had, why didn't the comanches just sweep the plains west with of the mississippi river like a genghis khan, and does that have anything to do with the low birth rate? >> i think that's part of it. i think their numbers weren't big enough for that. but the real reason, i think, is that indians never really, they didn't see property in strategic ways. they would never fight to take a position. they would never do a go liply, sacrifice large amounts of people to take a piece of land. so i think the way they saw their empire was simply the southern plains where the buffalo were. that was where it was. so the idea of sweeping northern mexico clean which people had suggested they could do too or sweeping to the -- that's more of the european idea. that's not so much an indian idea. they never thought that way because there would have been no point. from their point of view, there were no buffalo there, so there were no buffalo over by the mississippi. all they wanted was that. they never really did understand property, and i think some indians still have -- >> i was going to say we have the five

but it is a fool's air and to try to remake a country that nobody since genghis khan managed to conquer. what makes us think, what arrogance gives us the right to assume we can succeed with the moguls, the british, the soviets failed? no government in afghanistan, no government in kabul has ever been able to make its run in the entire country. . why should we take a government that is not supported by the people and is corrupt and impose it on this country? they have been in a civil war, we have no business intervening in that war and we have no necessity to win it for one side or the other? this whole idea of counterinsurgency, that we are going to persuade the people left alive after our firepower is applied to love the government we like is absurd. it will take tens of near, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of american lives, if it can be done at all. an we don't need to do it. if they want to have a civil war, we can't stop them. we can't choose the rulers they have. we don't have to like the rulers they have. we don't have to like their choices. it's