During what turned out to be a very critical time, before and immediately after the 9 11 attacks. He was very much involved in u. S. Efforts to oust the taliban from afghanistan and bring hamed 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. Other books of course have reported extensively on the war in afghanistan including some by other former cia officials. Bob offers 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 the Senior Agency official station the closest to afghanistan. He recounts meeting by meeting and sometimes even phonecall by phonecall how events unfolded. As he explains in the beginning of the book he knew early on that he wanted to write about the experience and about what happened so he kept extensive notes and was able to review many relevant documents. After his pakistan tour bob goes back with george tenet cia director to head the agency to coordinate covert operations and support of the invasion of iraq in 2003. He was removed from that position in early 2006 after clashes with other top officials and retired from the agency that youre joining crowe incorporated as managing director. And hes now chairman of the rg partners a strategic adviser reform but from the focuses on security and intelligence matters. The economist magazine has praised spots bob spoke as quote and engrossing wellwritten account and a Washington Post review has called it quote an admirable addition to the bookshelf of memoirs about americas involvement in afghanistan and iraq. In the post the review went on to say quote he has a sweeping story to tell which he does in a sharp straightforward style while pausing to let us in an ad hoc decision 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 the story begins early on a sunday morning. Its a clear, bright day. It was surprisingly comfortable for islamabad pakistan. I was sound asleep. I was absolutely exhausted. I had done up until 3 00 in the morning. Ive slept fitfully for maybe three or four hours and then the phone rang. So i admit that i may have betrayed a slight hint of irritation when i picked up the receiver and said hello . And i immediately regretted it as there was applause at the other end of the line and a very familiar voice said did i wake you up some . Oh good god its the director. So i sat up at attention in bed and i did the only thing you can do in those circumstances, i lied. I said no mr. Director was just getting up. He said look we are going to be meeting tomorrow at camp david, members of the war cabinet and we are going to be discussing the campaign in afghanistan. He said the pentagon is telling us that there are very few legitimate military targets in all of afghanistan. They can probably hit them from the air in a matter of days. We know where all the terrorists Training Camps are, but the terrorists have all fled. He literally asked me, he said do we bomb the camps . This was the 23rd of september , 2001, 12 days after 9 11 the worst oneday disaster in American History since pearl harbor. And heres george tenet the director of Central Intelligence at the seat of power in washington d. C. Calling 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 duke didnt know we were in trouble before, you knew it now. So i said mr. Director im not sure ive thought about this in the right way. Youre asking me about military tactics and 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 all we can and that is to keep it from again becoming a safe haven for International Terrorists. If the taliban is willing to be that government been so much the better, they are there. They are controlling most of the country and the head of the taliban is now willing to change policy with regard to bin laden and then there are others in the leadership we know who may be willing to step in and do just that. If we can 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 in a way that will enable us to bring Something Else in its place. So whatever military means we use we have to sequence them and calibrate them in such a way as to get us to where it is that we need to be politically. So as im going through this recitation hes taking notes and stopping to ask me questions. I said look mr. Director this isnt going to work. Its taking too long. So he said good idea and remember this is early sunday morning my time. Its late saturday night his time. He said its 11 00 in the helicopter comes for me at six. Can you get me something of five so i said yes or i can. I drove as fast as i could into the office and i hammered out an eight page message in about three hours. By this time i senior lieutenants were coming back and so i circulated it to them and i got good input from them and made those changes. Send back completely bypassing the chain of command and send it to security detail and i said hand this to the director soon as he gets up. I was concerned for the time being that was end of the story. I had no idea what was going to happen after that. He did wake up and they gave him my piece and they looked at it and circulated copies to the war cabin Cheney Rumsfeld and secretary powell and chairman myers and they discussed a bad day in camp david. The following morning, monday they met with the president and the president said this is our template Going Forward. The next thing i knew tommy franks the Combatant Commander for the region was getting me on the phone to do a videoconference because he had been ordered to make sure they conform to my paper. Absolutely extraordinary. This is said is simply not the way things ordinarily work. Well it said that no plans survived the contact with enemy the enemy in this blend is no exception. But there warned him that a lot of principles which in the end we did actually followed during the conduct of what we thought was the war. And so what was it that we said . To reiterate we said at the end the day this is a political problem not a military problem. Whatever military means we use we need to make sure that we are not besieged by the afghans, invaders. Afghanistan is a nasty habit dealing with foreign invaders. It was discovered by the soviets at their cost in the 20th century discovered by the british. I was very concerned that we would reprice the experience that they have as well. So i said we have to keep our military footprint as small as possible. We may have to make it clear that we are not seeking Permanent Military bases. We are not seeking to occupy the country and is part of that we have to make it clear we are coming in on behalf of afghans. Afghans have to be in the lead. Unless theyre afghans who are willing to do on their own account and of their own volition what we want for them to do such that we can support them we will not succeed in the end. I didnt see any advocates for that. But, as we are looking for these allies are most natural allies for the Northern Alliance, the collection of ethnic minority centered in the north and other countries have been fighting a civil war and of living civil war for quite a number of years. I said obviously we will find support and we must comment on their side but we have to be extremely careful lest we are perceived by the far more numerous taliban many of whom have had it up to here. If we make it appear to them that we are simply entering the battle on the side of their enemies as tired as they are the taliban they will recall less around the taliban and the political situation will be worse better than better rather than better. Its extremely important as we support the Northern Alliance that we also are fighting in support of the pashtuns. In that respect the least we have gotten a head start. The previous 18 months i and members of my station had been reaching out to pashtuns warlords if you will most of them tribal commanders. Many of whom we established relationships with back in the days of antisoviet jihad in the 1980s. Many of them have been marginalized by the taliban. Some of them are fighting for the taliban and still looking for their opportunity to reclaim what they thought was their rightful place in Pashtun Society. So now after 9 11 when everything was possible we went back to them again and they said this is your chance. If you are willing to rise up against the taliban you will have the full weight of the American Military power behind you. That was a pretty good pitch. You dont survive as a warlord in afghanistan by coming in on the wrong side of the fight. They came up with any number of excuses but the meaning of it in a burden behind it was we need to make sure that you the americans are serious. We need to make sure who is going to win at the end of the day before we commit ourselves and there were only two tribal leaders of any consequence, in afghanistan who are willing to commit themselves and rise up in rebellion against the taliban and take the risks associated with it. One of the most common karzai who we know and love. Came by this very nicely twotime president of afghanistan and also the former governor of kandahar who had the dubious distinction of being the first provincial governor to be driven out of power by the taliban in 1994. Those were the only two that we could induce initially to take the fight to the taliban. So much of this book tells the improbable and at times hairraising story of these two individuals going back essentially on their own to their respective tribal areas rising, raising small tribal armies somehow surviving long enough to get by cia officers accompanied by u. S. Army special forces to join with them and to marshal u. S. Airpower and to one from the north and one from the east. They finally converged on kandahar on the seventh of december 2001 drove the taliban and al qaeda from power. We thought that was end of the war. In fact it turned out only to be the First American afghan war but as that was underway there was a separate campaign that was also being fought. The prowar if you will being fought within the borders of pakistan because as the campaign in the north and the south is Going Forward foreign militants aligned with bin laden were fleeing out of afghanistan primarily to pakistan in hopes of finding safety elsewhere. The cia in conjunction with the notorious Pakistani Intelligence Service the isi were doing Land Office Business finding and arresting these people many of them ending up in guantanamo. 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 and we realize this was the political struggle that we really didnt fully understand the political situation in southern afghanistan especially to convince the taliban they needed to give up because we didnt understand why they won. We didnt understand just how tenuous our victory was. Now we could spend a long time cataloging the mistakes were made by any number of afghan actors by the americans or the international community. Among many other things we shifted our focus. A spread as mentioned before very long i was ordered back to washington to become cias iraq mission manager. We are off to the next thing. Afghanistan was largely left aside and by the time i returned to begin to focus once again on pakistan and afghanistan this time is the director of Cias Counterterrorism Center and made an extensive visit to both countries in the spring of 2005 and already we did again to see that things were starting to unravel. We didnt know what was going to go but we could begin to see the taliban reasserting control and 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 bush 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 simply werent up to the task. They simply werent up to what would be required to fill that in order for them to be at eight that taliban pretty remember the principles we talked about at the outset that the americans must keep their footprint very small that afghans have to innovate have to innovate away into working in support of them rather than the other way round. All that was left aside. We decided in effect afghanistan was too important to be left to the whims of afghans and sell at the height of the obama surge we had 100,000 american troops. We have another 40,000 from nato. We were spending at a rate of 100 billion a year completely overwhelmed the small primitive agrarian countries for the tied to gdp and national institutions. It didnt go well. It has brought us down to the current path were especially the United States has largely withdrawn from a tennis fan and we are going to withdraw. In my humble estimation i think having made a very serious mistake by trying to do too much now we are compounding that error by trying to do too little. So having one 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 and setting the stage for what will ultimately have to be another, a third american afghan war. As brad alluded to 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 of 2001. But on balance as i look at now im glad i waited because if i had written this book when i first got a government in 2006 in 2007 as i originally intended it would have been a very different story. Essentially it would have been an adventure story and i hope still lives at its heart but now with what we know and the perspective we have of time that adventure story one persons perspective is bracketed in a much larger geopolitical story, the story of the First American afghan war how were why it was that we won it, how we lost our way and failed to win the second american afghan war and how we may be forced to fight a third. Thank you all very much for your patience and lets throw open the floor for questions. [applause] you are certainly not my image of a cia officer. You look more like an accountant i hate it when people say that. However, based on your experience do you see any incentives for the taliban to negotiate with the current Afghan Government and try to put an end to this verse that much more likely that they will just kind kind of wait them out and continue with their terrorist attacks and take over the country . And you all hear the question . Im not very optimistic. I know there have been recent developments and talks about having people buzzing beginning to make progress here but i share your thoughts at the taliban is succeeding on the battlefield. They certainly dont want to be the United States with a strong position in afghanistan because they know ultimately its going to work against them. They have tried to make it clear that a condition of their engagement with the current government is the departure of the foreigners. I dont think they are about to make peace. The best we could hope for over the long term is that the taliban will simply conclude its not going to win along with current lines and frankly i think this requires a more robust, limited and sustainable but yet more robust engagement on the part of the United States. If we can get them to that point where they say we are just not going to succeed militarily and we will have two reach some sort of an agreement i dont think its in their dna to form themselves as a Political Party and former coalition government. As a followup, if thats the case with the taliban be a selfcontained afghanistan creature or do you foresee linkages with isis . I mean how does that work . There are extremists in afghanistan some of who have had up until now affiliated with the taliban and there may be others who will eventually be affected because they see their mission and more broader in global terms. The taliban per se is focused on national goals. I think theyre going to remain that way. They are going to be around forever. They are part of Pashtun Society and for the foreseeable future they will be a part of that society. My thinking on this has been influenced by one of the founders of the taliban and i have had the opportunity to meet with him several times since we have both been out of government. What he says is that you know we the taliban we really shouldnt be involved in politics. He said we are not a Political Party. We are a social movement. We need to go back to what we were. We need to be a social force which is exerting influence to make sure that those who are in power are really in a way that is consistent with their conception of islam. I think ultimately thats where its going to go but its going to take a long time to get them there. Thank you great first of all thank you for your service. I want to ask you a question about pakistan since you serve there for several years. The current civilian government or military government will be able to hold off the more fundamental assessment of the Pakistani Society and do you do think the