good work. he wanted the practice counterinsurgency on how the individuals were, who killed those four contractors and he wanted to do fairly precise raids to bring those people to justice. he was told that that was not an option. he was told to assault fallujuah with everything of the marine corps had. that decision made one of general madison's have head did the unbelievable, something i could not believe could be done, a united all of iraq behind a single idea, kill every american here. the united against us, the siege

of volusia. and as close as we ever came, to losing the war in iraq and a result of that decision. so much of that first part of the war, from 2003 until 2007 is encapsulated by that. there were people who knew how to do it differently but they could not find a way to get their voices heard until the entire war was over. >> i wonder if there's a lesson here, you have been talking about not using enough resources. >> we oversswung the pendulum. the first six years of the george bush administration and overreliance on military force, first six use of the obama administration and under reliance on military force.

the bush administration corrected in the final two years and the best individual signal was the hiring of bob gates, the best secretary of defense we ever had, i am extremely hopeful, as we spent lots of time talking about iraq, we do what is required to defeat isis in iraq and we learn from this and make different choices in afghanistan so we don't have to fight a third afghan war in my life. >> let me invite your questions on that cheerful note. what i call on you if you would stand and say your name is so we can get to know each other. icy hand there. i don't see the body attached to it but you got the microphone. go ahead. >> you asked about the battle for ideas. i wondering in terms of cultural

understanding of the american political establishment and specifically as an example of the need to get a status of forces agreement in iraq where publicly the protest asian was we don't want one, it is not domestically palatable for iraqis to say they want americans to stay but those in the know who are alive, how does that dynamic play out in the future for iraq and afghanistan? >> the question is the status of forces agreement which is one of the sticking points in negotiations about withdrawing americans from iraq in 2011. it was americans who insisted on a parliamentary agreement on those cellphone rather than just a signature from the prime minister. i would ask any american how

easy it is for our president to get a treaty through congress. as we contemplate what we are asking the iraqi people to do having had their government overthrown and been occupied, a very large, violent -- improved over time was pretty flagrantly brutal. asking their representatives to sign up and ask for that force to stay is an unrealistic expectation. i would also point out that we somehow managed to put 1600 advisers into iraq today without a status of forces agreement so we could have found a way to get this done. the good news and there is comparatively good news, the afghan people very much want american forces to stay. afghanistan, a war that is not talked about as much as it

should be, and enormously different war, it has seen extraordinary improvement in quality of life for the afghan people for the last 15 years particularly with the women of afghanistan have done remarkably well. afghanistan wants american forces to stay, african -- they don't just want american forces after 2017 but would be extremely irresponsible for the united states to do otherwise, something i agree with. >> in the red, go right ahead. away from the microphone. c-span wishes to hear your words. and introduce yourself. >> i have a question. you mention the decision, outright failures by the united states. what are the responsibilities of our allies and the iraqi army?

>> fair question. early in my career i studied nato. i wrote my senior -- senior thesis at west point on the nature of david petraeus's death -- desk when he was working for general jack allen at supreme headquarters in europe. and sell i have some sense of nato, our most important alliance but our nato partners are not meeting the requirements they agreed upon in terms of sharing gross domestic product in national security. end a contract loved dearly, and it is taking itself off the table, and to project power internationally as a result of the choices it made economically.

so our allies are willing to follow if we lead, but have a very limited capability to do so in most cases. the counterexample is turkey which has enormous capability to intervene but for political reasons of its non. the iraqi army has lost -- it is easy to point out the mistakes the iraqi army or iraqi allies the stories against isis have been heartbreaking, without food and water and ammunition. most importantly without their commanders. in most cases commanders who have been appointed by prime

minister maliki directly, they were in the wrong sector, he was more afraid of a coup than he was of a hostile invasion and he is paying the price for that. for all the failings of the iraqi army i have seen enormous courage from them. they have been fighting for an enormously long time. i believe with american advisers and american support, more focused american air power they could achieve great things. >> somebody on this side of the room, the one with the two fingers. that gentleman is also fine. >> quick two part question. do you see parallels between what is happening in iraq now and the spanish-american war which started with a splendid little war in the last decade of the century and ended up with this country called the philippines which we didn't

expect and what we do with it and we end up with the ten year insurgency against muslim brothers, that is the first part. there is a book written by the british commander of the arab region. and he wrote from living with the arabs and the other armies that in arab countries is easy to conquer and impossible to occupy. anything we learned since you wrote that in the 1950s? >> as a fellow military historian, there is more continuity than discontinuity in military history. i like the analogy to the spanish-american war and the successful american counterinsurgency campaign in the philippines that followed, almost in arguably you have to

go back to the philippine insurrection at the turn of the last century before -- as the best example of an army led counterinsurgency campaign prior to the one in iraq in 2007-2011. there are interesting historical parallels. there was the wonderful, edited wonderful collection, a book that compiled success stories and found successful practices travel in packs. there are practices the working counterinsurgency. we should study that history as much as we study napoleon. is likely to be relevant at the naval academy in annapolis and georgetown. the problem with holding an arab country is enormously difficult. my favorite insurgent lawrence

accomplished great things as an insurgent because middle east arab countries are so hard to hold. my hope is isis is about to find that out. i believe isis has -- they will not be that hard to push back once we take it seriously just before i came over here our friends at the centers for strategic and budgetary assessment released a study comparing the current air war over iraq and syria to the air war over serbia and the average number of the lead at tax in this war is seven. the average daily number of attacks over serbia was 120. we literally have not yet begun to fight. i hope we start soon. >> in the blue shirt. >> doug bob brooks of the

international stability operations association. my question is about libya, another splendid war was very successful initially. is this one of those times we are not using enough military power? what should we be doing to influence events in this one? >> this is an example of a war the united states should not have involved itself in. in the last chapter of the book i make an argument for strong capability to conduct stability operations and counterinsurgency, i believe that is an essential tool the u.s. government as a whole, not just the military but the u.s. government needs to have. i didn't say it is a tool that should be used very rarely, and i propose fairly strict rules governing the american intervention in conflict. i do not believe the humanitarian crisis in libya had risen to a level of genocide.

i do not believe that the rebellion in libya really affected american idol national interests so i disapprove of the decision to intervene in libya. in particular, i disapprove of intervening in libya without having any plan for what followed. st. augustine taught us that the purpose of a war is to build a better piece. don't fight the war if you don't have a plan to build a better piece that follows and if you don't understand it, that is a generational task and it will require american. on the ground for a generation. sometimes it is worth it. if you were brutally attacked from afghanistan by al qaeda and the taliban won't hand them over you have a responsibility to overthrow the taliban and having overthrown it a responsibility to create a better country fare that will never again harbor

international terror. but that is the only war of the 21st century that i believe was necessary until now, this third war in iraq. >> let's go way back, how about the gentleman who is standing there. go-ahead. >> thanks for being here. i am the marine fellow at cnas this year. i am curious about your thoughts as to how adequately positioned our services are, the army and marine corps going forward for the long term to train and educate our forces so that we are not writing the next field manual during the next conflict. and if you do think there are changes that should happen what

those would be. >> let me say one good thing before i say and other bad thing. your service, the marine corps has done something interesting. it is requiring every marine, not just every marine officer but every marine to be assigned a foreign language and work on that language and they provide proficiency hey to marines who has certain dates on fat. that is an enormously wise investments. i wish my army would do that. my arby is making a very good decision. i was able to get my ph.d. at awkward -- oxford in preparation for a teaching assignment. the army created a number of strategic fellows who study counterinsurgency and wrote a letter of recommendation for a

former cnas military fellow who is engage in that process. we are making some good investments, relatively inexpensive, long-term high return investments. that is good news. the bad news is the danger and the damage, the actual damage being done by sequestration to the military forces of the united states. sequestration was intentionally designed to be so stupid that no member of congress would ever allow it to happen. they would do their jobs and make tough calls about taxes and spending rather than be forced to hold a gun to their own heads. unfortunately congress really is that dumb and they pulled the trigger and the people who have been hurt by sequestration i department of defense gets the biggest share of the budget, takes the biggest share of the cuts and we are cutting our

ground forces to level but i believe is dangerous given the world we are living in, given the world i think we are likely to be living in for the foreseeable future. >> you write in this memoir about the importance of arabic speakers in iraq. explain it to people who have not been in that situation. what difference has it been? >> you are operating not just blind but deaf and dumb in a roomful of people who are trying to kill you who are occasionally succeeding. the failures of the united states to properly harnessed one of our greatest strengths as a nation and i will quote that classic of strategic stocks, bill murray in stripes, we are americans, our ancestors were kicked out of every decent country in the world.

america is this polyglot country every platoon operating in a counterinsurgency campaign needs two interpreters, full time, living with them. i have at best half a dozen taskforces we have not taken that problem seriously enough. we got better over time. this was a fight in the pentagon to put energy into the system to improve the quality, capability, especially the ones with clearances, american citizens. we could get clearances, they were a combat multiplier of the

first quarter. we should be teaching everybody who works in foreign policy a foreign language. doesn't matter which one even. but a foreign language, a foreign culture so they are able to understand that there is something different from the way the united states operate and we should be taking advantage of the native speakers and also change immigration policy to make it easier to keep the foreign-language speakers who come to the shores particularly those in math, science and engineering degrees. [applause] >> what time is it? so that we know. we can take a couple more questions. right here in the white shirt. go-ahead. >> the microphone throwing skills are earned.

>> microphone catching skills. in the new york times, earlier this week, saying president obama instructed the cia to do longitudinal historical case study to see when the u.s. supported foreign insurgencies and if that is successful overtime. the confusion was that no, this hadn't been a successful practice with marginal increase in success if there were advisers on the ground. this apparently was very influential about president obama's reluctance to support syrian opposition, what is your reaction to the cia report and to you think i got the history wrong? >> over here, kristin and i ran 2.0 together, wonderful to have some veterans here in the room.

thank you for your service keeping nate and i if not in the straight and narrow at least out of jail most of the time. the cia report was correctly cautionary. the question is whether assad was bad enough that it was in u.s. financial interests to try to overthrow him. and we had i believe will window of opportunity in the summer of 12 when the assessment of professionals i respect very highly, the director of central intelligence leon panetta, hillary clinton, secretary of state, as good a national security team of any party as we ever had. phenomenal team who looked at costs and benefits to likelihood

and made the assessment. these are high risk operations. they do not often succeed. the more support we put behind them the more likely day are to succeed. it is a question of how important this objective is to us and are we willing even if it is loafers on the ground, the cia, boots on the field, have a degree of plausible deniability that soldiers to not. i don't disagree this is a high-risk operation. that was our risk worth taking. i continue to believe that had we done so, in particular had we done so while maintaining a more capable presence on the iraqi side of the border we would not be in the mess we are today. these are hard questions as

someone just said. this was not as clear a case for me as was the decision to put all american troops out of iraq in 2011. i am comfortable saying that was a mistake. >> setting aside the cia study, there was a public study by a couple of academic published earlier this year looking at a century of uprisings. peaceful uprisings far more successful than violent uprisings and even when violent uprising succeed they often became a. >> an important subject to be studying because for many reasons we are likely to see far more uprisings over the next 50 years that we have over the next decade. for the arab spring, not a coincidence or engendered in part by the energy put into the system by the invasion of iraq

and for subsequent war but the power of information technology to allow people to peaceably or not peaceably to assemble against a government and they provide an ability for people to understand more easily how bad their governments are. and i predict as climate change continues, as population pressure continues to increase, resource scarcity continues to rear its ugly head over the next 30, 40, 50 years we will continue to see uprisings, violence and nonviolence, some will succeed, some will fail and in some cases we want them to succeed against assad, in others we want them to fail as against the baghdad government. it is incredibly important that we learn the lessons of the last

decade, that we not intentionally burn the books of counterinsurgency as we did after vietnam. >> go on. >> and that we make more careful choices about when it is in america's interest to support or not support these revolutions. >> i jokingly asked at the beginning, referred at the beginning to affect the that counterinsurgency training that went off the ramp in school. it sounds like a joking question, perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. has run the schools taught you anything more than you knew before about counterinsurgency. >> great question. and has it ever. i have the privilege of running a boy school in pennsylvania. 1,000 boys from jr. a

kindergarten to monsters, 308 pounds and likely going to harvard. he can do the math. so can harvard. the boys have a wonderful brotherhood and they call it that, they formed long bonds over 13 years, the most importance to touche affiliation of their lives. that broke code can be enormously powerful. one of the things i am working on with the boys, i pick a virtue every year. we have all walks of virtues and

the schools that we aspire to. my virtue last year was respect, this year courage. i asked my boys to have the courage to speak up even if it means reporting one of your brothers. if that brother is doing something we dislike, the business of raising children, my focus is raising boys in the world we live in today, it is far harder to grow up in the world we grow up in so i have enormous respect for the challenges they face. i am hopeful i can use my understanding of tribal relationships, counterintelligence to help them use their superpower is for good. >> another good answer to that question. one last question.

you may have other questions, you are often involved in public events like this but before we do, there is a bracelet on your wrist. some people may have noticed that. you understand what it is? >> i had the privilege to serve in iraq with a remarkable group of young men and remarkable young women as well, playing increasingly important role in our all volunteer military. we literally couldn't have done the last 15 years without them. mostly men and names on this bracelets are -- they fell in the counterinsurgency campaign in 2003, 2004. those young men died doing what their country asked them to do. their country had not fully fallen through. certainly had not prepared them for what it was we were asking

them to do but they made absolutely heroic efforts to do when they believe their nation wanted them to do. on occasions like this, to remind me of them and to feel enormously fortunate to be a voice for them and to remind audiences composed of people like you, mostly national security folks, to remember those young men who paid the prices for the mistakes our government makes and to remember to take care as our greatest wartime president said, of the widow and orphan and those who come back with invisible wounds. we all have an enormous responsibility having sent them to war and asked them to do something for us to take care of them when they come home.

[applause] >> "knife fights: a memoir of modern war in theory and practice" is available on amazon. >> we are at politics and prose tomorrow night at 7:00 if you haven't had enough. >> thanks, folks, thanks for your questions. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching book t v on c-span2 with the top nonfiction books and not is every weekend. booktv, television for serious

readers. >> this weekend on booktv, i students getting value in their college education? we take a look at how and why texas is a red state. .. >> tonight we're rely