from south carolina. and also governor scott walker outlying his goals and donald trump speaking to a republican group in nashville. >> this week on "q&a," brookings institution senior fellow vanda felbab-brown, she talks about the u.s.'s counterinsurgency and state building efforts in afghanistan and the global war on drugs. >> vanda felbab-brown, can we start with the name? where does it come from? vanda: well, i was born in czechoslovakia on the czech side of czechoslovakia. but the name is actually not

czech, although vanda does occur in the czech republic and it's a fairly common poland name. i was name off orchids that exist in south of east asia. and the one i was named after is one of the invented -- endangered orchids today. it's interesting because a lot of my work is spent on working on endangered species, preventing poaching and conservation. so i guess i was born with the name of some of the stuff i will be doing. it's actually arabic even though i was born in czechoslovakia. and brown is, of course, angelo. >> you thank your mother in your brooks. t is jelena? vanda: yes. > did you take the ova off

your name? anda: o-v-a occurs in slovak cultures. so for simplicity and the connotation i dropped the ombingeds v-a. >> how long have you been in the united states? vanda: over 20 years. i came in high school. i started high school in the czech republic when the country just split and i won a scholarship to spend the remainder of high school in the private american high school which is philips academy in andover and it was an extraordinary opportunity. i am very grateful to philips and for funding me and i never went back. so although i go there, i did all my undergraduate, graduate work and of course professional work in the u.s. >> describe the kind of things you are an expert in?

vanda: well, so in the morning when i'm in the good morning, people ask me that question. i tell them that i work on nontraditional security threats which really covers anything from organized crime, illicit economies, insurgency, terrorism. in the evening when i'm depressed after working on these subjects i'd say i work on how things fall apart. but both statements are misnoemers. in many ways what we call today nontraditional security threats, low intensity conflict, rebellion insurgency, crime, certainly, predates organized warfare, conventional warfare that so much -- came about. and more traditional than the so-called traditional warfare. and i say in the evening i work on how things fall apart, the two is fundamental misnomer

since the key components of my work is organizing there are no such things of ungoverned domains. even illicit economies require organization, require rules and regulation. that's how we have organized crime. that's one of the reasons we have organized crime. even in the absence of government, some form of governs is offered delivered by nongovernment actors. benevolent ones or much more me nevada lent ones. there are connections between governments and unstate actors. for example, in slums, they outsource consciously and sometimes explicitly. to slum lords to gangs. they don't want to give state resources to govern. when i look at organized crime and i look at insurgency, i think about what kind of governance has emerged and how to alter the governance to be

both better for the international order but also better for the people. >> after you went to the philips academy for high school, where did you go next? van nuys ent first to to ann arbor -- harvard. >> in what subject? vanda: in government. which is what harvard calls political science or the rest of the world calls political science. i focused on international relations. so this was the 1990's. and i was looking at conflicts which later became to be called insurgency, once again. at the time it was totally unprofessional. of course it came back. and i started look hing at the intersection at the time of criminalality, illicitness and insurgency and that's what carried to my graduate studies and do work.

>> got a h. ph.d. from m.i.t. in what? vanda: to political science. host: i want to go to a piece of video from al jazeera. you write in your latest book and have you tell us the story of what this was all about. >> sound of gunfire ricochetted across kabul as taliban suicide bombers launched a coordinated series of attacks. three locations in the city. this was outside the kabul star hotel. close to major embassies in what is supposed to be the most secure part of the city. there were attacks on the parliament building and nato headquarters and another military base on the outskirts. host: where were you? vanda: this is a video from kabul which is where i was at the time. i have been very fortunate that i have been able to do a lot of

fieldwork in my life, the work that has brought unique and insights, including total empathy with people. so this is one of the trips when i was in kabul that several other colleagues, guests of nato, we were on the streets as the attack took place and being holed up for the rest of the day and night in the ministry and to -- expelled from the building by a guard who decided he wanted to go home. nd a story of the waiting, the boredom, the drama, the real danger to life. think it captures many aspects of war. we often focus on war in the moments of suffering where a bomb goes off. but, of course, there are these

long periods in between that things don't happen. now, unfortunately, the bomb attacks, including in kabul, as significantly gone up since the 2012 video. it was very intense, very difficult. i'm going back to afghanistan in october and will see how much i'll be able to travel around the country. how much more difficult it is to find drivers willing to drive a female, western female, even dressed in a burqa and local clothing. it's very risky if we get stopped on the road, for example, and the taliban check who is under the burqa and i might be executed and the translator would be in a very difficult situation. so the ability to move around has never been easy but it's become significantly more difficult, even since the video. host: how many times have you

been to afghanistan? vanda: i'd say at least 10 or 11 times over the decade. host: and when you go, how close have you come to this kind of an episode? vanda: it varies. they watch very closely. the surprising fact is you can be a street away and you don't necessarily know that things are happening after someone, your driver, for example, says we have to go, get out right away. i have never been in a direct cross fire, though. host: let me show you some video back in 2013 of a man we came to know via television, hamad karzai, and everybody should listen closely to what he has to say and i'll ask what's happened since then. hamad: we discussed it earlier that in the spring this year the afghan forces will be fully responsible for providing security and protection to the

afghan people. and that the international forces, the american forces in be no longer present afghan villages but the task will be that of the afghan forces to provide for the afghan people for security and protection. host: what happened near the end of his term? he -- what happened in his relationship with the united states? why was he so negative? vanda: well, i think it's a broader question what happened with his term overall. the end was a long culmination of progressive deterioration of relations really since 2008. and i think the deyoration of afghanistan governance, of afghan governance, really, to corruption, abuse. many afghans would call toward the end his government a mafia

ule, mafia government. it was the abuses that were taking place, and a progressive -- relationship from washington, certainly when president obama came to power, president karzai became convinced that the united tates was trying to undermined him or get rid of him, that they were trying to support the rival candidates in the elections. probably so. and then washington was appropriately demanding much more accountability over how money was being spent. the corruption that was -- every aspect of afghan life and the abuse that afghan people faced. land theft, disappearances of people. the brutal mafia rule some of which i described in the book you referred to.

and so watching put pressure on karzai to moderate his behavior and he was unable and uninterested to do so and came to see it as very threatening. so he then viewed the entire relationship with the united states with conspiracies of washington seeking his removal but also having larger designs on afghanistan. host: back in may of this year, john, the special investigator for the united states government, talked about the detear ating security situation -- deteriorating security situation in afghanistan just a short time ago. let's listen to this. >> i remember when i started coming three years ago i could travel around most of the country. i could go to mazr. harad is a big city off to the west. kandahar.

my people, my agents actually traveled around in cars without having militariess courts. we don't have anybody in those -- in harad, in mazr. jalalabad is a very dangerous place. we use afghans as sources and we -- they do monitoring of sites for us so we try to come up with other means to do it but this is not your normal i.g. operation. my auditors wear flack jackets, helmets, my agents are carrying machine guns when they go around out there. his is not your order ordinary -- not your ordinary situation. host: what do you think? vanda: afghanistan is not a normal situation. the level of corruption that is in everyday life and the security which deteriorated

very significantly since 2002. it's difficult to get around. it requires a great deal of bravery or foolishness or a combination of those to do so. i spent part of the spring this year in somalia doing -- going back a year and a half to look at changes there. you have the situation in some ways it's even more difficult in many ways, it's even more difficult than in afghanistan. a lot of insecurity, very difficulties in getting around, tremendous amount of corruption. it's possible but it's tough. host: you say in your book that afghanistan's one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. you name north korea. somalia? vanda: yes. host: how do you judge them to be corrupt, how do you see corruption? vanda: well, i really rely in the rankings of transparency international which ranks countries but it's a very

important question of what is corruption and what is debilitating corruption. it's a very important question because corruption is at the ore of a range of domains. whether it's combating poaching in wildlife trafficking or major state building efforts like in afghanistan and like in somalia. there are countries that are corrupt like india and so when the united states, multilateral organizations of other countries try to devise anti-corruption measures, they often fail and yet they need to succeed in that effort or the entire policy effort might be undermined. and to me this was the key priority, corruption, to focus on are those that alienate people to the point of preferring a group like the

taliban, whether it's a systematic plan or tribal discrimination, whether this is totally unaccountable -- resources, land, other brutality. or whether this is charging bribes for -- for example, the rival charges a bigger bribe, they will attack both and satisfy the party with the bigger bribe. people often dislike bribes but re willing to condkt -- it's a tax. it's unpredictible, ever-escalating bribes that vals the services that debilitates society. host: you know, more -- we've been over here since the early part of 2001. depending on where you look, it's a trillion-dollar expense

and more before it's all over. you combine that with iraq and it's somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion by the time everything is paid out over the years. what would you say to somebody that lost their son or daughter over there or got wounded, the 17,000 that got wounded, that we accomplished there? vanda: well, i think it's a tough question. it's a question that is increasingly difficult to answer, particularly if you combine it with -- and how much longer we should say? clearly the lives of particularly urban afghans have improved significantly. n some ways the lives of afghans have improved significantly. at least access to primary education in many areas are better. access to health care for women, for families is significantly better. in most areas . from the u.s. national security perspective, i think we are certainly much better off without al qaeda

having a platform for operations that they did in afghanistan. until 2001 during the taliban era. however, increasingly we need to ask ourselves, what are the gains to be achieved and the resources to be devoted to it? and i've been a major supporter of not leaving afghanistan of,of persevering in the efforts and many of my sympathies and inclinations and commitments to my people, to my drivers, to my translators, just ordinary afghans still lie there but it's increasingly tough to justify those expenses particularly if we don't see significant improvement in afghan governance. now, there is a moment of opportunity that is a new government. president karzai is no longer president. there is a governmental focal nonetheless y, but

on paper the government is committed to combating corruption. so -- also committed to improving governance and -- so i think we should not quit yet. we definitely need to demand accountability from our partners. host: has it been worth the price? 2,700 people killed, americans killed, more than that. i mean, what do we got other than the fact they may have beater life? we go to bed here in the united states -- vanda: i think the u.s. did achieve improvement in security. how netheless it depends it ends. i hesitate as i increasingly interrogate myself, we don't know how it will end. if we withdraw now, the moment

-- it's also possible that still two, three years, five years down the road we'll be back and a new civil war will be in afghanistan. isis is now slowly emerging in the country. it's much worse than the taliban. the taliban is deeply entrenched and hardly defeated. and so if we end up five years down the road in a new civil war in afghanistan and new safe havens for the taliban and isis, then i would say it was not worth the price. host: will he met ask you about karzai again. was he honest? vanda: i any he was honest with the time frame and mind set what he was working with. i don't think it translates how we define honesty. host: billions of dollars have been lost over there. has he taken it? vanda -- was he personally corrupt, i don't have the information. there has been many newspaper articles. for example, the c.i.a. was giving him money just as

iranian officials were giving him money. from his perspective, this was not a personal bribe. this was the method of ruling. and he was using the money delivered to him to pay off opponents. so from his perspective, this is just everyday doing business. in afghanistan. every day of ruling. we certainly know that people very close to him, including his vice president, people in his family like his deceased brother, had their hands in both any money coming in, taking bribes, taking corrupt money from that as well as participating in many illegal rackets like drug smuggling. host: how did you know ashraf before he was elected to president? vanda: i had many exchanges with him. host: were you surprised when he got elected? vanda: i must say yes. i watched his first campaign in 2009 against president karzai

then and of course he got about 3% of the popular vote and so his learning of becoming a politician from a former world bank -- the change of persona and -- was very astounding. host: how much time has he spent in the united states? vanda: several decades. host: doing what? vanda: he got his ph.d. at columbia in @row polling and was at the world bank for many years. so i think about three decades. host: let's watch a little bit of his march, 2015 speech before the congress when he was here. >> to the soldiers who have lost limbs to buried -- to the brave veterans and to the families who tragically lost heir loved ones to the nemies' cowardly acts of

terror. we owe the many who have cured the sick and we must acknowledge with appreciation that at the end of the day it's the ordinary americans whose hard-earned taxes which over the years led to our conversation today. host: you know, when you look at that and you hear him say that about soldiers, you still go back to the fact that we have spent all this money, lost all these people and then we wake up in this country and see one out of six americans go to bed every day hungry and you wonder, again, what have we gained by being over there. i mean, you write a lot about iraq. i assume that was a mistake? vanda: yes. host: why is afghanistan not a mistake if iraq was a mistake? vanda: because in afghanistan there are real terrorist threats. al qaeda was in afghanistan. it was originally not in iraq.

now iraq was a problematic country. there is no doubt about it. they were a major thorn in the fight of u.s. security arrangements in the middle east. they y were a source -- were a problematic country but terrorism was not there and it turned out that saddam hussein also did not have the w.m.d.'s that was part of the justification for iraq. afghanistan had real al qaeda. it was a major operation for al qaeda, and it was, of course, the place from which 9/11 attacks that was organized, arranged and took place. i go back to was it worth it depends on how does it end. if five years down the road we are back in a civil war, the country just collapses and a combination of taliban, isis

and other militant groups control large parts of the country and they become bases for terrorism, then it probably will not have been worth the effort. host: can you explain our relationship with pakistan? and i preface this i point out we've listened for months and months about iran and the nuclear boston when pakistan has it and india has it, and then you talk about a lot in your book about the relationship between the taliban and they're being harbored in pakistan and we have this supposed friendly relationship with pakistan, can you help us on this one? vanda: sure. you know, if our relationship with pakistan might be a relationship with a defined friend and partner but it's an extraordinarily tortured one. it's very much of a marriage of abuse from which there might not be a divorce but there is a

great deal on both sides. pakistanis and certainly the pakistani establishment, military, police, but the united states uses them and abandons them when it suits their will but they are a very unreliable partner. the united states focuses on the fact that these days pakistan these days, not -- over the past decade and a half and real the 1990's, pakistan has supported, protected the taliban. of to define it as betrayal the worst kind including because obviously it puts the lives of our soldiers at risk. taliban is killing as many u.s., nato, afghan soldiers as it can. from the pakistani perspective, they are fundamentally skeptical of the state of the project.

they don't believe that there will be a stable government, and especially not one that is not susceptible to what they define as their arch enemy, india, and so they want to cultivate proxies that will help their end and they believe the taliban is such a proxy. so from their interest perspective what they are doing is not inconsistent with their state interest. of course i -- there is another dimension of the u.s.-pakistan relationship and back stan behavior which is that -- pakistan behavior which is that a lot of the pakistani sponsorship or at least not cracking down on the taliban the way we have been demanding r a decade and a half is not from a different understanding

of interest but it stems from weakness. pakistan for decades has sponsored many militant groups. -- t the afghan taliban, or using them for interest against india, sponsoring terrorist attacks, holding weapons against india. but they cannot many of them today. at e are pakistani groups the core of the country, the industrial military brain and heart of pakistan and they can't control them. and so a lot of the groups on the border with afghanistan, they are increasingly many militant groups in the biggest business. half of the country, karachi. so part of the reason why pakistan doesn't take the strong stance and stop them, the united states would like to see, is that they don't have the capacity and they are

afraid that if they start acting against them it will backfire and many of these militants will now start attacking the pakistani state with much greater energy than what's been happening. host: by the way, do you think the pakistanis knew that osama bin laden was there? vanda: i don't believe so. you know, again, i absolutely do not have any personal information that could make me believe it one way or another, but from my conversations with u.s. officials and whom i have absolute faith, i believe that pakistanis were persuaded. w, there is a large -- surprised by the -- did not know about it. now, there are larger questions of why did they not know, how could they have been so oblivious? what does it say about their

internal security the fact that they are ignoring clearly a very unusual situation, this compound, in the heart of the country? brian: let's go back for a moment -- you graduated from harvard and m.i.t. with a phd. did you become an american citizen? and if so, why? vanda: yes. all of my professional and personal life was here in the united states. i love the united states. with all of the difficulties and challenges the country faces at home and abroad. i identify with the people and the country. brian: when did you first learn english? vanda: my last year of elementary school. about two years before i came to the united states. i grew up in communist czechoslovakia. most of my childhood.

communism ended when i was 13. this was 1989. i grew up in a small village in the borderlands of czechoslovakia. about an hour away from germany and austria. in the mountains. very beautiful and isolated place. my village had about 1200 people. it was very difficult to study english. there were no opportunities. one would have to travel 20 kilometers to a bigger town. also english was prohibited. one had to have a special dispensation to study english from the communist regime. i started studying in a town about 20 kilometers away. i would take a bus.

i was in my last year of elementary school. brian: is your mom still alive? when did your dad die and what of? vanda: he died of cancer when i was 13. he suffered with it for about three years. brian: what did he do for a living? vanda: he was an interesting man. one who shaped my life deeply. by the time i was born, he was working in the textile firm. before i was born, and afterwards, he was engaged in a variety of anti-communist activities. he was part of the czech resistance against the nazis. people often ask me about how i came to work on smuggling,

crime, and i say that part of my childhood was very much about that and not disclosing what my father was doing. i knew what he was doing. it was very risky. he was preparing me that one day he would not come home. i knew from early on what was happening and that i could not speak about it. at one thing, he was helping to smuggle dissidents out of the country. i lived a childhood of a disjunction between what is legal and what is illegal. brian: what about your mom, where is she? vanda: she still lives in the village. she is retired now. brian: what was her attitude

about communism? vanda: she strongly disliked it and disapproved of it. there was unity in the family about that. she was very afraid for what would happen to my father because of his activities. brian: how old was he when he died? vanda: 68. he was older than my mother. an older man when i was born. brian: where did you get this fearless approach to going all over the world to problem situations? how many different places have you done your studies? vanda: i couldn't count. probably i have been to every single continent except for australia. i have been to all of them.

100 or something countries. i have researched about 30 of them. brian: where other than somalia and afghanistan have you spent a lot of time? vanda: columbia, and mexico. i am completing a book on mexican security crime, just now. it should be out next year. brian: going back to afghanistan, i want to show you another video clip. this is down the alley that you have been studying. this was in january of this year when he was here talking about this. [video clip] >> some of the examples we go through in your report that came out last month, some of the waste and fraud. money that could have been better spent. looking at the $7 billion to

combat opium production. talk about that effort. >> unfortunately, there is nothing positive about that. if you use any metrics that we normally use for fighting drugs, the amount of crop being produced, we fail. there is a 30% increase in the amount of fields under production. the amount of opium actually produced. we fail. that has increased. the amount of interdictions decrease. the amount of people using drugs in afghanistan has increased. phenomenally. using every indication it has been an abject failure. we have wasted $7 billion. brian: do you agree? vanda: i think that there is one very important aspect and one that is positive. we could have done much worse. that is not a satisfactory answer.

we need to be realistic about what interventions can accomplish. we could have much better metrics and we would -- for example, if we decided to start heavily eradicating the fields and spraying them in the same way that cocoa is sprayed in columbia, the war in the country would already have been lost and the government would have collapsed. afghanistan, unfortunately after decades of civil war and insurgency, it is a country that revolves around opium and poppy. perhaps china in the 1920's may have had something comparable. we decided that we would destroy one third of the economy without anything to replace it.

we have just eliminated political order in that country. the taliban is very skilled at mobilizing poppy farmers. that they would protect them from eradication teams. a government that is trying to kill people with hunger. that is what insurgents learn around the world. the islamic ones or be they leftist revolutionaries like the eln in columbia. the best way to win political capital is to win the economy. we need to do a deeper examination about the metrics and if they are right. it cannot be viewed in isolation. it has to be viewed within the larger picture of state building and priority efforts. the problem is that we have unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to wave the magic wand and get a legal economy going in the country that is still in violence and destroyed economically.

poppy is there to stay in afghanistan. i think we can be smarter about how interdiction is done. we can be smarter about how the livelihoods are helped.

we need to pay attention -- even if you do all of these things, you would still have huge amounts of opium and poppy. brian: let's look at it from an american perspective. we have lost $7 billion and that is not the only place. we have blown billions of dollars. how much of that poppy -- a lot goes to europe, but how much of the drugs that are created from the poppy in afghanistan are coming somehow or another into this country? not only do we lose $7 billion but we feed the drug habit of the people in the united states and in the end, it seems like a circle that we end up paying for it by borrowing money.

vanda: we do not know exactly but under 10% of u.s. opiates come from afghanistan. the vast majority of u.s. opiates, heroin and other opiates, comes from mexico and colombia. i say perhaps because what we are seeing in the united states is once again a change in addiction. for decades, cocaine was the dominant drug abuse. then it became opiate use. this increased demand and it is possible that we could get more from afghanistan. so far, 90% of afghan opium has been going to europe or the middle east. pakistan, and iran have huge addiction problems. the major demand markets for

afghan opium. brian: looking at your experience in mexico. they are talking about el chapo. [video clip] >> el chapo or shorty is officially the world's most powerful drug trafficker. a short man with big plans. >> he controls these distribution cells throughout the united states. >> from rags to riches, in less than a decade, he turned a startup operation into a multinational criminal empire. >> he is like the osama bin laden of drug trafficking. >> he has proven to be more elusive than bin laden.

he was captured in the 1990's and managed to escape eight years later. >> he bribed his way out of what was supposed to be a high security penitentiary. brian: how could he possibly have done this twice? vanda: the corruption and incompetence of the prison officials in mexico. brian: they bribed the whole crowd? vanda: they certainly had to have a lot of support in the prison. the idea that there would be no noise coming from the tunnel is difficult to imagine including because the tunnels are something that he is known for to smuggle drugs into the united states. he previously used them as escape methods. the fact that this went undetected is unbelievable.

brian: how big a drug user is united states? vanda: huge. brian: in comparison to other countries? vanda: one of the largest. one of the interesting things that is changing about the global drug trade is that the u.s. is no longer the largest, per capita. it used to be the largest in cocaine use. these days, places like brazil and argentina probably have per capita use as large as the united states. in terms of opiates and heroin. iran, russia, and pakistan have a lot of users. one of the biggest countries, but not the sole user. brian: in one of your books, you had a book called -- shooting up.

what was the basis of that book? vanda: the subtitle of the book is -- counterinsurgency and the war on drugs. it looks at the intersection of the drug trade and the economies. the main focus was on the drug trade. it is fundamentally challenged by what became the dominant -- the narrative would go that the taliban takes the opium poppy, the shining path takes coca. the best way you win wars is by destroying the coca. several years after i wrote the book, i challenged this narrative and said -- yes, illicit economies like drugs

bring insurgents a lot of money but they also bring a lot of political capital. if you want to win conflict, you cannot antagonize rural populations that are dependent on this illicit economy. or you make the life very much harder. this narrative that you win by destroying the illicit economy is incorrect. by the way, it is not even guaranteed that the insurgents will make less money because they can also adapt and their economies are very resilient. worse comes to worse, they can always switch to other illicit economies. in burma, a new funding stream became available. and it was worse for the public goods perspective. they would not be defeated. moreover, one does not succeed

in even the pure narcotic subjective unless one has control. one needs to win the war before the production can be tackled through brutal means, eradication. mao in the 1960's was probably the most successful government in destroying the illicit economy. or through providing illegal economic alternatives. brian: should i assume then that we have wasted billions of dollars in the world drugs. vanda: yes. it is not wasted.

a lot of money has created counterproductive effects in the united states. the assumption is that it is about $40 billion including money spent domestically including on incarceration of users, a policy that is bad from every aspect. fortunately, the obama administration has started moving towards changing that. nonviolent users are increasingly being released from prison both at the federal and state level. that is how we need to move forward. treatment as well as external policies, eradication and interdiction. brian: your last name has brown in it. who is brown? vanda: sam brown. a scholar of international relations.

we met in boston when i was at harvard. he was a professor. we got to know each other. when i was between my undergrad and my graduate years, i spent a year in washington and he was at the time a visiting scholar at the brookings institution. we met there. brian: where are you now? vanda: i am also at the brookings institution. brian: does it pay for all of your travel and the work you are doing now? vanda: i need to raise all of the money for my work. it is a challenge because fundraising is challenging in general.

i have to raise all of the money for the fieldwork. brian: what kind of people support you? vanda: a combination of foundations. brian: the one thing that i've read that i have to ask you about is that you gave credit to norway. vanda: norway supports brookings in general. some funding goes to me as a scholar. it does not necessarily fund my fieldwork but it funds my salary at brookings. brian: why does norway fund brookings? vanda: norway is one of the

countries that supports brookings because brookings is a hallmark of quality, independent research. indeed, i feel very privileged to be at brookings and one of the reasons i am there is because it is a place that is truly committed to intellectual freedom based on sound scholarship. while i may disagree with my colleagues on policies like in afghanistan, on policies in other countries, and my judgments on columbia being a success -- that is what is wonderful about brookings. you can have a panel of scholars that can directly disagree with one another on the stage. there is not an ideology doctrine. there is not a uniformity of views. it is a place that i can thrive in. brian: there is one story i want you to tell about your car in the andes. vanda: i spent the time doing research in the andes on the coca economy and the drug trade. i have been quite a few times in peru. in this one trip, i decided to take a shortcut across the mountains to get to a coca area.

this time, i was doing it in the summer season. the rains were pouring down. the roads that would normally be passable, were a disaster. quite close to the coca area, i had to push the car. i ended up crashing in to the mountain. i was stuck close to a coca area on the road where no reasonable person would be. the police could ask interesting questions about what i was doing there. the outcome was that i spent a few days there trying to get local help.

i did get local help. i got the car out with the villagers. i ended up doing fascinating research into the community. they put the car back together with scotch tape, chewing gum, and prayers. i managed to drive the car back. the car was barely moving. it was risky. seconds away from death. i did not end up in the cocoa area that i was planning to do research in. nonetheless, it resulted in fantastic, interesting research.

brian: do you have a theory about why people take drugs? or about whether it is worth fighting the drug development out there or why people use so much of the drugs? is it worth spending all of this time trying to eradicate them in the first place? vanda: a lot of the policies and the current design are problematic and counterproductive. i don't believe the answer is we should do nothing. many people who are users would quit, perhaps 80%, but some people will become addicts and their lives will be ruined and the lives of the community around them will be ruined. we should not be indifferent to that.

my view is that we should not say -- anything goes and anyone can use drugs however they want. it will have bad effects on people who cannot make the judgment. they will not be able to comprehend it. we should certainly move away from encouraging users. we should move towards much smarter eradication. i am one that believes that we should prioritize eradication of drugs. recognizing -- there are areas where we do not want to have drugs. i very much believe that we need to do interdiction but often we need to focus not on the amount of flow in the case of drugs, as being the predominant metric of success but focus on how we change the behavior of criminals so that they have the least propensity towards violence and the least capacity to corrupt. so that society is not dependent on them. that might mean thinking differently about who we target

and how. in the case of drugs, the objective should be to shape criminal behavior towards the least threat towards state and society. i would not make the same argument about another illicit economy that i work on and am passionate about. that is wildlife. if you simply say -- that we focus on the behavior of organized crime groups, then we

will lose tigers and we may not have any rhinoceroses. we are seeing a huge depletion of other animals like turtles, amphibians. with a strong impact on the echo system. this is a depletable resource. we need to focus on reducing the volume of flows. making law enforcement smarter and weeding out corruption. brian: if folks want to read more about what you write, where do they find it? vanda: you can go to the brookings website. the vast majority of my articles will be posted but there will also be information about my books. brian: when is the book about mexico coming? brian: in the spring.

our guest has been dr. vanda felbab-brown from the brookings institution. book writer. thank you so much for joining us. vanda: it has been a great pleasure to be here. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] transcripts vis i us .org. a on the next "washington journal"

associated press reporter of a economists of weak round c growth and a on e of the cueto institute wall street and the recent the stock market. at 7:00 a.m. eastern. a day night on c-span conversation on fracking to and gas and possibilities from renewable energy. mills ll hear from mork with the manhattan institute. here's a preview.

it's going first, we will get underlying improvements in existing technologies. the drilling, the operational capabilities. seismic mapping. better.hat will get is wely, what will happen will later in new stuff. a lot of it will be fully automated. computing, mobile things like robotics, industrial drones. that will later into the system quickly. and all of this will be optimized