Rapid pullout. The pakistanis came into view that america was not in the region for a long time. They continued backing thinking that india would fill up the void. You know i do think it lookslooked like we were not even going to have troops in afghanistan. We backed up a bit on that because we saw how bad it was. I think certainly if we continue to deescalate afghanistan is going to fall apart and also going to have tremendously damaging ramifications in pakistan where we have great interest now, critics would say it was a hopeless case and the start. We put in the wrong person president karzai who was hopelessly corrupt. The ama, Afghan National army was corrupt and incompetent like his iraqi counterpart. What were looking at them allmore we are really seeing is societies and countries which are in a state of extended collapse and failure and there is nothing the United States could have done to pass the situation out. Trying to establish democracy in afghanistan and iraq was a fools errand and the United States should have instead maintained a kind of handsoff approach and it is not just it is the only it is the best it is the best worst policy. Given your experiences in afghanistan do you think this would have had a completely different outcome now that we are if aa different strategy and if a different policy have been followed . There have been a lot of mistakes made. We struggled because we vacillated between a policy of trying to turn afghanistan into a viable democracy. One of the things you have to keep in mind in the early days we outsourced a lot of that to the europeans we let the germans handle that and they assigned few resources to it. It was poorly managed. We lost a lot of time. Itit is a problem of our european allies. It would be great if we can get them to do things and take the burden off of us, but they have not been able to do a lot of things. We got behind the curve. Sending our resources. It is a longterm process to nation build. We too often neglect that as a generational project. The American People have the patience for this. It has become a dirty word in politics. You cannot go on capitol hill and talk about nationbuilding without being shown the door. Part of it is a hasty approach. It is a longterm process. This gets into the debate within the Obama Administration. 2,009 you have the leading figures saying we will nation build. We will do counterinsurgency pass by this place, secures. That is too ambitious. Focus on kind terrorists drones, and special Operations Forces. 2,009 they really argued that trying to just focus that narrowly is not going to work in the context of afghanistan. And so fast forward to 2011. Continuing to make these arguments. Coming up with arguments that have not worked in afghanistan. He is able to gain new supporters for a strategy thanks to the fact that the trail, mcchrystals, gates moving on and you now have political supporters of the president moving into positions. You do get the president to buy off on the strategy. We are going to use our drones and special Operations Forces to kill any enemies that happen to be here. And thisand this then becomes strategy not just for afghanistan before the us presence at large which then it conveniently allows the administration to say we dont need big Ground Forces because we can use special operations and rounds. Lets talk about drones for 2nd. When we talk about the handsoff small footprint approach to american conflict, American Power particularly in the war on terror this has become a hallmark of the Obama Administration is. The number of predator drone attacks if you chart the monograph from the Bush Administration which initiated the use of lethal force administered by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to the Obama Administration it is a straight curve up and now it has become the principal tool by which obama and his advisers deal with the terrorist threat the terrorist threat that they do not name. The Obama Administration justifies on the ground that it has been successful in crippling al qaeda. Just a couple weeks ago theyre was a senior al qaeda official and libya was killed by predator drone strike. The Obama Administration has been deployed to these high profile highly high leadership positions that have been vacated things to predator drone strikes and to the body count if i can use that term for the war on terror. Measures of success. What i find interesting about your book and im going to ask you in particular, but i we will do do it this way. What i find so interesting is that while most of us are focused on the threat for isis you remind is the fact that al qaeda far from being an extinct presence is very much alive and part of the Terror Networks and the growing threat that we have to deal with. What is the relationship between obamas much touted drones break counterterror strategy and the continuing viability and growth of al qaeda, not to mention isis. Drones certainly can be tactfully useful and have scored formidable successes. The problem with the administration is they turn them into a strategy in many cases. As a substitute for other things that need to be done. This is also driven by domestic politics. Early on we were taught. I think a lot of the information has been fed to the public about drones is inaccurate. The administration touted the numbers in pakistan. It turns out the vast majority of the people were not important terrorists. A terrorists. A lot of them were people who are enemies of the pakistani government. Then a number of innocent civilians were killed. Most countries dont even let us use drones. It is mostly pakistan and yemen. Yemen, a pretty stark case of limitations. Let me back up for a 2nd so that we understand. The fact that so many of these predator strikes and killing of highprofile terrorist and Al Qaeda Leaders in yemen and pakistan isnt because that is where they are all hanging out the because those of the two countries which have the most liberal policies are letting america conduct a strikes. And we have seen over time, a permission diminished because of the fact that we were killing the wrong people for the fallout from the bin laden raid. They shut down a drum base. Even when the drones were at there height you had the subway bomber and faisals is odd that is that truck and the time square training in pakistan in those areas at the same time. Most troubling the extremists have been able to find ways to beat the drones Counter Drone Technology and pakistan particularly al qaeda has moved into the big cities where we cannot use our drones, the government wont let us and there is too much risk of civilian casualties. So the impact of drones has been declining. Certainly theyre is still value to them. Surveillance good abilities are good. Yemen has totally gone to pieces. The military was pushing president obama to use counterinsurgency as well as persistent strikes and the administration so we only to do that. The insurgents took over the country earlier command we had to pull out our special operators. Now we cant do much at all in terms of drone strikes. One recent success a signature strike which is something just based on suspicious behavior. We didnt actually no that was a senior leader. You may no the worlds leading terrorist bomb maker is still in yemen. I very much worried about al qaeda and yemen pakistan has been somewhat quiet but for most indications this injury be the rebuilding which is part of the fear. As we pull out of afghanistan that we will further embolden al qaeda in pakistan. If the drone strategy is not working thats your some prescriptions about how to correct the direction. Direction. My last questions i will be getting to a broader sense. For now, what is the alternative . Certainly a lot of the good alternatives actually i think, we have lost out. May decisions where we put ourselves back. We couldve been talking about how we would build up the government counterinsurgency capability. Now wenow we dont have a government to work with, so it will be harder. We try at some. To build up large military forces. Trying to get arab countries to do that. Pakistan our relationship now has been in preset shape. I think we can to some extent ease some of the pakistani government concerns by maintaining a us presence. I think we need to increase our presence. The current small footprint is not what our military recommended. We need more troops theyre for longterm. Even if we are going to keep them theyre we need to make clear that we we will keep them as long as is needed. If it is going to be a hundred years we can tell people. Conveying the message is very important. Do we still have troops in germany . We do. Troops in south korea. Getting on tour 70 years. Thats correct. The size that we are talking about is not numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It is not requiring commitments of that size. Correct. But it is commitments to a specific kind of strategy. The other book which i should mention is a book on the history of counterinsurgency. The evolution of it. And i think that for a lot of people what has happened as a result of the war the very success did something. Counterinsurgency became associated with state building which is a dirty word bipartisan consensus on the hill right now that we do not want to engage in say building and also it became identified with long grueling processes in which the iraq war unfolded from is very hopeful beginnings in 2003 until finally the tray assert paid off almost on the eve of the 2008 election. I was an advocate of counterinsurgency and saying this is an important strategy which the us needs to hang on to. How do you deal with critics of counterinsurgency who say that it is either going to get a so involved that it is a hopeless task and the falls and are that it takes so long the American Public we will have the patience for it and its a strategy that in the longterm is one of diminishing returns. That is a good topic. There are a lot of people who think counterinsurgency itself does not work. A book ina book in the wall street journal called how to lose a war the right way. And that book basically makes the argument that you need insurgency wars are inherently intractable. My. Is counterinsurgency, part of the problem is that some of the counterinsurgency enthusiasts believe that you had to pull out this manual and do these things and counterinsurgency would work great. It is more complicated than that. Part of the Obama Administrations frustration with afghanistan was that it was not as easy as some of the proponents suggested. What i believe and what i have argued is that, counterinsurgency depends heavily on the leadership the human capitol brought to bear on both sides. If you have a strong pool of leaders on the counterinsurgency side chances areside, chances are good he will succeed and historically we have seen quite a few that have worked well. The philippines, columbia, el salvador, successes in afghanistan and iraq. And so we need to try to move people away from the view the counterinsurgency is a cureall or that it never works because it very much depends upon the context and do was involved. Can you say one of the reasons why the evolution of successful strategy took so long was because after vietnam and what was felt to be the failed us strategies there including counterinsurgency those doctrines were put on a shelf allowed to gather dust even with the marine corps which is the great progenitors of counterinsurgency warfare and that this is one of the problems. When you dont treated as an important tool you find yourself in situations in which you have got to go back and dig it out and dusted off and trying get its work. Youyou have thought perhaps crucial decade or two of loss doctrine. I think that is one of the big problems we face. In 2012 the Obama Administration so we will not be doing prolonged stability operations. Theres a sense that we have done counterinsurgency. It was messy and we didnt like it. Ifif we remove our capability to do it then we wont do it again. We will we have seen historically is that we get surprised by these kind of wars. We didnt want to do counterinsurgency. Bush came to power and so we would not do these things. We end up being in iraq. Things go south. Afghanistans, we turn things over to the europeans they can handle it. We decide it is in our interest to go back in and do counterinsurgency. Were poorer predicting the next war. The idea that we can no we dont have to do one of these things again is dangerous and ultimately if we are not prepared the people who we will pay the most other people in the armed forces who will not be prepared for the war. With americas retreat, six, six and a half years has come the advance of other powers russia, china iran. Now, you cannot make the argument that the strategic failures that you describe in the book is the result the withdrawal of american troops from those countries and regions. How do youhow do you attribute this . What is it . There is a pattern obviously to the way in which these aggressor nations are taking full opportunity but how is it related directly to the way in which the Obama Administration policies in other areas have rebounded to creating knew strategic threats. Certainly the cut and the Defense Budget driven to a large extent by what was going on in the middle east has had a global impact. I think our enemies have been encouraged by that. Our friends have become more concerned. They doubt our credibility but also add to that decisions that the United States has made. The syrian red line that we backed away from the administration has consistently been reluctant to stand up for things. Ukraine is a particularly disturbing example where we said we would protect them if they give up the Nuclear Weapons and then they are under attack and we dont do anything. That is particularly disconcerting. We have done in the case of china we provoke them by saying we would pivot to asia so that that stimulated defense spending and we ended up not executing because we cut the Defense Budget. I think theyre have been a lot of missteps in terms of public messaging which really is a white house responsibility. We saw the secretary of defense trying to mitigate some of the problems. Ultimately foreign leaders Pay Attention to what the white house is saying. Also, cuts in our capability headed down below 3 percent of gdp has created worries among countries. A lot of countries want to end up being on the side of the power that we will be most powerful in the region and the thinking it wont be the United States. In the conclusion of your book you have the statement. By the time barack obama vacates the white house he could go down in history as the president who forfeited americans global captaincy and ushered in a long era of global strife and stability. Now, the next president as obama vacates and the knew one was an lets assume that he or she wants to reverse the process. Now is your chance to tell us about how you would prescribe what advice you would be giving to a president in order to reverse the process. Start with the specific command how would you handle the situation in afghanistan in order to bring that to success or even victory . Well, i would 1st commit the us presence beyond 2016. I think that we need to increase the number of troops to at least 20,000. And they dontand they dont have to be going up operations. That is not a big jump. Its not. We need at least 20,000 troops. We are keeping troops behind the wire. Were going to have to send people out. There is not a quick fix because of what we have done we cant just have the courage do everything. We cant do in and bar awakening because we have so alienated the sunnis. We dont really want the shiites just going in and taking things over and taking the country fully into irans orbit. That we will be a longerterm process. I think probably need to increase defense spending which historically is relatively low. You could even justify going to 5 percent. What the next pres. Has to do is reengage of the public. This president has done little to explain to the American People why the overseas commitment. If you look at polls people say public support for overseas intervention is down and a lot of that is the pres. s fault. He came into office in in 2009 saying he would get tough in afghanistan. He felt he had to do that. He got elected. The public support has faded because they have seen the president not commit to conflicts. Why do we need 4 percent gdp still need to be engaged in the world which we will go a long way. No american boots on the ground. Well wewhile we dont want to just send american troops and whatever there needed that really has encouraged other countries and then the discouragement our allies that feel like we wont be theyre for them when things get tough. Been more time talking about what were not going to do them what we are going to do. Should we open it up to the audience. I will be great. If you have a microphone come around you give us your name and also any institutional affiliation you care to divulge. The political sense. I have a question that toy anniversary of saddams invasion. Many people say the war ended promptly. That the question. It might have made sense to go in but i do think at that time we probably we likely would have made the same mistake of underestimating what it wouldve taken to pacify and stabilize the country. It was an option that you could have pursued them and probably could have again. Decapitate the regime and authoritarianauthoritarian government. Things would have played out differently. Its hard to no all the stuff that would have come in the interim. Now looking back in hindsight a lot of people think it wouldve been great if you were still there because we were not at have to deal with that messy conflict. Now a ran has become the dominant force. We could have prevented it ran from gaining his stamina position had been uphold out in 2011 because it opens the door. It will be hard for us to get away from in the longterm lets hope we have. There ishave. There is a hope that we can keep it from becoming completely proiranian. Th