Good evening. Im bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose, along with my wife. On behalf of the entire staff, welcome. A few quick administrative notes. Nobody could time to turn off your cell phones or anything that might go beep. Secondly, when we get to the q a part of the session, we would ask if you have a question that you make your way to that microphone that there because we are videotaping tonight, taking ourselves of our Youtube Channel and also cspan booktv easier. Lastly, at the end before you come up to get your book signed, please fold up the chairs that your city in and leaned them against something that looks like it wont topple over. We are very pleased to have Robert Grenier here with us this evening to talk like his new book, 88 days to kandahar. Bob spent 27 years with the cia, three of them as station chief in islamabad during what turned out to be a very critical time. Before and immediately after the 9 11 attacks. He was very much involved in the u. S. Efforts to oust the taliban from afghanistan and bring hamid karzai to power, and the books title refers to the period between september 11 and december 2001 when karzai made his return to afghanistan from pakistan. Of the books of course have reported extensively on the war in afghanistan, including some by other former cia officials, but bob offers a fresh details about the role of both the cia and the pakistanis in the pashtun areas of afghanistan in the months after 9 11. With his ringside seat as a Senior Agency official stationed closest to afghanistan, he recounts meeting by meeting, sometimes even phone call by phone call, how events unfolded. As he explains at the beginning of the book, he knew early on that he wanted to write about the experience and about what happened. So we kept extensive notes and was able to review many relevant documents. After his pakistan tour, bob was brought back to cia headquarters by george kennan, who was then, of course, cia director, to head the agency group covert operation in support of the invasion of iraq in 2003. Later he assumed leadership of the agencys catechism center and he was removed from the position in early 2006 after clashes with other top officials and retired from the agency later that year. Joining a Security Firm as managing director and is now chairman of the rg partners, Strategic Advisory firm that focuses on security and intelligence matters. The economist magazine has praised bobs book as quote and engrossing wellwritten insiders account and a Washington Post review has called quote in admirably frank addition to the bookshelf of memoirs about americas involvement in afghanistan and d iraq. The post review without is a quote, he has a sweeping story to tell what she does and a sharp, straightforward style while pausing to let us in on ad hoc decisionmaking of the sometimes absurd world he inhabited. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Robert Grenier. [applause] thanks very much for that introduction. At the end of the day all i really wanted to do with this book was to tell a story. And a story begins early on a sunday morning. Its a clear, bright day. It was surprisingly comfortable for islamabad pakistan. But it was enough to enjoy. In fact, i was sound asleep i was absolutely exhausted ive been up until 3 00 in the morning. I slept fitfully for maybe three or four hours, and then the phone rang. And so i admit that i may have betrayed a slight hint of irritation when i picked up the receiver and said hello . I immediately regretted it because it was a pause at the other end of the line, and a very familiar voice said, did i wake you up, son . Oh, good god. Is the director. So i sat up at attention in bed and i did it within you can do in those circumstances. I lied. I said no, mr. Director, i was just getting up. He said look, we are going to be meeting tomorrow at camp david. Members of the war cabinet. And were going to discussing the campaign in afghanistan. He said the pentagon is telling us that there are very few legitimate military targets in all of afghanistan. We can probably get them from the air in a matter of days. We know where all the terrorist Training Camps are, but that terrorists have all fled. The seat of power in washington, d. C. , he was called in the middle of the night halfway around the world completely bypassing the entire chain of command to ask some sleeping field operative what we ought to do. If you didnt know we were in trouble before, you knew it now. So i said, mr. Director, im not sure what we are thinking about this and just the right way. You are asking about military tactics. This is a political problem. We probably have the power to Chase International terrorist out of afghanistan, but whos going to keep them out . At the end of the day what we need to have is a competent Political Authority able to assert its control over afghanistan that will do will begin. And that is to keep it from again becoming a safe haven for International Terrorists. If the taliban is going to be that covered, well then, so much the better, they are there and theyre controlling most of the country. If mullah omar ahead of the taliban is not willing to change policy with regard to bin laden, been there others in the leadership we know who may be willing to step into just that. If we cant convince the taliban as a whole to do what needs to be done, then we have to smash the taliban and we have to do it anyway that will enable us to bring Something Else in its place. So whatever military means we use, we have to sequence them and calibrate and in such a way as to get us to where it is we need to be politically. So as im going through this recitation, hes taking o notes and he stopped and asked the question. I said look, this isnt going to work, this is taking too long. Me try to write all this down. So he said that idea. Remember, this is early sunday morning my time. Its late saturday night time, hihas died. He said its 11 00. The helicopter comes to me at six. Can you give me something by been . I said yes, sir, i can. I drove as fast as he pretendedd did office. Hammered out an eight page message in about three hours but by this time my senior lieutenants were coming back in. So i circulated it to them and i got some good input from them, made those changes and sent it back. I didnt completely bypassing the chain of command, and send it to security detail and said had this to the director as soon as he gets a. As far as i was concerned that was for the time being the end of a story. I had no idea what was going to happen after that. But he did wake up and they gave him my piece and you look at it any circulated copies to the other members of the war cabinet, to cheney and rice and rumsfeld and secretary powell and chairman myers. And to discuss it that day at camp david. Then the following morning, monday, they met with the president and laid it out for the president. The president said done, this is our template going forward. The next thing i knew, tommy franks, the Combatant Commander for the region, was giving me on the phone to do a Video Conference because hed been ordered to make sure his battle plan conformed to my paper put this is absolutely extraordinary. Esso but not the way things normally work. Well, it said that no plan survives contact with any. This plan was no exception. But there were in a lot of principles which and in we did actually followed during the conduct of what we thought was of the war. And so what was it that we said . To reiterate, we said at the end of the this is a political problem, not a military problem. I said, whatever military means we use, we need to make sure we are not perceived by the afghans as invaders. Afghanistan has a nasty habit of dealing very badly with for invaders. The time of alexander, discovered by the soviets to to their cost in the 20th century, discovered by the british as well in the 19th, and i was very concerned we would reprieve the experience they had as well. So i said but to keep our military footprint as small as possible we have to make a clue we are not seeking Permanent Military bases. Not seeking to occupy the country. As part of that with to make it clear that we are not coming in on her own again. We are coming in our behalf of afghanistan. Afghans have to be in the lead. Is the afghans were willing to do on his own account and of their own volition what we want them to do, such that we can support them, we will not succeed in the end. As we will colonize the place, and i didnt see any advocates for that. But as we are looking for these allies, our most natural allies with the Northern Alliance, collection of ethnic minority send in the north of the country who been fighting a civil war, a losing civil war mind you are quite a number of years with the taliban. I said we will find support within. We must come in on their site, but, but we have to be extremely careful lest we are perceived by the far more numerous visits from in the, oregon, many of whom put had up here from the taliban. We may adhere to them we are simply entering a battle on the side other enemies come as hard as they are the taliban they will be coalesced around the taliban and the political situation with the worst rather than better. So its extremely important as we support the Northern Alliance that we also are fighting in support of the pashtuns. And i respect at least we have had, weve gotten a head start. For the previous 18 months we have been reaching out to pashtun warlords, if you will. Most of them tribal commanders. Many of them we establish relationships with back in the days of the ethics of jihad in the 1980s. Many of them have been marginalized by the taliban, some of them were fighting for the taliban and still were looking for the opportunity to come back and reclaim what they felt was the rightful place in pashtun society. So now after 9 11 when everything was possible, we went back to them again as if this is your chance. If youre willing to rise up against the taliban you have the full weight of American Military power behind you. Thought that was a pretty good pitch. But almost to a person they demurred. You dont survive as a warlord in afghanistan to come in on the wrong side of the fight. They came up with any number of excuses, but the meaning, the burden they had was that we did make sure that you, the americans, are serious. We need to make sure whos going to win at the end of the day before we will commit ourselves. There were only two tribal leaders of any consequence in southern afghanistan who are willing to commit themselves and rise up in rebellion against the taliban. And take the risk associated with one of them was harmed karzai, whom we know and love. Love. Came out of this very nicely, thank you very much, twotime president of afghanistan. And also a former governor of kandahar had the dubious distinction of being the first provincial governor to be driven out of power by the taliban when it first was up in 1994. Those were the only two that we could induce initially to take the fight to the taliban. Much of this book tells the improbable and at times hairraising story of these two individuals going back essentially on their own to the respective tribal areas, raising small tribal armies and some of surviving long enough for me to get my cia officers, accompanied by u. S. Army special forces to join with them Andrew Marshall u. S. Air power in two attacks, one from the north and one, east. They converge on kandahar on the seventh of december, 2001, drove the taliban and alqaeda from power. We thought that was the end of the war. In fact, it turned out only to be the First AmericanAfghan Border as that was underway it was a separate campaign, also been fought, a parallel war that is being fought within the borders of pakistan. As they can be both the north and south was going forward, militants, foreign militants allied with bin laden were fleeing afghanistan primarily into pakistan in hopes of finding safe haven elsewhere. So cia in conjunction with the notorious pakistani intelligence service, the isi, were doing a land office business, find interesting many people in many of these people ended up in guantanamo. We thought it was all enormously successful. But as i look back now its clear to me that we really didnt understand how and why we had one. We understood the military part of it we realized this was by wrote a political structure, struggle but we didnt fully understand the political situation in southern afghanistan especially that convinced the taliban that they needed to give a. Because we didnt understand why wed want them we could really understand just how tenuous our victory was. We could spend a long time cataloging the mistakes were made by any number of afghan actors, by the americans, by the international community. Among many other things we shifted our focus. As brad just mentioned before very long i was ordered back to washington to become cias iraq Mission Manager we are off to the next finger afghanistan was largely left aside. By the time i returned to begin to focus once again on pakistan and afghanistan, this time as the director of cias counterterrorism center, i made an extensive visit to both countries in the spring of 2005 and already we could begin to see that things were starting to unravel. We did not is going to go. I certainly didnt get th that e could begin to see the taliban reinserting control in significant parts of afghanistan. That was the situation that persisted when i left government in 2006. And then in my humble estimation we as a country made a very serious political and strategic mistake. In a small way in the latter part of the osha administration and in a much bigger way in the early days of the obama administration, we essentially took over the war ourselves. We concluded that the afghan authorities at the time simply were not up to the test. They simply were not up to what would be required we felt in order for them to prevail against the taliban. So you remove all those principles we talked about at the outset, that the americans must keep their footprint very small, the packet has been the lead, we have to be working in support of them rather than the other way around all of that was left aside. We decided in effect afghanistan was too important to be left to the whims of afghans. And so at the height of the obama surge, with 1000 american troops, another 45,000 from nato. Were spending at a rate of 100 billion a year, we completely overwhelm this small, primitive agrarian country with a tiny gdp and a Debt National institutions. It didnt go well. Its brought us down to the current path were essentially the United States has largest withdrawn from afghanistan. We are going to withdraw further. Again in my humble estimation i think have made it very serious mistake by trying to do too much, now we are compounding that error by trying to do too little. And so having won what now i call the First American afghan war, having certainly not one the second american afghan war, i am very concerned that we are setting the scene, setting the stage for what will ultimately have to be another, a third american afghan war. As brad eluded a couple of minutes ago, this book was a long time in coming, especially for somebody who knew he was going to write it back in december 2001. But on balance as a look at it now im kind of glad i waited a separate written this book whatevers got out of Government Back in 20062007 as i read the intended it wouldve been a very different story. Essentially within an adventure story. I hope it still is at its heart, but now with what we know with a perspective that we have a time, that adventure story, one persons perspective is bracketed in a much larger geo political story, the sort of the First American afghan war, how and why was that we won, how we lost our way and failed to win the second american afghan war, and we met may yet be forced to fight a third. Thank you all very much for your patience. And lets to open the floor for questions. [applause] certainly are not my image of a cia officer the you look more like an accountant to me. I hate it when people say that. However, however, based on your experience better, do you see any incentives for the taliban to negotiate with the current Afghan Government and try to put an end to this . Or is it much more likely that they would just kind of way to know, continue with her terrorist attacks and take over the country . Did you alter the question . Good. Im not very optimistic. I know theres been some recent development, some talks that people sort of buzzing, were beginning to make progress. I share your pessimism, sorting of the stage. The taliban to succeeding on the battlefield. They certainly dont want to leave the United States with a strong position in afghanistan because they know ultimately thats going to work against them. Theyve tried to make it clear that a condition of their engagement with it, government is the departure of the foreigners. I dont think that they are about to make peace. What i would hope, seems to me the best we could hope for over the long term is that the taliban will simply conclude that its not going to win along the line. I think this requires a more robust, a limited and sustainable but get more robust engagement on the part of the country. If we could get into the point where they conclude, were just not going to succeed militarily, we will have to reach some sort of an agreement, i just dont think its in their dna to form themselves as a Political Party and form a coalition government. Its just not the way the thing. Spirit just as a followup to that, if thats the case is there, will the taliban be sort of a selfcontained afghanistan creature, or do you foresee linkages with isis, connections with pashtun how does that there are three in afghanistan some who up until now have been fully with the taliban, there may be others who may defect because they see their mission in much broader more global terms. The taliban per se this focus on national goals. I think they will remain that way. In terms, they will be