so he essentially fled the country in autumn without telling anyone. he left for the museum had its grand opening which was canceled at the last minute because one of the archaeologists making its way -- and murdered and left before the grand opening of the post office and the definition. in fact the word he uses his heat escape. mendelsohn would also leave thereafter. the excuse that his wife was in the memoir is that they landed in north africa and palestine was going to be invaded. i don't think that has much to do with it at all. he felt lonelier and limb here and were dismayed by what he saw taking hold in the country. they were not close friends but they were kindred spirits.

he writes to him that it's greatly affected me. it also leads for the same reason and around this time mendelson writes i'm lost in a world of lost itself. he also -- there is a way that he felt this place had acknowledged its own gift and what it could give the country. if he would just make up his mind there is no place for the pre- madonna. so they pack their bags and set sail again. i don't have time to go into all of that. but it didn't spit out their buildings and this to me is a critical thing. these buildings went up in the

late 30s were in a kind of conversation with each other from the outset with the people that walk by. seems to me they are still in that conversation 75 years after. so time is moving on. we now have the bank and post office behind us and we are making our way toward the central square of west jerusalem towards this building if you can see it's going to hit us if i keep walking this way, so we are headed for the building which looks like this. that to me is the spookiest most dignified in the downtown area. it's very unusual for that part of town. you can see there is a more eastern thing going on. you've got these interesting shapes and most notably the panels that are the handiwork

and was brought by the british to work on the dome in iraq. what i found fascinating is how these elements have been integrated into become something people identify. you see people in america have these nameplates. it's the handiwork of an armenian system and the man who put them in the building i'm here to tell you in a minute if you can see past the junk and clutter and the plastic down below, you can imagine when it went up in 1929 was the height of fashion and was built at the behest of wealthy christian arabs and that is something almost no one remembers anymore.

the man that is called by one historian said in his day he was one of the best architects in jerusalem but his name has been almost entirely erased. by far it is the most mysterious. here he is in a single picture of him that we know to exist. when i set out for this quest for him i should say it took place a slightly lunatic thing i was doing in the summer of 2014 in the middle of the war and i'm running around very hot looking for traces of this man. i didn't know where he was born or when. i didn't know his family

situation or education or anything. we have these little calling cards i call them that he left in the size of some of the buildings he built and it seems to me that we can sort of read them for clues and messages beyond what is he telling us in peace letters first of all it seemed notably to me they are not in arabic. i thought that was interesting. spare a is a greek name and a little peculiar in the context it's not the kind of gesture but it seems odd to me and the culture i've never heard of that before. and then his last name is pretty much like smith or brown. in this case again it is odd.

then there's this last little bit. does that tell us something more substantive of the language and dreamed and there were other clues that were not adding up but i found in the a indiana fos architectural services be added to rent so as i was trying to put the puzzle pieces together, the war was going on and i was trying to make some sort of sense of these clues i was finding. by now i talked about how the case is a bit different and in a lot of ways it is more sweeping and more extreme because that isn't the case of one man being driven out that it is an entire culture antisocial -- social

i am saying something different. i am saying that he seems to have been an identity in the terms that won't apply. as it goes on and tends to be very rigid and petrified. you are an arab or jew, you are either with us or against us and it seems to me all of the clues i was finding it didn't pertain to the city he was an influx of uppity and also in terms of the other people that would have contact in one's working life, social life which is to say i'm not just talking about a physical landscape in the way connections work across would seem quite impossible borders and so in order to think about

this it was much more necessary. who were the people that commissioned these buildings and worked in these buildings and what does that tell us about his city, so while it was a kind of equal opportunity employee he really worked for all ethnic and religious backgrounds in a range of style. he is best known for his houses with ceramics set into the front but he built it in other ways as well. i will show you quickly some of these others you will see this is the main drag and commercial hub right across from the square and it seems you always have to qualify things whe unheeded and carved his name but it seems he got maybe three or four of these buildings and these are obviously in a much more european mode in the balconies and columns and what' whatnot as

he built respectively for an old family that is a translator and investor from the city. he came to jerusalem as the head of the municipal hospital and he also built for an aristocrat who considered himself the crusader who was actually the honorary hungarian consult and here you can see on the house of the steps. he built from one of the most

prominent families the poet and educator and intellectual, a grand mansion that is still standing and the locals call it the capital if you are going up in the eastern mode with these kind of details and you see here that he's building this in 1922 he is building a crosstown. it came in the late ottoman period until the end of his days. so the architecture is often called eclectic. to see it as encapsulating the hospitalization and border blend border crossing that is what's best of jerusalem.

as i said i didn't know things about it was he born in greece, ottoman, local, foreign it's seems to me his own identity again may well have been composed of shifting identities and contradictory. the city was helping to build itself capable of having these multiple identities and functioning according to the eclectic principle this dynamic eclecticism that embodied the architecture that was an expression of the dynamic and it's still there although it is highly endangered and it seems to me it is harder and harder these days to see if it's still there. so thank you very much and i'm

happy to answer questions. [applause] >> if there are questions. [inaudible] >> i have to be a detective. i did find some. i didn't find as much as i would like. in that section of the book i am describing my own quest so i take these archives with me and found some things. the fact he was working for private clients meant there was less of a record come even when the member who was a private clients with a huge office around him kept everything in a very dramatic fashion and a saved everything and worked for institutions and they saved everything but there's not the same paper trail i won't reveal it as i reveal them in the book about why there wasn't so much

preserve of what he must have written. no architect could have not created a lot of paper. but in fact i found things out about him and also about the city and at some level i felt as i was chasing him around or chasing the trees as he was leading to all kind of places i never would have gotten without him as they were giving a tour of the city. both from westerners and also the greek patriarch cyrus seeing things i wouldn't otherwise have seen and i'm telling you the box that had all of his remains wasn't the case but i won't say that i came up completely empty handed. i think this is a kind of --

it's not architecture without architects but there's a way that she was functioning in the zone putting things up and if these werthatthese were not beih in those sorts of journals. mendelssohn and harassing they were also international figures in a way. he certainly had a reputation in england, but he was a local in that sense so the rest of the world probably wasn't as interested. >> one more question and if you would come to the microphone. it'microphone. >> on a local college student and i want to say how meaningful i find your work to be. my question is in research for

the most recent book that you were speaking about this evening, what did you find those surprising and least surprising and why? >> the truth is i can't point to one big surprise. the biggest thing was finding surprised as every day in one small way. it wasn't as if i had a revelation in one way. i was in jerusalem for a long time coming and it a city that gets into a rut in the term of the way people talk about it and it's tiresome the same story over and over again. at least as it's told in the newspapers and as you feel it as a resident. yesterday another bus blew up. it's very repetitive which doesn't make it any less meaningful and is hard to take but i was trying to surprise

myself and surprised the city by looking in these hidden corners. these are not people that tend to be written about. it's not that they are unknown, but usually as the prime minister and general whoever architects for in part because we don't have time for aesthetics there is a view when it comes to jerusalem. so i can't really answer that question in a specific way except to say i was surprised. when i found stuff in the archives that was exciting but i would be surprised walking into the rockefeller museum, which those of you if you have a chance in jerusalem i recommend you go. it's aeneas t in east jerusalemd palestinians don't go because it's an israeli institutions so they are afraid. i'm often wandering around by

myself so don't be surprised by a doorjamb were in that sense high and low or both. >> as rich as the talk was, i read the book and it,

the c-span radio application and c-span.org. good morning. welcome and good morning.

i'm on the faculty of political science department annals of a research fellow at peace and more centers of it is my pleasure and honor to have this conversation with the 2016 winner recipient of the military history award. what they are going to do today is have a conversation you should take a look in the pamphlet that was handed out. as a very famous journalist and helped set up "time" magazine's edition. he lives now in singapore and works for bloomberg. he's written this book called

midnight fury and what we wanted to do today is unpack this book and i've intentionally not read the entire biography because it would be more of the audience to have a conversation and put the book in perspective. so this book deals with events that happen in countries far away from over 70 some on years ago, but i would contend the book is so timely and relevant and connects with issues you see from the newspapers every day. america's leadership and transforming to help try to transform countries and what the 21st century will bring as a role of religion, and if i might say how important it is for

politicians when they are running for office or otherwise to be very careful in what they say. so i want to take you back if you will a few centuries. i was born a long time ago, not that long ago that wants to take you back a few centuries to india where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed a cosmopolitan multicultural civilization with hindus and muslims and christians all living together worshiping each other's shrines and this is especially true of muslims and hindus who did that and you can go to any village in pakistan or india and you will find them worshiping at muslim shrines and hindu shrines and there are

marriages where it took place after 150 years of british presence in india and another 200 to 300 years of another empire before that when the partition took place, it was a hugely significant event. but before i get into the conversation, it's not as simple as it looks. this isn't strictly a religious conflict and i will give you a personal example. an uncle of mine rose to the air force and he's family like many muslim families didn't leave india because they thought it was whole. so in the pakistani war come here as my uncle leaving against the airport muslims and muslim on both sides both owing allegiance to their own countries.

the big point i want to make is that as important as religion seems to appear, that isn't always the case. i want to start by asking you for hundreds of people they've lived together. in 1947, millions get injured or killed. why? >> why don't you start with an easy one. [laughter] >> we will give a one-word answer, power. what changedwhat's changed, whas different from the previous 150 years means for the first time the british were leaving and they made it clear they were heading out and it didn't have the money to maintain and they were not wanted there. there have been tensions but it's fairly limited. you have small riots break out

and usually last a day or two, that you didn't have a mass scale of violence you would have in 1947. what happened is the political leaders in the muslim community in india saw a future in which there would be a permanent minority they would be cut out of power and the congress party that was dominated always when. they would get the majority of the votes wherever they ran and would be confined to the system database year i tier is almost r take all system where if you ran the government coming to your friends and family and cronies would get the contracts. he would write the textbooks in schools and the words of worship and so on through the political

leaders, the founder of pakistan argued the only way muslims could be safe after the british left is they have a state of their own where they were majority and ran the government. those are at the very top level. political leaders have to be careful about how they talk about these things and what they say. they would think these pictures for the followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they didn't get their own state. ..

>> reporter: a a lot of them still had weapons. so with the riots in the violence broke out after the british left these organized you could almost call them death squads were much more effective and deadly than previous attacks. they were not fighting with fist and knife there using machine guns. the death toll skyrocketed because of that.

>> that is an interesting series of dots that you tried to connect. let me ask you that a lot of the trouble, i grew up in bombay, my, my family and i went through the partition, but there was scarcely a whimper there and what i wanted to ask you is if you could unpack that part of your book where you talk about the killings. why were they localize? why did they not happen all over? >> it's important to remember, that a lot of people have the idea that the british left and all the sudden violence and rights broke out all over the subcontinent. people were killing each other, it was not that at all. my family my father was a child in bombay at the time, no memory of any violence. it was most of india was unaffected by this. there is one particular providence called the punjab which is now split between india and pakistan and this is where

the border was going to go. they decided to draw the border to divide areas where muslim were majority would to where he hindus were majority of the punjab was half-and-half. a new border was going to be drawn there. the problem was there is a third community in the punjab which was known as the sikhs they were concentrated in the middle of the providence and historically there is a historical memory of how the sikhs had suffered under muslim rulers of centuries ago, much more recently in the spring of 1947 as part of this ruling series of rights, muslim mobs had massacred several thousand sikhs. within just a few months of memory they had this vision of what would happen to them if the british drew this border and they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. also the sikhs were overrepresented in the army so they were heavily militarized. so there death squad as a were started the violence after the

border was drawn. that is white spread very quickly, but it was very concentrated in this area. it was that muslims on the indian side of the punjab were pushed out and hindus and sikhs are pushed up the other side. as you have this movement of people, something like 14,000,000 people cross sides of the border over the span of a few months you had these mile-long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people in a convoy, sensually defenseless. there are some elders trying to guard them but the death squads would commandants swoop in and were able to massacre several hundred thousand people at a time. is that combination of communities in the punjab with the new border that provoke them >> so that is so interesting, by the way i wanted to commend you and you dad probably were still calling it bombay, a lot of us have never grown used to move bay.

so this kingdom muslim issue came to providence along the border areas but it's not spread to the rest of the country, does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was or whether it was a local fact having to do more with territory and advantage and revenge? >> again it's easy to think of this as a hindu muslim conflict but you have to remember the leaders of indian pakistan work completely secular men. they were not religious at all. they barely knew the crime, he he drank alcohol those forbidden by islam,. >> he was a man of fine taste. very dapper. and nehru was was a cambridge socialist. he did not believe in any of this hindu mumbo-jumbo as he saw it. it wasn't about religion for them.

it was again about territory, about community, it was fear that was driving them. the sikhs were afraid that they were going to be that the community was going to be massacred. anything that is interesting to remember to is that the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in areas that eventually became pakistan because in northwest and 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 it was muslims in central india, southern india, other places really push the idea of pakistan. some of them moved but it it was created, many others did not. and many indian muslims never want to to be created at all and live in india now. >> so it's just a quick personal anecdote on this issue and how importantly a lot of muslims

felt about not creating another country called pakistan. so my dad at that time was an up-and-coming screenwriter and he had not yet made a big movie. we were 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 is going to be my big opportunity and my mother of course, a freedom fighter and so on in india and she said not on your life, you are you are not going to the horrible country to start a movie and he said we don't have any money we have two children and he went out for his walk to think about this and he came back and so he told me when we are growing up that my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing? and she said you go to pakistan to make money, i am going back to my mother. so that is how intensely a lot as you point out, the family fell. but the question i have for you than it is now 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, 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 it's a feeling on the leader's eye, the british side for the partition to happen? >> there are definitely mistakes made on all sides. there are. there are failures, guilt to be assigned to everyone. now you cannot prove a counterfactual obviously even if partition had not happened there is no proof that it unified india would've stayed unified. these these pressures still would have been there, possible five years or ten years later it could have broken up along different lines. the other thing to remember is that in 47 the british only directly controlled about half 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 left them unified they may have decided to declare. but all of the leaders made mistakes. they did try to compromise. the british, for a year a year tried to bring the two sides together and in about a year earlier in the spring of 46 they had come up with a compromise, a very complicated, rickety compromise where you have a unified india with very weak, central government and the muslim areas would have a certain degree of autonomy and the individual provinces would have other powers. it was a face-saving way for everybody to agree. they did agree. everybody did agree to this. but, then almost immediately after they agree to it the communist party leader had a press conference and he was being pressured by people from

within his own party saying why are you given up this autonomy to the muslim areas, we have fought for vet decades to kick the british out and this is our time to roll. and he said something stupid like don't worry, were saying this now once the british lee we'll will do whatever we want. of course, for any muslim hearing this you had to think, how can we trust these people. the sign this document now, once the british leave they'll be in power and they will turn on us. so so they backed out of the agreement, and that it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. they did try, the british kept trying up until the summer of 47, they kept trying to get back to that compromise, the americans were putting heavy pressure on both sides to come back to that compromise. they are very worried from the beginning of the cold war that they wanted a united india to help in the defense against the soviet union. they did not wanted to be broken

up. they do want the army to be broken up. between the time they struck the compromise in the summer 47, that is when these rights 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. you have to remember, nehru remember, nehru and jenna had known each other for 30 years. the fathers had been good friends, they argued with each other, they had friends in common. you think that they could have found common ground, even their personal relations grew very bitter over this time. >> so in a moment we'll open it up and ask questions. i wonder now to close this part of the conversation and to think about history. i had the pleasure of interviewing general gordon

sullivan, the chair of the board of trustees at the university a few weeks ago, he impressed on me how important it was for him and nor rich to get this history major and a huge liberal and i use the word liberal in the classical sense, education. he said without an understanding of history, this a very little that you can do as far as making sound decisions at the top levels of any chain of command. and so i wanted to take us forward now. we spent trillions of dollars in the strongest army in the world, a stake in every hill that we wanted it to, but we have not been able to prevail against an enemy, the taliban that has no gdp, we have 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, same thing in iraq and you can carry that through. so my question for you is, in america we have the same, oh that's history.

right when someone says something that you think is irrelevant, and i think we ought to do away with that saying and i wanted you to take now what happened in 1947 and if you would as you did masterly new book, by the way of raising the pressure here so you go out by multiple copies of his book, christmas is not that far away, you need to buy at least six each. so i wanted to say, can you you now take us forward from there and connect this to what is happening in afghanistan essentially but the importance of history. >> is important in two i think, for americans in particular you mention afghanistan. the reason reason we're still fighting afghanistan 15 years later most is only because the television has had a safe haven to retreat to across the border in pakistan. they have a certain degree of support from the pakistani military covertly, they are tolerated to regroup and me and the leadership is safe there and so on.

that has allowed them to keep the insurgency alive and they can keep it alive forever as long as they have that safe haven. what is pakistan do this? what do they take billions of dollars in aid from the u.s. and then support the taliban? why do they support what they would support terrorist groups that fight the indians in kashmir but also conducts attacks like the mumbai attacks in 2008, and why are they building up their nuclear arsenal so rapidly and creating smaller nuclear weapons and so on, they do all of this because they view india as a mortal threat still, 70 years later, they do not believe still treats india as an xo sense jill's threat they don't leap in their their existence and does not want them to survive. they would like to see them fail and be absorbed within india. so that mentality is nothing new. that came out of these just a few months in 1947, that 47, that mentality was cemented

within the pakistani establishment within ordinary establishment. they have been able to rule the country from half of this existence because every time they took power they say you need us to defend you against india. we are going to protect the country. they blended this with his mom, they use other excuses but that is their justification for drawing the majority to the budget for the military is that you need us to defend you against india. so for americans and outside powers it's important to understand the roots of this mentality. you have you have to understand where it comes from. we need to understand how it has changed over the decades and how it has developed. but you cannot start to unwind it until you know where it came from. you accept that at least out when it was created there is a certain degree of legitimacy to it. there were indian leaders in 1947 he did not want pakistan to be created or exist. they would've been happy to see it fail within a year to and be reabsorbed. it is not entirely crazy.

it is not the truth now, indians have no interest in taking over pakistan, quite the opposite. but it did come out of something real that we have to accept and understand. then for india and pakistan it's important to bring up that saying about americans in history. i agree with you that sense, the other hand americans also had a very healthy ability to examine their own history and to be self-critical and not to feel like they have to hide things or sugarcoat them or ignore them. they can admit what happened in the civil war and there's shelves and shelves of books about this. and and then they can move forward. we can move forward. indians and pakistanis still have trouble with this. i've given lots of readings in india, the majority of the publishes were young, born after partition. born after partition. they should not have any personal connection to this, yet

the phrases they use, the way they talk about pakistanis and vice versa, it is no different than 1947. there 1947. there still a sense of paranoia, suspicion, it is because they are taught to version of history, it's very different than this. the indians get 1% pakistanis get another version and there are mutually incompatible. neither side really wants to admit that they could have partly been at fault, that may be gandhi was not entirely think, maybe he did make mistakes. and pakistanis say maybe jenna was not such a nice guy maybe was power-hungry and so on. until they do that and come up with some sort of joint narrative that asides blames all sides, i do nothing they're going to be able to move forward in the prayer that is dangerous for the rest of us. we have to to hope that they will get there. >> before i open it up for questions i wanted to give you an opportunity, was there a time when you wrote the book or after that you sat back and said, you know, this really came out well.

>> the fact that you wrote about -- >> is guess a revealing moment that happen is when i got my first review of the new york review of books. they call called it super. that is the only time. but tell us, just a personal, you've thought about this for so long, you wrote this book,. >> it was a long process. he started working on this book exactly five years ago in spring of 2011 and i11 and i had been working at his week magazine for about ten years and i left my job, my wife and i sold our apartment in new york and we put all of our stuff in my in-laws basement and then took off. and looked out of a suitcase for a year while i did research in india, london and i had no idea where this was going. i had no idea what i wanted to accomplish, but imagine you're in the library ten hours ten hours per day just pouring

through painstakingly telegrams, the paper thin telegrams that churchill sign, and personal diaries and letters and you vacuum it all up and you try to see patterns in it but at the time you're really trying to get as much material as possible. and then i sat down and try to make sense of it all. because it was reports me with this book was to write it for a general audience. this is not meant for professors. i hope they find new scholarship in it, but i wanted to i wanted to make a narrative that would be appealing to everyone. also to try to find a narrative in this great mass of material, i cannot say there is a moment while i was doing it that i was fully confident that i succeeded until it was published in someone else told me it was okay. >> so we have a few minutes left and we can take a few questions. and just tell us who you are and go to the microphone.

the microphone will come to. >> my name name is sean markey, have a question about craft and some of the choices you made and may be a way to open it up a little bit. what was maybe one of the harder things that you struggled with and how to do work through that, or alternately, what was the best advice that you got from then outside reader either an editor or friendly reader that really helped to see something that was not 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 very short, two-year period from 46 to 48. i did a day by i did a day by day timeline of those two years. once you do that that's what i start to see the patterns emerging. what's what's incredible is that these leaders, especially in the thick of the months right after the partition there were milling things going on, they were not just focused on the rise of the

punjab, there is an uprising in kashmir, they're moving towards independence and these things were all happening in the same day. and you realize in those books, they treat them all separately, there's a chapter on each but you do not realize that when nehru woke up that meeting he went to one meeting about this in another bout that, he was operating on to ours asleep and then he got a letter from his girlfriend and so on. it's only once you see it laid out that way that you can kind of get into their heads a little bit more and understand the pressures they were under and why they would have made certain decisions. there are certain decisions that jenna made that i've never seen explained before then you realize all he made a decision at the end of a three-hour meeting where they had talked about x before hands and i can imagine that would've influenced his thinking. the hardest part for me was making a narrative because you have any characters, huge forces, and it was chaos at the time.

it is hard to know what's real, what's not. not. a lot of people's memories afterwards were not all that trustworthy, if you hear the same story over and over again that my aunt was on a train full of refugees and everybody was killed but her, for the story dozens of times. it's generally not true because they had stopped most of the trains. but it's something people have told themselves for generations and you have to sort of see the records at the time to know that no, there actually were not that many train massacres and so on. so i waited through the material and then finding a way to make it a chronological narrative which i did through using two characters. i dig jenna and narrow, and their personal relationship gave me a vehicle in which to work the larger forces in the history into. but really tell it through a day by day account of what they were

going through at the time. >> did you do most of your research in india or pakistan? >> at the most of it in london because up until august 15 when the british left all those records were british records. so they exist in india but in india trying to work in the archives is a little difficult. you have to fill out request forms and on paper and send the men in three days later you get a note back saying we cannot find the file and so on. it's more straight for forward in london and you can get through more material quickly. there's a there's a lot of personal papers there as well. i spent about three in india, went back for a few weeks and almost a year in london. >> if you would've taken the time he spent on research versus the time writing, is there division there you can talk about? >> it was about half-and-half. >> for the first draft. >> until the first draft and then saw about one year researching, wrote the first strap between man december and

then i accepted a job, moved to singapore and that i read the first draft and realize there is still work to be done. then it took me another year but that was just working on evenings and weekends to polish it up. >> and the class of 68, when you are researching the book was there an aha moment for you that changed your mind or understanding of the history. >> my understanding was wrong, and it was this way can you share that with us please. >> there is not a single moment, there were individual moments though, there are days when you do this and you go to library and you work through the archives and he come home and you know that you have found nothing new. everything you have read that day has been read by someone else and so on. and then there are days when you find that nugget, that illuminates a particular angle and then the combination of those leads to

that new narrative that you create. for instance, some of the best material i found was actually in the state department archives in a park and marlon. nobody ever looks at them. the american diplomat at the time in new delhi were fairly well-connected, everyone came to talk to them they knew the americans for the rising power in the world so they had great details. there is actually a moment, the british investor in london, the day the british decided to create pakistan in the june of 4070 called in the u.s. ambassador to explain the decision, the investor writes back to washington as is, they're going they're going to do this, they're gonna create pakistan. they're gonna hand over power, possibly as soon as august to india. but they know pakistan is not ready yet so they will hand over power later, may be a few months, maybe a year, it has not really been worked out yet. and that sort of brings home, you understand why they left so fast, how, how could they have thought this was a good idea and

is because they had not thought it through. they thought somehow the pakistanis will want us to stick around to help us with the government and so everything is going to be okay were not going to worry about the details so much. there are certain moments like that where a key decision of why the british decided to leave so quickly, it seems so crazy and stupid. and you realize this because they do not think there are leaving that quickly. >> , students, we talk about pakistan providing a safe for the television, and in the past couple of years it's very trying but it never worked out, afghanistan does not have provide security and things like that in the country and its

borders. but what you think is a solution left for the afghan is? to fight the taliban? to think they can. [inaudible] >> the nobel peace prize -- >> it when i did my ten years at newsweek i oversaw the war in afghanistan and 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 our work right to work towards that. but even though they give the taliban safe haven they don't control them or kick tell them what to do. i do believe the pakistanis generally want the telephone to come to the peace table now. they're not able to do it. on the other hand, if they said were not given you anymore safe haven whatsoever and were kicking out all the leaders or we will arrest you, then i think they might change their not minds. the pakistanis are are not ready to do that