walled in not just once but three times that's the number of barriers in closing the american university of afghanistan there are also numerous security checks the university is filled not just with students but also security personnel there largely from india not afghanistan to be sure that no taliban member has infiltrated the squad after one terrorist attack the university was closed for more than six months the college president is adamant something like that will never happen again. we of course have to increase our security massively but we did that and we were very worried that many students would come back in fact many students came back many more morse new students came and over the last three or four weeks this university has become a bright beacon of hope for all of afghanistan. almost eight hundred students are enrolled here and many of them can still remember the attack which claimed the lives of sixteen people. or you. when you talk of and we were in the second floor of the building which was attacked and then the attackers eventually made their way up to the class that we were hiding so

northern afghanistan against suspected taliban training facilities, this after 16 years of american involvement there. joining us now, dean of the graduate school of journalism at columbia universityrize winning author of "ghost war" steve coll, his new book is called "directorate s." let's talk about the latest news out of afghanistan. your thoughts on that and then we'll talk about the book. >> we've been fighting a couple wars in afghanistan since the obama administration won assisting afghan forces in the war against the taliban and last year we dropped a lot more bombs. i think we're dropping at least 25% or 50% more bombs in 2017 than the year before because we're the air force that the afghan government needs to keep the taliban out of cities. so it's kind of a grinding stalemated war. the trump administration did a big policy review and thought about some changes, put more pressure on pakistan but it's essentially the same way the obama administration was fighting in its second term. >> the same war the obama administration was fighting in a second term, andrea, and as we look at this book we're also looking at new leadership with a very different hard-to-predict approach