of men? >> this is a a debate that even though it was discussed at honolulu in july of 1944, itwa really does not get resolved until that fall, and really it really doesn't get resolved until there is a final move toward now. i think it a nutshell you are right, macarthur is fixated on the philippines all through the course of the pacific war therea are these two different lines of attack. nemitz and the central pacific and arthur in the southwest pacific. you have to remember that thed south pacific operations on the canal are in between both of those fronts. every time the joint chiefs of staff wants to decide between the priority of one front over another, quite frankly they kick the can down the road and they're still kicking the can down the road in the fall of 1944. macarthur, early on said that the philippines were important

to the drive to get into the dutch east indies, cut the lines of communication between the natural resources and the flowe of oil up to japan and certainly he had a strong point about that. by the time he has gotten back to the philippines and really gone ahead and moves in to. [inaudible] in 1945, those operations as first natural resources and everything, the lines of supply to japan have already been cut by american submarines. the industries to which they run have been pounded by b-29 a nuth bombers. so the only thing at the end that i would say the nutshell is that, there seems to be good evidence that despite the joint chiefs not able to decide one way or the other that that twin

driver across the pacific to keep the japanese off balance him, there is absolutely no question that a both fronts fronts there were some horrific battles.nd it of >> going into macarthur with the savior conflicts, i shall return as opposed to week, is there any discussion as a whole army and navy behind this, who are you? , >> well, i think it goes to the core of douglas macarthur. there was a suggestion a suggestion after he said i shall return. there was a suggestion by fdr marshall, wendy be great if we said we shall return. that sounds a lot more collaborative, but that is not douglas macarthur's personality. to. to his credit, he took it personally that he would go back and do it. it was a terse personal charge to him. to your point earlier dan about operations and things, you have to remember that macarthur's father's father in the civil war which is very begin the book, because i think it's instructive

and a lot of people have written about this, it's instructiveivil that his father really leads this great charge up missionary ridge during the civil war and it may not have been the greatest charge of all time but by the time he got done telling his son douglas about it it had became the greatest charge of all time and it was i, it wasleh not we went up the ridge, it was either the way up the ridge and it was i shall return. yes sir. m >> to what degree of venting, because the battle of midway for a lot of people seems to be a major turning point, at least in slowing the japanese advance. to what degree did macarthur participate in that or was that appear early naval decision? >> is a purely naval decision o that come out of nemitz central specific operation. macarthur is not involved at all in the battle of midway. the precursor of course world

war ii pacific historians know is the battle of the coral sea. macarthur come about a monthfore before midway.as macarthur is involved on the periphery of that at least, at least the australian naval faces under his command word likely to use the command periphery, they are are more actively engaged in that even though the main fleet elements came out of nemitz's command. >> yes sir, i want to commend you for talking about macarthur's utilization of code breaking. i -- my only problem with that is that he did not use it when he was in the philippines. station cast in the philippines, he had one of the purple machines, pearl harbor operation or the pearl harbor intelligence station hypo did not. commander who is in charge of the station cast operation in

the philippines that use round-the-clock code raking routines along with army, navy and marine personnel were well aware of what was going on with the japanese.printing they also utilized information from the british with radio fingerprinting.at. somehow, somewhere along going macarthur forgot to use code breaking early on. i would like you to respond to that. but let me just mention this. you have short and camel that can at pearl harbor for not being prepared or whatever, they they did not have nearly the intelligence assets that macarthur had in the philippines. macarthur gets the medal of honor, and, and these two guys get canned. can you respond to that. >> we could do a seminar on that for about a week. the latter part of that in terms

of clark feel and what happened in the philippines, right about a lot in the book. it has been dissected but i do spend considerable time on that. the code breaking operations, i don't mean to say that he did not use them, but i think it is sorta like the combined operations. it is the it is the best answer i could give you. it's something that he is aware of, it's going on, but he really hasn't realized how important they are going to become. in fact quite in fact quite frankly, i think the time thatnt he does realize how important code breaking is, it is is age george kenney and george kenny's air force that uses intelligence to find the japanese convoy that is a relief convoy going from new guinea in the battle of bismarck see and really up liberates the convoy.. it's kinda like seeing that power and the power that

intelligence i think makes a macarthur pay more attention to it.t i would not call it toy, but in the days of corregidor when they are reading this stuff, again macarthur with this world war i mentality where he got intelligence of world war i he was going out in the frontnt trenches. i think it's one of the many pieces of the combined operation that he has got to get use to >>d rely on. >> to have time for one more? one last question. >> considering macarthur's formants with the army and roosevelt's comment about -- alchemy kept him around in 1933? was there any indication that roosevelt tried to move thems th out? >> the short answer to that is that roosevelt keeps macarthur on for an additional year as chief of staff rethink two reasons. one, he wants to position and

one story about seniority he wants to position his chosen successor to follow macarthur. the second part of it is that roosevelt is already working to, and the depths of the depression begin to prepare the country for some level of mobilization for world war ii. it is great to have a conservative republican leading guy go up to the hill as army chief of staff and take some of the flak when saying that our military budget needs to be increase. do not the military budget was in 1935? the total military? the total military budget for the army part, something like $400,000. it is rather incredible and that. i think there were reasons to keep him around. >> there's no indication to try to get rid of him.

>> i'm sure sitting in the house not too far from here there are many times that roosevelt wish he could get rid of macarthur. there are always reasons why didn't. >> i'll be glad to sign books. thank you all for coming. >> every night on c-span through august, book tv is in prime time. tomorrow we will highlight our guess on in-depth and afterwards. including will haygood, hiv researcher, natalia holt and journalists and political commentator, heather mcdonnell. that starts at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> every weekend on book tv we hit at 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on c-span2. fox news channel, the five cohost eric bowling looks to the

values and virtues to build america as a great nation in his book "wake up america". why we need them more than ever. at 10:00 p.m. eastern on afterwards, karen greenberg, director fordham university center national security talked about legal questions arising from policies and laws enacted to fight the u.s. war and terrorism in her book "rogue justice" ms. greenberg is interviewed. >> i think it is important for the american people to understand that there are nuances to these cases that there's an entire spectrum of cases for those that are accused of wanting to plots and evidence like a subway bomber in new york to those who are just aspirational. >> at 7:00 p.m. eastern on sunday, carol anderson discusses her book "white rage" and it chronicles black progress in w history has been that with what she called white rage. ms. anderson suggested in her book that opposition to the

advancement of blacks still exist today. go to booktv.org for the complete we can schedule. >> good morning. welcome in the morning. i'm on the faculty the political science department and also a research fellow at the pisa war center. c it is my great pleasure and honor to have the conversation with the 2016 winner of the recipient and winter of the famed knowledge history award. what we are going to do today is have a conversation.n. you read his bio i'm sure he is a very famous he helped set up

time magazine addition, he lives now in singapore and works for bloomberg. he has written this book called midnight here a. what we wanted wanted to do today is on pack this book and i intentionallyly have not read the entire bile because i think it would be more of interest to the audience to for us to have a conversation about the book in perspective. so if deals with events that happen in countries far away, over 79 years ago but i would contend that your book is so timely and relevant to where we are today. it connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day, the war in

afghanistan, the war in iran, america's engagement with the world, america's leadership in transforming or help trying to transform countries. what what the 21st century will bring in asia. the role of religion in when th conflicts and if i might say, how important it is for politicians when they're running for office or otherwise to be t very careful in what they say. i was born along time ago, not that long ago but i want to take it back a few centuries to india where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed a multicultural civilization withe hindus, muslims, christians, all living together, worshiping at each other shrine. this is especially true of muslims and hindus who did that,

even today you can go to virtually every village in v pakistan or india and you will find hindus worshiping at moves one shrines and vice versa. their intermarriages, when the partition of india took place after 150 years of british presence in india and another 200 - 300300 years before that. when the partition took place it was a hugely significant event. but the point that i want to bring out before we get into conversation is nothing as simple as it looks. this was not strictly all religious conflict. i will give you a personal example. an uncle of mine rose to be the head of the indian air force. ms

his family, like many muslim families did not leave india because they thought it was on. so in the pakistani world here's my uncle leading the indian air force against the pakistani air force, muslim to muslim. patriots on both sides, bothal owing allegiance to their own countries, but the big point i want to make is as important as religion seems to appear, thatat is not always the case.killed, i want to case by asking you for hundreds and hundreds of years these people have lived together. hindus and muslims. in 1947, millions get injured and killed. why? >> i'm glad you. why? >> i'm glad you started with an easy one. [laughter] i'll give you one word answer, power. what changed in 1947, what 1947, what was different from the previous 150 years was that for the first time, power was offered. the british were leaving, they

made it clear for several years at that point they were headed out and did not have the money to maintain their empire in india, they didn't have the political will to do it and they were not wanted there. hindus and muslims had lived together. there had always been tensions but there were fairly limited and local. good have small riots break out in a particular city or another and it would usually last a day or two. you. you did not have this mass scale of violence. that you had in 1947. what happened was because the brits were leaving the muslim community in india, the political leaders in the muslim community in india saw future in which they would be a permanent permanent minority. there be cut out of power in india. under a parliamentary system thb congress power led by mahatma gandhi which was dominated by hindus would always win. they would would get the majority of votes wherever they live. so the muslim parties would be confined to impotence.

in the system they fear that itw was almost winner take all system. if you ran the government your friends, family and cronies we get the contracts. you would write the textbooks and school, in school, you would write the rules of worship and so on. so the political leaders, the leader of pakistan argued that the only week muslims could be saved after the british left was if they had a state of their own where they were the majority, where they ran the government. that was at the top level.ese tn it happens with political leaders as you set your to be very careful about how you talk about these things away say. there are paint these pictureshe for their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they did not get their own state. not only would she be forced to

convert, your daughters would be kidnapped and raped, your grandfathers your grandfathers would be killed, and so on. this filters down from the top levels of the political leadership in new delhi, once you get to the ground level it the message becomes very simple and very simple it is killer or be killed. about a year before partition. terrible riots broke out in the state of calcutta. it's unclear who started them but something around 10,000 - 15,000 people were killed over four days. this gave indians a vision of what they thought would happen if they do not defend themselves. so they started turn themselvest and organize. you have to remember this was just after world war ii so you had a lot of young men who had been trained in the military and fought in africa, europe, asia and a lot of them still have weapons. so unlike previous riots when violence broke out after the british left, these organized

squads you could almost call them death squads were much more effective and deadly than previous attacks. they were not fighting with vista knives, they are using machine guns of the death toll skyrocketed. >> that's an interesting series of dots i tried to connect. let me ask you that a lot of the trouble, i grew up in bombay. so. so my family and i went through the partition but there was scarcely a whimper there and what i wanted to ask you was if you could on pack that part of your book where you talk about the killings. why were they localized? why did it happen all over? >> this is important to remember and i think people have the idea that the british left and all the sudden violence and riots broke all of the continent. it was not not that at all. my family, my father is here was also a child in bombay at the time. a no memory of any violence.

it was most of india was unaffected by this.im there was one particular. providence which is now split between india and pakistan, this is where the border was going to go, they decided to draw the borders and it was split half-and-half. so a new border was so there is a third community in that trance seven who is a small community about 5,000,000 people the border would split their community in half and historically there is a memory of how they had suffered under muslim rulers centers ago, much more recently in the spring of 1947 as part of this ruling series of riots, muslim mobs had massacred 7000 so within just a

few months of memory they had a vision of what happened to them if the british did this border and they found themselves on thv wrong side of the line. also there overrepresented in the army and heavily militarized. so there death squad as it were started the violence after the border was strong. that is widespread very quicklys but it was very concentrated in this area. it was muslims on the indian side of the punjab were pushed out and you had this movement of people something like 14,000,000 people cross eyed to the border over the span of a few months. you had mile-long convoys of mo, refugees, 250,000 people in aa convoy essentially defenseless. there are some soldiers trying to guard them but they would come and swoop in and were able to massacre several hundred thousand people at a time. it was a combination of communities in the punjab that

provoke them. >> by the way i wanted to commend you and your dad for still calling it bombay. but i was going to say, so this he didn't do, muslim issue came to prominence along the border areas, but it cannot spread the rest of the country. >> does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was whether a local fact having to do more with territory and advantage in revenge? >> i think it's right, i think it's easy to think of this is a a hindu muslim conflict but you have to remember the leaves leaders of india and pakistan were completely secular. they were not religious at all. he barely knew the quran, he he drank alcohol for bed by islam,

he was a man of fine taste. very dapper. nehru was a cambridge socialist. he did not believe in any of this hindu mumbo-jumbo.t wasn't so it wasn't about religion for, them. it was a get about territory, about community, it, it was fear that was driving them. they were afraid that they were going to be another community was going to be massacred. the other thing that's interesting to remember to hisot the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas that eventually became pakistan. in northwestern northeastern india where muslims are majority, they were majority, they were in power, they did not have to fear what happened after the british left. it was muslims in central india, southern india, other places who really push the idea of

pakistan. some of them moved when it was created, many others did not. many indian muslims never wanted pakistan to be created at all and live in india. >> so just a quick, personal anecdote on this issue of how important a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan, so my dad at that time was an up-and-coming screenwriter. he had not yet made a big movie. he was very young and he was having a hard time and he got an offer to partition from pakistan to produce a movie. he said great, this, this is going to be my big opportunity and my mother forces freedom fighter and so o an indian she said not on your life. you are are not going to that horrible country to start a country. they said we don't have any money we have two children and he went out for his walk to think about this and he cameat y back and so he told me when we are up that his mother had her suitcases packed and he said

what are you doing? and he said well you go to pakistan to make money, i'm going back to my mother. >> so that is how intense a lot, as you point out the family salt. the but the question i have for you then is i want to focus on therefore the importance of leaders and the importance of the british. do you think that of the british had stuck it out and said no, we're going to work this out, as they had many times over 150 or 200 years, or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out, do you think there is the feeling on the leader's eye, on the british side for a partition to happen? >> i think there are mistakes made on all said's. there there is failures, there is guilt toat everyone. you cannot prove a counterfactual obviously but even if partition had not happen there is no proof that india would estate unify. these these

pressures still would've beenene there, it's possible five years or ten years later could've broken up along different lines. the other thing to remember is that in 1947, the british directly controlled half of the subcontinent, the other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs who legally were independent and could choose to join india or pakistan. but if the british had just let them unify they may have decided to declare it. >> all of the leaders made yeari mistakes. they did try to compromise. the british for your tried to bring the two sides together and in about a year earlier, the spring of 1946 they come up with a compromise, very complicateds ar rickety compromise where you would have a unified india with a weak central government and then the muslim areas would havo a certain degree of autonomy and then the individual providences would have other powers. it was a face-saving way for

everybody to agree. they did agree. but, then almost immediately after they agree to it nehru, the party leader was at a press conference and he was being pressured by people from within his own party saying why are you giving up all this a ptolemy to the muslim areas? we have five for decades to kick the british out and this is our time to rule, and he said something stupid like don't worry, we're just saying this now wants the british leave we will do whatever we want. of course for for jenna, for any muslims hearing this you had to think how can we trust these people they'll sign this document now, was the british leave they'll be in power and they will turn on us. so they backed out of the agreement, and then it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. they did try the british kept

trying up until the summer 47, they kept trying to get back to that compromise, the americans were putting heavy pressure on both sides to come back to thate compromise, they were very worried from the beginning of the cold war that they wanted a united india india to help the defense against the soviet union. they want the army to be broke up. between the time they struck a compromise in the summer 47 that is when the ride started to spread across the country so feelings were getting embittered at the ground level and the tensions and divisions between communities were growing and they grew between the leaders themselves too. you have to remember they had known each other for 30 years. r his father had been good friends together they had argued with each other, they had friends in common, you would think that they could have found common ground, even their personal relations grew very bitter over

this time. >> i went to go to a moment and open it up for people test questions but i want to smell to close this part of the conversation to think about history. and i had the pleasure of interviewing general gordon sullivan, the chair of the board of trustees at the university a few weeks ago, and he impressed on me how important it was for him at norwich to get this history major and a huge liberal and i use the word liberal and a classical sense, education and he said without an understanding of history there's very little you can do is first making sound decisions at the top levels of any chain of command. so i wanted to take a sword now, we spent trillions of dollars in the strongest army in the world and taken every hill that we have wanted it to but we have

not been able to prevail against an enemy, the taliban with no gdp, same thing with iraq and you can can carry that through, so my question to his in america we have the same, all that's history, right when someone says something that you think is a relevant you say that's history, think we ought to do away with that saying and i wanted you to take now what happened in 1947 and if you what is it a masterly in your book, by the way am raising pressure here see gone by multiple copies of his book, you need to buy at least six each. so so i wanted to say, can you take us forward from there and connect this to what's happening in in afghanistan especially but the importance of history. >> is important to is i think, for americans in particular you mentioned afghanistan, the reason we're still fighting in afghanistan, 15 years later

almost is only because then televangelist had a safe haven to retreat to a cross the border in pakistan. they have a certain degree of support from the pakistani military covertly there tolerated and allowed to regroup in me and the leadershia is safe there and so on. that has allowed them to keep this insurgency ally and they can keep it alive forever as long as they have a safe haven. what is pakistan to this? whether they take billions of dollars of aid from the u.s. and then support the taliban? why do they support what you will call terrorist groups that by the indians in kashmir but alsod conduct attacks like the one in mumbai, and wire they building up their new clear arsenal so rapidly and creating smaller battlefield nuclear weapons and so on? they do all this because they

view india as a mortal threat still. 70 years later. they do not believe, the pakistani military still treats india as an existential threat, they don't believe in their existence or want them to survive. and would like to see them fail and be reabsorbed within india. so that mentality is nothing new. that came out of this a few months in 1947. it was cemented within the pakistani establishment, it is wide, the pakistani military has been able to rule because every time they take power they say you need us to defend you against india, we are going to protect the country. they have blended this with islam, they have used excuses but that is their justification is to draw the majority of the budget for the military set you need us to defend against india. so for americans or any outside powers it's in poor and to understand the roots of mentality work comes from. we also need to understand how it's changed over the decades and develop.

but you cannot start unwind until you know where it came from. and you accept that at least when it's created there's certain degree of legitimacy for it. there was leaders in 1947 who did not want pakistan to be created to do or exist. they would be happy to see it fail. so it's not entirely crazy.to ap it is not the truth now, indians have no interest in taking over pakistan, quite the opposite. it did come out of something real that we need to accept and understand. and then for india pakistan it's interesting that you bring it up i agree feel that sense, on sense, on the other hand, americans also have a very healthy ability to examine their own history and to be self-critical and not feel like they have to hide things or sugarcoat them, or ignore them, they can admit what happened in the civil war on their shelves of books about this. then they can move forward.

indian and pakistani still have trouble with this. i've given lots of readings inoo india, the majority of the population is very young prone after partition, they should not have any personal connection to this, yet the phrase they use, the way they talk about pakistanis and vice versa is no different than 1947. it's still a sense of paranoia and suspicion.ar it's because they are taught to version of history, it's very different than this. the indians get one version the pakistanis get s another version and they are mutually incompatible. fault neither side really wants to admit that they could partly be at fault, that maybe gandhi was not entirely saint and maybe he did make mistakes.so u and pakistanis would say maybe jenna was a little power-hungry and so on. until they do that and can come up was some sort oe joint narrative that assigns

blame tall sides, i don't think they are going to be up for it either. that is dangerous for the rest of us. we have. we have to hope that they will get their. >> before it open it toth questions i want to give you an opportunity, was there a time when you wrote the book or after , that you set back and said you know, this really camew out well and i'm glad i did it? besides when you -- >> the only moment that happened was when i got my first review in the new york review of books and they called it superb. >> will tell us about was there a personal thought. you wrote this book. >> it was a long process. i started working on this but five years ago in spring of 2011. i've been working at newsweek magazine in new york for about ten years.r and i left my job, my wife and s sold sold my apartment in new york and put my stuff in my

in-laws basement. in that way took off. we lived out a suitcase for your well i did research in india and london. i had no idea where this wash going. i had idea of what i wanted to accomplish but imagine you're in a library ten hours a day just pouring through telegrams, that churchill signed and personal diaries, letters, and you vacuum it up and you try to see patterns in the but at the time you're really trying to just get as much material as possible. and that i sat down and tried to make sense of it all it was very important to me with this book was to write it for a general audience. this is not meant for professors, have they find a scholarship in it but i wanted to make a narrative that wouldet be appealing to everyone and to try to find the narrative innn this great mass of material. i cannot say that there is a moment will i was doing it that

i was fully confident that i succeeded until it was published in someone else told me it was out okay. >> we have a few minutes left we take a few questions. >> anybody would like. >> just let us know who you are and go to the microphone. >> my name is sean marquis, i have a question about craft, and some of the choices that you made and may be a way to open it up a little bit, was the one of the harder things you struggled with and how did you work through that, or alternately, was the best advice you got from an outside reader, either an editor or just a reader thatak help to fix something that wasn't quite working. >> the best advice i got early on was to make a timeline. it sounds so simple, but i literally the book takes place in a two-year period from 46 to 48. i did a day by day timeline ofof

those two years. once you do that, that is when you start to see patterns emerging was incredible as these leaders, especially in the thick of the months after the partition, there were 1,000,000 things going things going on they were just focus on the rise of the punjab, they were uprising inf c kashmir, they're moving towards independence and the slings were all happening in the same day. then you realize in most books they treat them all separately. you don't realize that when they woke up that meeting he went to one meeting about this in another on this he was on twot d hours asleep. it is only once you see it laid out that way that you can get into their heads a little more and understand the pressures they were under and why they would have made certain decisions. there are certain decisions made that i never seem to explain before then he realized well hea made the decision at the end ofv the 3r meeting when they had

talked about x before hand and i can imagine that would've influenced his thinking, theer hardest part for me was making a narrative because you have many characters, huge forces at play and it was chaos at the time. it is hard to know what is real, what's not, what's not, a lot of people's memories afterwards were not all that trustworthy. you hear the same story over and over again, that my aunt was on a train full of refugees andue everybody was killed but her. i've heard this story dozens oft times. it is generally not true because they stop most of the trains, but this is something people have told themselves for generations any have to sort of see the records at the time to know that no, actually there were not that many train massacres and so on. so finding a way to make it a

chronological narrative which i did through using two characters. their personal relationship gave me a vehicle in which to work the larger forces in the politics, the history but really tell it through almost a day by day account of what they are going throughout the times. >> did you do most of your research in india or pakistan? >> i most of it in london they x actually because up until augush fifteenth, all of of those records were british records. so they exist in india but i tried to work at the archives is a little difficult. you have to fill out request forms on paper and send the men in three days later you get a note back saying we can't findia the file and so on. it's more straightforward at the british library in london, you you can get through more material quickly. there's a lot of personal papers there as well. so i spent three months in india, went back again

for a few weeks and almost a year in london. >> if you taken the time you spent on research versus the time writing is their division there. >> it was about half-and-half. >> for the first draft? >> right. about a year researching, i wrote first draft between man december and that i accepted a job, moved to bloomberg and then read the first draft and said there still work to be done. that it took me another year but that was working evenings and weekends to polished up. c >> class of 68, when you are researching the book, was there or not ha moment for you that changed your mind or understanding of the history. >> my understanding was wrong and it was this way can you show that with us please? >> there was not a single moment, there were individual moments though, there are days

when you go to the library, you work through the archives and you know you found nothing new. everything you read that day has been read by someone else and sd on. but then there are days that you find that nugget that illuminates a particular angle,a then the combination of those leads to the new narratives that you create. for instance, some of the best material i found was in the state department archives in college park and maryland. nobody ever looks at them. the american diplomats at the time in new delhi were further well-connected. everybody talked to them they knew the americans for the rising power in the world. they had great details. there was the british investor in london, the day the british decided to create pakistan ine june he called in the u.s.they g ambassador to explain the decision, the ambassador writes back to washington and says they're going to this, they're going to create pakistan. they're going to hand over power, possibly as soon as

august 2 india, but they kno pakistan is not ready yet so they'll hand over power later, may be a few months, may be a year, it has not been worked out yet. >> and that sort of brings homes to you, you understand why they left so fast, with why they thought there was such a good idea and it's because they have not thought it through. they thought somehow the pakistani will want us to stick around and everything will be okay we don't need to worry about the details so much. there certain moments like that where it is a key decision of why did the british decide to leave so quickly, it seem so crazy and so stupid and you realize it's because they did not think there are leaving that quickly. is >> i'm a student, you say pakistan is providing protection for the talent man. and during the past couple years even the current president of

afghanistan have been trying to. [inaudible] but it never worked out. don't h and they don't even have thets capability to provide security inside the country or supporters. the other thing is the solution left for the afghan ace and what you think they can do to fight the taliban, do you think they can bring that power into the country?nswer. >> the nobel peace prize - make. >> my tenure at newsweek i oversaw the coverage of the war in afghanistan. i wish i had a good answer. i think you're right that there has to be a negotiated solution. i think all the parties are right to work towards that. pakistan, even though they give the telegram safe haven they don't control them. it. they can't tell them what to do. i do believe the pakistanis

generally want to tell a band to come to the peace table now. they're not able to do it. on the other hand, if they said we are not giving you any more safe haven whatsoever, and we are kicking out all of the leaders or we are going to n arrest you, then i think they might change their minds. the pakistanis are not ready to do that yet. one positive develop and i've seen so far and it's not a breakthrough yet is the fact that china's downfall.ic rea china is much more interest in stability in afghanistan than it did before parlay for economic reasons they want to develop minerals there and so on. but also because they're worried about islamic extremism coming across the border into western china. in china is one power that has influence over the pakistan. so they are the ones leaning on the pakistanis to bring the television to the peace table.cr they've had host talks it will

be a long process what they sustain that pressure, we correlate with them. it's important to remember their tension between the u.s. and china in the south china sea over trade and other issues. we need. we need to look at the big picture. so even as we compete in some areas we need to work with them and others. i don't anticipate a breakthrough anytime soon but if they keep pressuring the if the afghans can hold their own at least then the taliban have less incentive to come to the peace table. if they can hold their own maybe they can get to a point where you can bring them in. you have to preserve the liberties that have been created in afghanistan. nobody will give them up now. so you cannot come back to the tell been days. there will have> to be some part of the solution eventually. >> is a follow-up, do you think the american presence continued

presence helps or do you think if we left the country's there we would strike a balance within themselves? >> i think were still needed there now. i think the afghan army is not able to hold its ow. against the taliban without art logistical help. i think our presence there we cannot solve this for the i also don't think that we should necessarily rush to draw down to zero there. >> you recognize someone in the back there, will come back to you. >> so it's an iconic figure for americans and indians as well can you talk briefly about how your perception may have changed in writing this book can you talk, were you surprised about the things he learned about god and how that might affect our

memories of him? caret's interesting. you have to write about him carefully obviously, especially for an indian audience. gandhi was much more of a politician than people give him credit for. of all people have seen muslim movie he seems like a saintly figure that just have proverbs that subgrades and is for peace and so on and hates violence. he was a very issued politician, he used nonviolence against the british because it works. he knew the indians to not have the weapons to challenge the british army. this was the advantage they had over that. he had great success in the 20s and 30s but he was also fairly vain man. he was surrounded by admirers and others telling what a great person he wasn't home fallible he was. even indian leaders coming to him for advice.

led to a few things. first, first, he never understood the way moslems assault him. he thought, i'm a person, a person, no prejudice and nothing against muslims. pra of course they must embrace their message. he cannot understand them for for many muslims they would see gandhi dressed up holding it prayer p meetings with hindu champs and so on. stories and parables well hindu parables and he never understood that image was projecting to muslims was frightening. they saw him as a religious leader not as a secular democrat. . . to use the word senile but he wasn't as sharp as he had been before.

they were going out and raping hindu women and they brought this up at a prayer meeting in he was trying to say don't retaliate, don't use violence, don't fight back. instead for all of you at risk of being raped coming should kill your self instead. he hadn't thought this through. there were local politicians who went out and committed a massacre with several dozenmethh muslims.

they blamed gondhi and said it's causing this violence. he thought his spirit was purent and he didn't understand the impact of his words. his times he fought agains agait the most and dragged out thefo negotiations. there were moments in the process he would have been good as a figure involved in the politics was hard to make compromises. they were very egotistical,icala

narcissistic to some degree and not to catch on to things that are more practical. >> these three men had huge egos and maybe that's part of the reason why they rose to the top you have to have confidence to do this. but they were -- remember this is a british system where c combined they were talking about socialism and this and that. he had no idea what he was doing just here for this figure was on