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TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I’m Tom Putnam, the Acting Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Museum. On behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my colleagues here at the Library and Library Foundation, I want to welcome you to this evening’s forum.

For those of you who have attended events here in the past, our former Director, Deborah Leff, has taken a new position as the President of the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. Deborah made a lasting impact on the library and will be sorely missed.

Kennedy Library Forums would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, along with Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, and Corcoran Jennison. We are also indebted to our media sponsors, WBUR, which broadcasts all of our forums on Sunday evenings at 8 p.m., , and NECN.

Tonight’s forum is a homecoming of sorts. In establishing the , President Kennedy recognized that while the United States could not discontinue the training of soldiers, it also needed to train young men and women to be ambassadors of peace. After graduating from college in the early 1980s, Sarah Chayes responded to President Kennedy’s call, living and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in . Distinguishing her service was the fact that 25 years earlier, her father, the late Abraham Chayes, served as legal adviser in the Kennedy administration, playing an important REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 2

role in sustaining a more peaceful world by helping to resolve the crises in Berlin and Cuba, and to facilitate the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And so, it is a special honor to welcome Sarah Chayes to the Library that is dedicated to the President for whom her father so nobly worked and where her father’s papers from that period are housed and made available to the public.

After years of reporting for National Public Radio in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, Sarah Chayes was stationed for many years in , where she chronicled issues and trends in France that resonate in the United States. And she writes, “… filed a seemingly endless series of stories about [pause] food.”

Shaken by the terrorist attacks in 2001, she wondered whether that event might goad the United States to “be what we kept saying we were, the champions of human dignity, the exemplars of public participation in government, of government acting in good faith, the mentors of people struggling to be free.” Wanting to make her own contribution to those ideals, she called her NPR editor to volunteer to report on events unfolding on the Afghan/Pakistani border. And then, as the fell, she entered Kandahar, their former stronghold, where she has remained ever since.

Her new book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban , is an engrossing account of her experience reporting on the political reconstruction of Afghanistan and her decision in late 2001 to leave NPR to REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 3

join Qayum Karzai, the brother of the ruling president, to create a non- government organization dedicated to rebuilding Afghan civil society. Her efforts constructing new schools and repairing villages brought her into direct conflict with Afghan warlords, made her the recipient of numerous death threats, and led her to form a devastating critique of US policy in Afghanistan, which we will here more tonight. The Punishment of Virtue is on sale in our bookstore, and Ms. Chayes will sign copies after tonight’s conversation.

Joining the discussion with insights from his own reporting from Afghanistan is Sebastian Junger, author of the bestselling books A Perfect and A Death in Belmont . He has worked as a special correspondent in Afghanistan in 1996 and 2000. He later reported on the fall of Kabul. And most recently, last December, he was embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. In addition, he has reported on civil wars, war crimes, and human rights abuses in Liberia, , Cypress, Bosnia, and Kashmir.

After inviting Mr. Junger, based on his exceptional war reporting, we discovered that he and Sarah Chayes were childhood friends from the age of five, growing up in Belmont. And we’re honored that Sebastian Junger’s parents, Ellen and Miguel Junger, and Sarah Chayes’ mother, Antonia Chayes, are here with us in the audience this evening.

Moderating tonight’s forum is Jessica Stern, one of the country’s foremost experts on terrorism. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the US National REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 4

Security Council developing policies to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and terrorism. She is the author of The Ultimate Terrorist and currently teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at . Five years ago this week when we, like the rest of the nation, searched for answers on how our country should respond to the terrorist attacks in New York City, we turned to Jessica Stern to speak at a forum such as this one, and we are pleased to do so again tonight. Dr. Stern.

[applause]

JESSICA STERN: Thank you very much. Many people here are familiar with the two extraordinary writers that we are lucky enough to hear from tonight. Most of us know Sarah Chayes’ voice from her days on NPR, reporting about atrocities often, not just food, in various parts of the world. And now, she has produced an extraordinary book, The Punishment of Virtue . And while Sebastian Junger is mainly known for his bestselling books, including Fire and The Perfect Storm , he would prefer to be known as an intrepid reporter, who traveled with Ahmed Shah Massoud before he was murdered in September 2001, and who continues to travel in Afghanistan.

Both of them are truly extraordinary human beings. I am utterly in awe of both of you. I have to tell you that. They are probably the two people in America who know the most about Afghanistan. And the amazing thing is that they are both from Boston and that they are childhood friends. And we REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 5

are so lucky that they want to come and speak to their hometown audience, including their families, both of whom I know.

They both understood that September 11th changed the world in a fundamental way. In fact, they saw signs of that change even before the September 11th strikes. They were not content to sit in Paris or New York or Belmont, perhaps to their mothers’ dismay, and cover the story from there. Nor were either of them content to cover the unfolding story, as most war correspondents do, from the safety of their hotels with brief forays into the world they write about.

Not only did Sarah Chayes go out of her hotel, she stayed out. Sarah shows us how, through a series of tragic mistakes, the US government has allowed, even abetted, the return to power of the corrupt military commanders as well as the return of the Taliban forces supported by America’s ally, . Both Sebastian and Sarah will have a lot to tell us about the role of Pakistan and also about the role of the war in Iraq in the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan. The final words of Sarah’s book are, I think, words to live by -- not just if you're Sarah Chayes living in Afghanistan, but for all of us who aim to do good in this world of any kind. She tells us, “It doesn’t really matter if there is a chance you will succeed. You have to keep trying. That’s what matters. You have to try. You have to give it your all.” Thank you, Sarah, for the extraordinary inspiration you provide. We look forward to hearing from both of you about your recent experiences in Afghanistan.

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And I want to start by asking you, Sarah, how do you know about Afghanistan? How did this happen that you are here to tell us about it?

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, I guess it’s sort of full disclosure. I was an NPR reporter assigned to cover the conflict against the Taliban. And I had been feeling a little bit of discomfort with reporting anyway, feeling partly that, you know, it’s time to shut up already and do something. And I also had a problem with the kind of, do a story and come out, and do another story, and the lack of continuity. I was beginning to feel very strongly that, in reporting, as well as in real life, like policy, continuity is really critical.

But then again, as you pointed out, 9/11 was such a kind of earth-shattering event, and almost you could hear the plate tectonics of history shifting. And Afghanistan was where it was happening. Afghanistan was where history was taking place, and it seemed like this was the place to stay.

So I ended up working for President Karzai’s older brother. It was President Karzai’s uncle who kind of said, “Wouldn’t you come back and help us?” And I said, “Yes,” before I even registered the question. And so, it was a very odd way to end up staying there, because I wasn’t just a regular development or humanitarian aide worker. I was working for the President’s older brother, who explicitly gave us a mandate to involve ourselves in issues of policy. So we were both doing stuff on the ground, like rebuilding a house. And then, when we ran into policy issues, like when the REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 7

government held up our tractor load of stone, we talked about it, which is really taboo in the … normally, in the humanitarian world.

And now what I’m doing is running a small agribusiness. We make soap, which you can buy in Wellesley and on the Cape, at Harry’s Tools on the Cape. But it’s very important to me, actually, mixing living an ordinary life on the ground and then reflecting on it. I think that the instinct that we had at Afghans for Civil Society, which is very iconoclastic, is a good one, because you actually have a lot more to say about, let’s say warlordism, when it’s your tractor that’s being held up at gunpoint, than if you’re kind of studying it from a distance.

JESSICA STERN: Sebastian, you obviously had an intuition way before September 11th that Afghanistan and southwest Asia would be critically important to the world way before most people understood that. Why did you have that intuition? And also, I’d love to hear about your recent experiences in Afghanistan.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, my first overseas magazine assignment was to write about some westerners who were kidnapped in Kashmir in ’94, I think it was, ’95. And I looked into the story a little bit, and I realized that the guys who had kidnapped these westerners, they had been trained in Afghanistan. They’d fought in Afghanistan. And I said to my editor, “Look, if I’m going to do this story, the real source of the problem, the source of the story is Afghanistan. I mean, I’ll write a story about Kashmir and the REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 8

kidnapping, but Afghanistan is really the root of it, and I want to go there, too.” And he indulged me. And I went to Jalalabad and Kabul in the summer of ’96. And my idea was to write about the al Qaeda training -- they weren’t called al Qaeda training camps then, but what we would call al Qaeda training camps now -- outside of Jalalabad. And, of course, I couldn't go up to those camps, but they were well known, and people in town knew about them, and said, “Look, we’re Afghans and we can’t even go up there. We’ll get killed. Bad things are happening. There are foreigners up there that are planning bad things.”

But also, it was a time of great chaos in Afghanistan. I remember while I was there, two villages just started having an artillery duel, just because they had a dispute. And I went out to one of them in the middle of this battle, and I was talking to one of the fighters -- and this is where I started to get an inkling of what part of the problem might be -- I was talking to one of the fighters, a very nice young guy who spoke some English, and I asked why, you know, “Why do you speak such good English?” And he said, “Well, I used to work for an aide organization in Pushtan. I said, “Oh, what did you do for them?” And he said, “Well, I was a typist.” And, you know, he’s sitting here with his Kalashnikov on a hilltop at this point, talking to me. And I said, “Well, which did you like better: typing or fighting?” And he said, “Oh, definitely fighting.” And he pointed to his Kalashnikov and said, “This types a lot faster.” [laughter]

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I started to realize there’s -- politics and social influences aside -- there’s also that fact, that chaos sort of breeds chaos. And I don’t know if it’s something inherent to the psychology of young men or young people or what, but there is a drama in war that I think sometimes really does pull people. It’s tragic, but it is a factor that we have to, I think, all think about if we want to stop war. Which, obviously, we do.

I went back in 2000. I had an amazing opportunity to spend six months with Ahmed Shah Massoud. It was right before winter set in, in the fall of 2000, and he was launching a counter offensive to try to open up his supply routes before winter. There was very, very heavy fighting, the first time I’d really been exposed to that kind of thing.

Massoud was just a mesmerizing man, really forward looking and idealistic. And there was something so intensely charismatic about him that he really was … I mean, I don’t, I couldn’t understand the language he spoke, but when he spoke, he would talk for hours to his commanders, sort of strategizing and yelling at them a lot. And you could not not watch him. And it didn’t matter that you couldn’t understand him. There was something about his voice and the movements of his hands. He was just absolutely captivating. And he said in Paris a few months later -- he went to Paris at the invitation of the French government -- he said, “Bad things are being planned in Afghanistan. And not only will Afghans suffer, but you and the rest will suffer as well if you don’t do something about it, if you don’t REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 10

pressure Pakistan to stop their meddling in Afghanistan, to stop the support of the Taliban.”

And, of course, 9/11 came. Massoud had been killed two days earlier. I went back to Afghanistan immediately afterwards. I saw Kabul fall to the Northern Alliance. And then last December I was in Afghanistan with the US forces, embedded with the US military, which was very different and an equally amazing experience.

JESSICA STERN: I’m going to disobey my marching instructions and ask you something sort of unprofessional. Why aren’t you afraid?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: What makes you think I’m not afraid?

JESSICA STERN: Well, what happens when you are with Massoud? I mean, I would like to ask you both this, but what happened? Why don’t you want to just go home?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I mean, I’ve been in several situations where I was very frightened. And every single time, I thought, “I just want to go home.” I mean, you can be afraid. Being afraid isn’t the end of the world. It’s just an unpleasant feeling. And wanting to go home is part of being there. And if you accept that as just part of what happens there, then it’s sort of okay. But I’ve had a couple of moments thinking, “This … It’s not my business to be hurt or killed in someone else’s war. That’s not … I have a REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 11

country to go home to, a family to go home to.” You have to do your reporting in a way that maybe isn’t guaranteed to be absolutely safe, but as close as you can come.

And so, in years of reporting, there’s maybe four or five times where I really thought, “Wow, this is miserable, and I can’t wait for this to be over.” One of those times was with Massoud. We got shelled very heavily by the Taliban. The Northern Alliance had taken a hilltop position. We’d gone out there by horseback. It was very remote. And they’d just taken over this position, and machine guns were still pointed the wrong way. And we got there right when the Taliban launched a counterattack, and they started pounding us, the hilltop, with Katyusha rockets.

And that was … I curled up literally in a fetal position. I mean, I was practically sucking my thumb, thinking, “I just want this … I just want to go home.” And eventually we -- one of our horses was killed -- but we got off the hilltop, and it was okay, you know.

And then you just sort of … you sort of say, “Now I’ve learned a little bit more about what front lines are, and how you really want to be very, very cautious about how much you go up there, and whether you really need to.” Not a lot happens up there. It’s very dramatic. It seems to be, but war reporting is. But you don’t get to see a lot. I mean, particularly if you’re curled up in a trench sucking your thumb. So, you just get … You get wiser, basically, as you do it. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 12

JESSICA STERN: I think there are several kinds of fear I could imagine feeling in these situations. And there’s the fear that you’ll be killed. That’s one kind of fear. But there’s another kind of fear that our policy has gone totally wrong, and things are completely out of control.

Sarah, I’m wondering what it feels like to be a person who witnesses the return of the Taliban?

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, and even before the return of the Taliban, actually. I actually, I think I have a defective mechanism, and so, I don’t think that I could stay in Kandahar if I were experiencing that kind of fear regularly and over a protracted amount of time. I just don’t think you can function when you’re … you know. But I’ve had some, I would say they’re like devastating awakenings. I mean, I’ve spent a couple of weeks just stunned when I started coming … In disillusionment, not only at US errors, which I pretty much saw from day one and was tracking, but I at least assumed that the Afghan government had it right and that basically the US was what was obstructing the Afghan government from doing what it needed to do, which was largely the case and continued to be.

But there were some choices, some personnel choices, made by the Afghan government – mid 2003 is when the most devastating version of this -- that was when the ground moved out from underneath, because I just thought, “How can I know this stuff? How can President Karzai not know this stuff? REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 13

Or what is it that he is constrained by that I can’t see?” In other words, for the first two years or so, I was taking pretty much everything at face value that we were being told, both by American policy makers and by the government of Afghanistan, and assuming that it was incompetence or stupidity or institutional shortcomings, which you can forgive, that were causing things not to work out the way that they ought to have.

And when these personnel choices were made, that didn’t … Those explanations didn’t work anymore. So I definitely had a couple of weeks of, “Oh my God, there’s something else going on here that I can’t get a purchase on.”

JESSICA STERN: I had the sense, reading your book, that you were far more afraid actually coming to those realizations than you were when you realized that a memo you had written, for example, that might be released in a way that would put your life in jeopardy instantly. That you seemed more disturbed, more frightened in a more fundamental way by your recognition about how things had gone so wrong. And I’m wondering if you can tell us, just sort of sketch out for us, what has happened with the Taliban? Give us a kind of quick summary of the role of the Taliban.

SARAH CHAYES: Well, I might do the inside, and maybe you can do the outside. But basically, I think there’s a two-pronged problem. One has its origin on the outside, and Sebastian knows a lot more about the inner- workings of that, I think, than I do. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 14

But on the inside, I was … I show up in Kandahar, which is the Taliban stronghold, you know, two days after the fall of the Taliban. And although there weren’t people jumping up and down and getting in line to shave their beards, and things like that, everybody was thrilled. I mean, it was overwhelming how overjoyed people were at this new chapter in their history that was opening. There was such a leap of faith, and I was blown away to see that Afghans still had any faith after three revolutions in 25 years.

And, unfortunately, what happened is that because -- maybe understandable on a military basis -- US decisions to kind of team up with pretty disreputable warlord types for the military part of the anti-Taliban campaign -- what happened was there was no plan, of course, for what was going to happen after the end of the Taliban. This has now become a kind of chorus in US foreign policy. But somehow it was as though all you have to do is cut off the head, and even though it’s a traumatized society suffering from basically collective post-traumatic stress disorder, whose governing institutions had been pulverized by 25 years basically of war followed by six years of a very specific kind of government institution, it was as though suddenly, not just democracy -- which is a big word -- but accountable, responsible, governing institutions at every level were going to spring up, even though we also gave these warlords so much money and weaponry that they were beyond the reach of their fellow citizens to kind of reign them in.

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So over the last five years, they have not been reigned in. And what the experience of the regular, ordinary Afghan person with their own government is such a painful and hostile and costly experience. In other words, they’re either being shaken down, they’re being kidnapped for ransom, they’re being asked for bribes, they’re being roughed up. I see soldiers on the street pushing people for no reason. I mean, you know, yes, they got off the bus on the side of the road where there’s a checkpoint. And so the soldiers, instead of saying, “Could you please cross the street?” physically hurl people across the street.

And so into this context, in my view, primarily Pakistan is injecting what really amounts to an invasion. And, unfortunately, when people are suffering at the hands of their own government, they’re not likely to … you know, it’s kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other.

And so what I’ve been observing since late 2002 has been kind of spikes in violence, like, from your perspective. You know, there will be a little spike and then a lull. And then the next spike goes up a little higher and then the lull. And it’s been going like that. And it’s only since this spring that the spike has really been high enough for it to really capture the attention of the American public, partly because it’s been overshadowed by Iraq. But this is not sudden. This has been happening steadily, if in this kind of a jagged fashion, since the end of 2002. And the reason is, you know, if I’m being shaken down by government soldiers, and then Taliban show up at night with guns and say, “Could you please give us a meal for ten people. Could REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 16

you give us a meal?” People are going to cough up the money, the food. They’re trying to navigate between two forces that they feel are equally hostile to their interest.

JESSICA STERN: You recognized already in the mid-90s how the Pakistani jihadi groups are very … and the ISI and parts of the Pakistani government across the board have had a keen interest in supporting the Taliban, and that they have also a keen interest in a certain amount of chaos in Afghanistan so that they … something they could take advantage of. Can you tell us something about that? I mean, you’re one of the first Americans, I think, to recognize that danger.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, thank you. I mean, I’m not sure that that’s quite true.

JESSICA STERN: I think it is true. I think it is true.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Pakistan is doing, I think, what many powerful countries do. They want to control the politics of their neighboring countries. And they’ve tried to put in place sympathetic governments. And if it’s not a sympathetic government, they try to sow chaos so that they can put one in. I mean, it’s sort of Foreign Policy 101, in some ways, I guess.

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So, in a way, I sort of feel like, well, you sort of can’t blame them. I mean, it’s not like the US hasn’t done that all over Central and South America. It’s the same thing. And maybe it’s misguided maybe in the same ways.

Because I’m a citizen of this country, and because we’re so incredibly powerful, I feel like, okay, Pakistan’s going to try to do what it’s going to try to do for its own interest. I mean, that’s just a given. But what do we then do? And I mean, actually, I think Sarah can speak to this much more eloquently than I can, but we -- the United States -- as far as I can see, completely overlooked the double game that Pakistan seems to be playing: on the one hand being a sort of friend of America in the War on Terror; on the other hand, the most benign thing they do is turn a blind eye to the Taliban. The most poisonous thing they do is, I mean, at the very least they turn a blind eye. But there’s quite a lot of evidence -- very, very good evidence -- that they’re actively supporting the Taliban and really not attending to those forces within their own country.

I was with American forces in December, and I could talk to privates, sergeants, lieutenants, captains. They would all say, with some level of indignation, “Pakistan’s our ally? What are they doing training the guys who are killing American soldiers?”

JESSICA STERN: With American money, incidentally.

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SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Right, with American money. As soon as you sort of go above the rank of captain, no one dares say a thing about that. It’s not like the military doesn’t know this. It’s that there is a military reality, and then there’s a political reality that they are essentially subordinate to. And they’re very, very aware of that political reality, particularly when talking to a reporter.

I think ultimately the problem is, I think the administration doesn’t particularly care about Afghanistan. I mean that’s the only conclusion I can draw by how badly it’s going. One guy that I talked to -- I didn’t put this in that article, because I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Actually, I don’t think I’ve really even said this in public before, but one guy that I talked to - - very, very sharp, competent American soldier in Afghanistan -- said that in the summer of 2001, so about a month before 9/11, he was sent with a special unit into Jordan to scout out invasion routes into Iraq. That plan was there. And then 9/11 came, and it gave that plan some justification and momentum, but it was there before 9/11. And I think it might have been almost irksome to the administration that they had to attend to Afghanistan first.

If we were not in Iraq … I mean, there just aren’t enough helicopters in Afghanistan to do the job. There’s something like 5,000 American soldiers whose job is combat. And there are a lot of support troops. There’s something like 5,000 American fighting men and women in Afghanistan. It’s just not enough. With or without NATO, it’s not enough. If we were not REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 19

in Iraq … I think you can’t talk about the failure -- what looks to be the increasing failure in Afghanistan -- without talking about Iraq.

JESSICA STERN: Let me [simultaneous conversation] go back to Iraq for another …

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, I sort of feel like responding on two of those things. I did want to …

JESSICA STERN: Let me just remind you of something you said and see if you can respond to it. You argue …

SARAH CHAYES: I was just going to argue a third thing.

JESSICA STERN: You argue that in exchange for a few high level al Qaeda …

SARAH CHAYES: Exactly, that’s what I … Okay, that’s what I wanted to get into. What I think their …

JESSICA STERN: Well, say it, because I …

SARAH CHAYES: I’m going to, I’m going to. See, this is what I told the organizers of this thing is that they really shouldn’t put the two of us up REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 20

here, because we’re just going to be completing each other’s sentences, since we agree with each other about everything anyway.

I wanted to explore what … I see Pakistan as Sebastian does. Pakistan’s agenda in Afghanistan is a very regional, tactical agenda. They have used, the Pakistani government had used jihadi vocabulary as something to galvanize people and to kind of hide behind. But, fundamentally, they never had a jihadi agenda. They have a backyard agenda.

Osama bin Laden shows up in 1996, and I presume the Pakistani government was delighted because that was bringing money and men and things like that into their fight to, through the Taliban, control Afghanistan. But what that means, then he had his agenda, which was genuinely international, and brought us, with our big boots into Afghanistan. And so, objectively, I don’t think Pakistan really ... (inaudible) any level at all on al Qaeda. I don’t think they’re interested in al Qaeda. I think, if anything, they’re a little bit irritated that al Qaeda broke up their nice marble game in Afghanistan. And so, what they’ve been doing is actually buying us off with al Qaeda operatives and buying our looking the other way on the Taliban. And I think Sebastian’s exactly right: that we fundamentally didn’t really care in spite of all of the verbiage about Afghanistan. That was definitely a subordinate issue: one, to Iraq, and two, also we need a Muslim ally someplace, and Pakistan is bigger than Afghanistan, so we’ll take that one.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 21

And so, that really defined our policy a lot. Pakistan wanted certain things, and it wanted a blind eye turned to the Taliban. I guess I’ll wait on the Iraq thing until we get into Iraq. But I totally agree, but I would add some other aspects of it.

JESSICA STERN: Well, why don’t we now talk about Iraq. As you know, there is a new national intelligence estimate, at least according to what we read in the press, a highly classified estimate that concludes that the Iraq war has increased the risk of terrorism.

SARAH CHAYES: I can tell you that a national intelligence estimate is usually a problem, because it’s a consensus document. And for all the intelligence agencies to come to a conclusion like this is shocking.

JESSICA STERN: How do you two see that? What do you see as the role of Iraq? Sebastian, you were starting to talk about it, but maybe you want to say a little more.

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, go for it.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, I was actually coming to an end there, but I think it really has forced us to take our eye off the ball. It just didn’t … In just sheer numbers of soldiers, helicopters, and sort of psychic energy in this country, it really has taken away-- taken away from a winnable and morally REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 22

solid war in Afghanistan, in a way that, at this point, we may not be able to undo.

I mean, in a weird way, the war that I think President Bush hoped to have in Iraq, he had on a platter in Afghanistan. And we sort of bypassed it, and it’s tragic for all three countries, really. And what to do about it, I sort of have no idea. But that to me is a major … Iraq is a major issue with Afghanistan.

SARAH CHAYES: The way I experienced that was that, you know, we were waiting for this Marshall Plan. We’re, you know, starting spring of 2002, we’re waiting for this huge flooding of concentration and money and all of this stuff that was supposed to pour into Afghanistan. And it never happened.

And we were also -- with my sister, Eve, who is also in the audience -- we were working together on Afghans for Civil Society. And we kept wondering, we kept, like, calling each other and saying, “Well, what do you suppose they’re waiting for? Do you think it’s maybe the loya jirga, the first big tribal council that named President Karzai as transitional president of the country? And then we were fuming about that, like, don’t they understand that it’s more likely to give him a solid position if we come through for him now? Well, it was later that I realized that all of those resources were on hold for Iraq, that there never was the flood of focus and attention and resources on Afghanistan that supposedly later shifted to Iraq. It never got there in order to shift. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 23

But that said, the caveat that I would offer is that the fundamental mistakes that have sent Afghanistan in the direction that it’s gone were made well before Iraq. They were made, you know, during … As I say, I can understand that you grab allies where you can find them in an urgent military conflict. But my problem is, you don’t, by default, inform them as provincial governors or provincial governing officials. And that fundamental mistake was made a year before Iraq ever happened.

And I still believe that even with the amount of resources that have been earmarked for Afghanistan, if those resources had been applied more intelligently, if there had been more transmission of knowledge from one rotation to another, if there had been -- you know, and that has to do with the psychic energy that you’re talking about -- but it’s not only how many resources or how much money or even how many troops you devote to an issue, it’s also how you devote those resources, and that mistake was, and has hardly been repaired, as far as I can tell.

JESSICA STERN: Terrorist organizations have often told me about a strategy that involves utilizing social welfare to win over the hearts and minds of the population they hope to recruit. And I’m wondering, what do you think? I mean, we see that now with Hezbollah. Hezbollah is now doing very, very well with this strategy, which they have perfected over many years. What would happen if the United States were to essentially follow that strategy? This would be different. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 24

SARAH CHAYES: Yes. I mean, what I see in Afghanistan, I don’t see the Taliban doing the Hezbollah thing, but what I do see is that the government is not performing the regular duties that a government ought to perform. And so, I mean, we had to register our cooperative with the agriculture department. It took seven months. It took seven months. I mean, this is like three pieces of paper. It took seven months, mostly because we weren’t willing to pay a bribe. But this was driving out once a week to their office, which is two miles outside of town. It’s sort of like taking seven months to get your driver’s license and going down to Watertown and having to go once a week for seven months before you could get those papers completed. And that’s the situation now.

And so, what I heard early on when I would talk about governance was, “Oh, later. We want to deal with security first.” But it turns out that if you don’t focus on governance, you’re going to get insecurity of various kinds.

And so, in my view, how we could help turn the situation around at this point, if there is a hope of that, is by -- at least in Afghanistan; I’m not sure it would work in Iraq -- is by demanding more accountability from the government officials that we, pretty much, ushered into power. And that means in particular on a provincial level. And it means we would be riding herd on people in a very detailed fashion like, “Oh, golly, the manufacturers are having a hard time getting title to the land in the industrial zone.” Well, you have to talk to the governor and get him to address this problem. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 25

Or a friend of mine who runs a NGO, an Afghan friend of mine, who had 15 wells to drill in a district, and he gets a call from the district chief who says, “Oh, you’re going to drill your wells in this and this and this villages.” And my friend was able to say, “Well, no I’m not.” And he had the gumption to sort of stand up to them. But he had to fight it for a long time, whereas I think he ought to have been able to bring this to some of the international officials who were around, and say, “Look, here’s the situation I’m running into. Can you put some pressure on the governor to make sure that I’m able to deliver this humanitarian assistance in a non-partial way?”

JESSICA STERN: How do Afghans view Americans?

SARAH CHAYES: Did you want to weigh in on this before …

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, actually it dovetails with that. So, why don’t you.

SARAH CHAYES: No, you go first.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: It’s interesting as a former reporter, not just in Afghanistan but really all over the world, the view that people have of America. And I think it’s changed a little bit. I don’t think it’s changed massively in some ways.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 26

I was in Liberia a few years ago during the civil war, and there was an American warship off shore. And rebels were besieging the city, and mortar shells were raining down and killing people. And people would come up to me -- I was one of the only Americans there at that moment -- and they would come up to me and say, “America’s going to do something, right? Please, tell your president we’re suffering. Just five Marines would stop this civil war.” I mean, literally, I think it probably would have taken five Marines.

And I’ve seen this in Kosovo and Bosnia and Afghanistan. I’ve seen it everywhere. The way people see this country is basically, if all else fails, the United States will take care of us all. There’s some idea out there of us being infinitely powerful and basically benevolent. And that’s plus or minus one administration or another. I mean, of course, that changes. But there’s a basic benevolence and an almost infinite power.

And what that does is it gets people very powerless, terrified people to think, “Well, there are parents in the house somewhere.” And the parents are the United States. And I think that cuts through the Muslim world, the former communist world; I think that covers the entire world.

So, with Afghanistan, that is, I mean, I was getting hugged on the streets of Kabul after Kabul fell, simply because I was American. It was amazing. I mean, even last December I had trouble finding an Afghan who wanted the American troops to leave. I mean, people really look to us for protection, REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 27

and it cuts across religion and politics and everything else. I can feel you withholding.

SARAH CHAYES: Well, right. That said, the problem with this is we’re also projecting that. We are talking as though we are going to fix it and that we are benevolent, and we’re going to bring all this great stuff and democracy and things like that. So the problem with that is that then you get very bitter disillusionment. And that’s what I’m starting to experience. Believe it or not, about 99 and a half percent of Kandaharis believe that we are working with the Taliban. So this is the problem with this kind of a feeling is, “Oh my gosh, if the Taliban are doing so well and the Americans are here, this has to be part of American policy.”

And then the logic is even a little bit more specific than that. People remember that in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, we were not spending money directly on the anti-Soviet resistance inside Afghanistan because that could have provoked a nuclear conflict. And so, it was taboo. So there was this fiction that, of course, everyone winked at. Everyone knew it was a fiction, but we were providing money to Pakistan -- a lot, like a quarter of a billion dollars a year on average over a decade. It was a major, major operation. And then Pakistan would dole our money out to the different resistant factions, actually focusing on the one that was the most extremist.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 28

And so, what Afghans are seeing is, let’s see, Americans allied with Pakistan in 2003; the United States gave three billion dollars over a five year period to the Pakistani government, and Pakistan is ginning up the Taliban movement. So that must be American policy.

So where I’m getting people irritated with America -- it’s one of the huge ironies of this whole situation -- is that they’re not angry at us because of our Judeo-Christian civilization or our democratic values or anything like that. They’re angry with us because we’re supporting an extremist Islam -- in their view -- an extremist Islamist movement.

And so, there’s that, and then also the warlordism and corruption pretty much because of what Sebastian just said; Afghans have very little room in their analysis for incompetence or failure. So they assume that if there is massive corruption in Afghanistan, that’s our policy. And it’s pretty much ending up on our door.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes, it’s the downside, the sort of PR downside of appearing all-powerful. Well, if you’re all-powerful …

SARAH CHAYES: … and all-virtuous.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: … and all-virtuous, yes. If those two things are true and things aren’t going very well, that must mean that we, as an all- powerful country, want it to go that way. It gets very, very complicated. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 29

SARAH CHAYES: And then the democracy issue also. When you have President Bush telling everyone that what we’re doing in their country is bringing democracy, then the population is saying, “Oh. Okay, so what you’re saying is that very corrupt and rather brutal public officials, stolen elections, and an insurgency -- that’s democracy? No thank you. I’d rather try something else.” And so, it’s actually giving democracy a really bad name.

And what I keep hearing from audiences is, “Is it right or proper for the United States to impose our way of, our version of democracy on people who may not be ready for it, or may not want it?” And I’m thinking, “Wait a second.”

I have this joke, which also makes my mother blanch, which is that I’m going to be the collective mayor of Kandahar with my cooperative, that my cooperative is going to become mayor of Kandahar. And so, in this joke, I ask the guys -- I have three guys and four gals -- four guys, but the three guys who were in the room at the time, I said, “When we’re mayor of Kandahar, what do you guys want to do? What job do you want?” So one of them says he wants to be the person who’s in charge of the cleanliness. I mean, basically, here’s a guy volunteering to be the garbage man, because he is really upset at all the detritus that's visible in the streets and things like that.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 30

The next guy says he wants to be the one in charge of the public register so that powerful and rich people don’t encroach on public land or on other people’s land and basically arrogate other people’s land.

And the third guy says he wants to be the one who disguises himself and goes into the market and checks out the bread and makes sure that the bread that, by regulation is supposed to be a quarter of a pound, actually weighs a quarter of a pound, and that the meat is … And it’s like, these people know how to run a railroad. And we have not been imposing democracy … We may have been imposing American democracy as we are currently experiencing it, but … [laughter] … I would like to think that as a nation, we have something more to offer than that.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Just to follow up a little bit on that, when I was in Afghanistan in 2000 I was there during the contested election. And news dribbled over, even to the Northern Alliance fighters in northern Afghanistan that there were some -- a wee bit of troubles in the United States, and we weren't really able to sort our government out. And they would ask me, very sort of sweetly and innocently, “Are you going to have a civil war in your country, too?” And I realized that their idea of a democracy includes the possibility of armed civil war. And that I think we have to sort of realize that when we negotiate a political solution in Afghanistan; their idea of what’s possible socially, politically, militarily is almost limitlessly horrifying.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 31

SARAH CHAYES: But what that also means is that people are very terrified. I mean, we can live through, as a nation, periods of very, very painful conflict within our body politic without the fear that it will lead to either arbitrary or ideo -- not ideologically, but basically, you know, if your team loses the election here, you don’t have to be afraid to say that you were on that team for fear that the person you’re speaking to is going to shoot you.

Whereas in Afghanistan, you won’t get anybody telling you what they really think until they’ve figured out where you’re coming from. They need to know that they’re safe to express themselves. And that means that fear is one of the most pervasive emotions in Afghanistan that needs to be taken account of.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes, imagine the terror that Kent State, the massacre at Kent State in this country would have triggered in a much less stable country. Imagine the fear in politically left wing people in this country -- left wing students in this country after that massacre. Imagine the fear they would have had if it was a country where they didn’t ultimately believe in the rule of law. It’s terrifying.

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, and imagine even today … I was in Denver -- which is a city that I adore -- a few days ago. And what really stunned me in the Midwest -- I was in Omaha and Denver. The two people I stayed with, good friends of mine in Denver, both live in these legendary gated REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 32

communities, which I have never experienced before. But here I am in Denver, Colorado, and people feel like they have to live behind these massive gates with guards that open the gate. And I’m saying, “Wait a second. I live in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and I don’t have a gate.” So think of how frightened we are now.

And imagine, when people ask me, “Well, are things getting a little rough in Kandahar,” it’s like, “Uh, yes.” I mean, my staff members or cooperative members are coming to work through body parts, pretty much once a week, or twice a week. And we are now spending an hour or two hours of our time everyday metabolizing whatever happened last night, be it a suicide bombing or be it a battle. I mean, the one that blew me away was a battle for the district headquarters of a district that’s a mile south of Kandahar proper. And one of my guys lives in … Yes, my mother is now freaking out again. So this is not a good topic, then we’ll ask you to move us along smartly. But he’s standing on his roof from about three in the morning until about seven in the morning. And he comes in, you know, with his hair on fire saying, “Did you hear about Dun? Did you hear about Dun district?” And I said, “No, what’s going on?” And so he explains to me what he watched from his rooftop.

And then I get another friend of ours who is very close to the police department, who basically pooh-poohs it and says, “Yes, there was a half an hour, little half an hour battle.” And my guy was saying, “Wait, what are you talking about? I stood on my roof and watched this from three in the REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 33

morning until seven in the morning. So, that, count them. There are four full hours.”

Then I go up to Kabul, and I hear from NATO that all is quiet on the Kandahar front, whereas we’ve had night battles every single day in another district where there’s battles every single day. And then I mentioned Dun, and they didn’t know about it. And it turns out that reporting on the ground is not happening, because some contingents, literally, as Sebastian said, are so overstretched that they can’t be on the scene. And so they’re not wild about their chain of command hearing that there are these battles that they can’t even get to. So that to say again, although Afghans have this reputation for being very bloodthirsty and hardy, and things like that, it’s difficult to overestimate the impact of an intimidation campaign.

JESSICA STERN: Sebastian, I’m wondering if you can tell us how we are to interpret President Musharraf’s decision essentially to let Waziristan go? What does this mean? Everyone assumes that if bin Laden is not dead that that is where he is. Why would Musharraf make this decision? What kind of ally is this?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, I mean, I have to assume that he either thinks … Wait, I have to say this right. I’m not sure if I can think quickly enough to say it, so I’ll rephrase it.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 34

He must think that doing this will give him a mortal wound with his relations for the United States. I mean, I’ll just put it that way. He must have made some calculation that he can get away with this, and really, “What are you going to do about it?” to us.

SARAH CHAYES: I’d like to come back to something. I agree with that, and I’d like to tease it out a little bit further. What I said before was that Musharraf doesn’t give a darn about al Qaeda, so he’s been turning al Qaeda over to us. He knows that we do give a darn about al Qaeda. And so, my own suspicion, in spite of an endless barrage of so-called “information” from various parts of the American and other establishment, is that Osama bin Laden is, has never been in Waziristan. He’s not in Pakistan. In my own view, I think Pakistan knows that that’s the one thing they couldn’t do and maintain a relationship with the United States. Pakistan could do almost anything else except harbor Osama bin Laden. And so, in my view he’s someplace else.

Waziristan is irrelevant to anything. Believe me. Waziristan has nothing to do with whatever is going on in Afghanistan. It may have marginally something to do with stuff that’s going on in Pakistan. If anything, it may be that the Waziristan crowd is a little bit uncomfortable, is just a little bit too hard lined for Musharraf, although he’s been stoking the hard liners as a way to keep us worried and keep us attached to him. Basically, what he’s been doing schematically is to build up this boogie man, and then tell us, “See, if REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 35

I’m not in power, there’s this boogie man that will be in power if I wasn’t.” I think all of that is red herring, all of it is cinema.

The people who have any meaning for what’s going on in Afghanistan are not in Waziristan. They’re not in caves. They’re not on mountain tracks. They’re in the town of Quetta, which is the capital of Baluchistan province. A lot of them are driving around with cars that were provided by the Pakistani Military Intelligence Agency. All of this was smoke and mirrors for our benefit.

And so, in my view, it’s a way … You know, but he was losing a few soldiers up there and stuff like that, so he’d rather stop fighting in Waziristan, you know, which he was only doing anyway for our benefit. So, okay, this agreement allows him to let go of that, and not do it anymore.

JESSICA STERN: Of course, he is a major target for al Qaeda. So it isn’t …

SARAH CHAYES: Al Qaeda?

JESSICA STERN: Absolutely.

SARAH CHAYES: Be specific. Is it al Qaeda or is it …

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 36

JESSICA STERN: No, we’re hearing, absolutely, regularly, talking about …

SARAH CHAYES: Talking about him, but what is he doing? I mean, I think you have to be really careful.

JESSICA STERN: I think his own person … Well, tell me, what am I getting wrong here?

SARAH CHAYES: Here's what I think. But you wanted to say something?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: No, no, go ahead, talk.

SARAH CHAYES: What I think is … I mean, I don’t quite think that he set these assassination attempts up, but what I think is that he is blowing smoke into this boogie man, and sometimes the boogie man gets a little out of control.

I’m not surprised that Zawahiri, at this point, might be irritated at Musharraf, because he has turned over some al Qaeda people. So I think there is, in effect, now -- I mean, this is what I’ve been saying -- that there is a dislike between the Pakistani government and al Qaeda. So I shouldn’t have actually challenged you on that. That’s what I’ve been maintaining all REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 37

evening, that I think Pakistan loses no love over al Qaeda and al Qaeda probably returns the favor. So that’s fine.

But Waziristan -- I don’t think there are al Qaeda people in Waziristan. I think if there were, he would have turned them over. I mean, look at where was Halachic Muhammad? He was in Lahore, right? Or Karachi, in Karachi. Look back historically over the last five years: when Pakistan has turned over an al Qaeda operative, they’d been found in the cities, not in Waziristan. So the Waziristan thing is a fantasy.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes, they get their tapes out pretty quickly. We know from events that they refer to that the … that audio and video tapes come out, I don’t know what number of days it is, but, you know, clearly they’re not being, it’s not being recorded in a cave in a very remote area. I mean, they have probably access -- wherever they are, wherever these people are -- they probably have access to modern communication and electronics. So it really isn’t a question of finding people in caves. Whatever it is, it’s not that.

There’re also these different groups. I mean, there’s a very hardcore group in the Pakistani military that dislikes Musharraf. There’s the Taliban, and there’s al Qaeda. And their interests, they converge, but they don’t completely overlap. And so there’s a very complex political game going on in the opposition, just amongst the opposition to Musharraf. Then if you REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 38

throw away Musharraf, plus the Afghans in the US, it’s a really complicated game.

And it sort of reminds me, there was -- I didn't actually read this article, but a friend of mine read it and repeated this quote to me -- there was a guard in Guantanamo, American solider in Guantanamo, talking about the sort of micro-politics that the prisoners in Guantanamo are capable of conducting. And he said they’re really good at it. He said, “Basically, we’re playing checkers and they’re playing chess.” And I have the feeling that that sort of describes our public policy all over the place.

SARAH CHAYES: But while being complex, I don’t think it’s illegible. I mean, you guys shouldn’t now go home and say, “God, I’ll never be able to understand anything about this.” I don’t think that’s what you’re driving at. But that is why we can’t operate in a country like this without getting really down and chewing the oak tree roots kind of thing, you know. So, again, just to say al Qaeda and the Taliban have a profoundly different agenda. Al Qaeda is, I think, a self-generated organization, and its various offshoots. The Taliban are not a self-generated organization. They were ginned up by the Pakistani government in 1994, and I think continue to be ginned up with a very specific localized agenda. And the problem for us is that the vocabulary is very similar. And even sometimes there’s some sharing of resources, and assets, and things like …

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 39

JESSICA STERN: Yes, like the ...(inaudible) talked about in the beginning. I’d like to invite you all to come and line up by the microphones so we can open it up to your questions. I think basically what you just persuaded us is the importance of information, that it’s critically important for us to understand that it’s in Musharraf’s interest both to be targeted by al Qaeda and look like he’s about to fall in order to persuade us that he is our only hope against al Qaeda.

So it’s very complicated, and this is the reason why it’s so important for international security, that there be people courageous enough to go into these places and really learn about what is actually happening. I’ll take your question. And before we start, let me just say that I’m going to be ruthless. And I won’t allow speeches, only questions.

SARAH CHAYES: No speeches, and also no double questions, because we’re both journalists, and we both hate it in press conferences when our colleagues raise their hands and have three questions. That’s no fair. So you only get one question. Anyone who had follow up questions to their own questions, decide which one you care about the most.

[laughter]

AUDIENCE: As a veteran of ...(inaudible), I’m with you entirely on how to do questioning. What wasn’t said here, and perhaps is not significant, is what is the impact in Afghanistan on the administering, the governing, and REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 40

the politics of the opium situation and the apparent failure of the efforts to eradicate it, and the great growth of it in the last 12 months?

SARAH CHAYES: I’ll see if I can do it. There are lots of reasons people grow opium. It’s not just that opium is worth more than watermelon. There are structural reasons you grow opium. I don’t have a son. If I had a son, it would cost me five to $10,000 to marry him off, because it’s a bribe priced society. So that means I have to take out a loan. That’s a heck of a lot of money for an Afghan farmer who lives in an adobe house. So there are no banks. So Sebastian is my local opium trafficker, of course. So I borrow $5,000 from him, and what he says is I have to pay it back in opium at half the market value. That amounts to a 100% interest loan.

Let’s say the government comes in and eradicates my opium. Well, that means that I missed my deadline for paying my debt. So it’s going to go to the next year. I have to plant the opium again, and Sebastian’s going to charge me double. He’s going to make it worth a quarter of the market value. So I essentially have to plant twice as much opium. This is one of the reasons that I think that eradication programs are worse than useless in this kind of a situation. It’s not that absent other policies they’re worse than useless. If you also had a micro-credit system that wasn’t only for entrepreneurial credit, but also for consumer loans, for agricultural loans … People have the same problem when they need fertilizer. They take the fertilizer from Sebastian, and then they have to pay him back. It’s only a 50% interest. But I’ve talked to farmers and said, “What if you had 20% REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 41

interest?” 20% interest! They almost begin to weep at how wonderful that would be.

The drought has a major impact also, because there’s been roughly close to ten years of drought in southern Afghanistan. It’s been on and off for the last five years. But what that means, there’s no rainfall agriculture anywhere -- anywhere, but there are irrigation channels, and those are pretty dry. And particularly this past year has been a really bad year in terms of rainfall. And so that means people are sucking water up out of wells, which they have to do with diesel water pumps, diesel fired water pumps, because there’s no electricity. So you have to pay for diesel in order to farm your land, which means people have to take land out of production. And so they have to have a crop that’s going to make more money for them with less land.

So those are the issues that I would focus on if I had an anti-opium policy. I would want to get loans out to the countryside. I would provide solar powered water pumps to every village, or something like that. Or you get a deal going where you can sign a contract with a village that they get a solar powered water pump if they don’t grow opium, and you take it away from them if they do and things like that.

Then I would focus the crackdown on Sebastian, on the trafficker, which is not happening. So you have major, major drug traffickers who are waltzing around town, and everyone knows who they are, and no one goes near them. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 42

And the way it’s impacting the government is that basically government officials, particularly on the local and regional level, want to get a piece of the action. They don’t particularly want to buy opium. That’s a little bit complicated and risky. But what they can do is they can appoint, let’s say, the policeman who are going to be stationed along a certain road. And so then they can collect from their cronies who are opium traffickers, they can collect a safe conduct fee. And so that means that you start having public officials appointed, according to whether or not they’re willing to let opium shipments pass through. So, that really is the kind of mafiazation as it were. I mean, it’s starting to infect the governing structure.

JESSICA STERN: Why don’t we take the question here.

AUDIENCE: Could you both talk about Hamid Karzai, his history and role in this chess game, and particularly what you’d like to see him do differently?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, I met Karzai in 2000, actually. Massoud had called a conference -- I mean, it took place on lawn chairs in a field. He called a conference of Afghan leaders for the post-Taliban era. He believed that it was only a matter of time before the Taliban fell, and that he wanted a sort of government already ready to step in, whenever that were to happen. He was training a police force to keep order in Kabul. He was incredibly sort of forward looking. And one of the Afghan leaders who I met was Hamid REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 43

Karzai. I remember him being just incredibly sort of charming and well spoken and gentle. It was the only time I’ve met him, so I don’t have a lot to say about him. I mean, I read , and that’s what I know about him basically, except for that one meeting where he really stood out.

And also I read after 9/11, when he was brought into Afghanistan, I believe he gave the chances of his own survival at 20%. And he went into Afghanistan with the belief that, I don’t know, his country needed him, this was his calling. I don’t know how he sort of articulated that to himself, but I do know that he thought his chances of surviving this process was something like 20%. And I just thought, whatever his flaws are -- and I think they seem to be maybe expanding, or maybe not; I don’t know -- but whatever his flaws are, I thought, “My God, that is bravery.” I feel like I live in a country where people -- not everyone, but an awful lot of politicians won’t even really deal, risk losing reelection on a principle. And Hamid Karzai is risking his life on a principle, and I just thought, “Where are those guys? Why don’t we get any?” [laughter]

It was just a sort of funny moment of -- I mean, we’re such a powerful country, and there’s so many amazing things about this country. And once in a while, a person or a situation in a very poor, foreign country will just sort of bring you up short. And when I heard that 20% figure, that was one of those moments for me.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 44

SARAH CHAYES: Um, yes. And I also remember how he inspired the people of southern Afghanistan, which, again, was the Taliban heartland. And when he was making steady broadcasts, basically interviews, with the BBC- service, and it was like a civic education class in a way -- that he was bringing his country up to speed with what the international significance of the Taliban regime and its al Qaeda guests had been and really spinning a vision for them of what the future could look like and would look like.

And, unfortunately, I think that he came under a lot of pressure from the United States in particular not to move that vision forward. Basically, early on in late 2001 and 2002, he really did have a kind of sense of how he wanted to move these warlord governors out of power.

Afghans read your gestures, not your words. I mean, they read body language, and we were sort of telling him, “Whatever you say, Mr. Karzai,” but at the same time, we were arming, equipping, uniforming the governors’-- the various governors’ militias. So, even if he had removed, let’s say, the governor of Kandahar from power, the US army was still employing all of his retainers as their kind of proxies.

So, unfortunately, I think the kind of gentleness of President Karzai has also been a flaw. I mean, it’s what made the Afghans love him. He was the only guy who didn’t have blood up to the elbows in 2001, but it’s made him tend to want to buy his enemies. So he’s ended up spending a lot of time REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 45

conciliating people who the Afghan population doesn’t want him to conciliate. So he’s in effect surrendering power to people that the Afghan population was looking to him for protection against, and I think that’s been his signal failing.

JESSICA STERN: Yes?

AUDIENCE: When a man on the street meets another man on the street, two strangers, or the American soldier meets a man on the street, how do they distinguish between an Afghani civilian and a member of the Taliban, member of al Qaeda? And are there a lot of overlaps between those different groups?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: When I was with American soldiers in Zabol province, the rule was, if you were carrying a weapon or a radio, you were shot. I mean, you were considered an enemy combatant and engaged with firepower. It was very, very simple. And so the American soldiers would tell the guys in the villages, “Look, just do not carry weapons or a radio and we will not hurt you.” And that’s where -- for the man on the ground, the American soldier on the ground -- I mean, obviously planes drop bombs places they shouldn’t and kill innocent people, but I’m talking about how the American soldiers dealt with that ambiguity on the ground.

I mean, the Afghans would sort of scramble up into the hillsides looking for firewood, and they were very, very scared that they would look like Taliban. REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 46

And Captain Mugari(?) of the unit that I was with, I remember him saying, “Listen, as long as you’re not carrying anything, you’re fine.” But it’s a tricky thing, particularly because the Taliban, what they started to do was hide their weapons up in the rocks in the hillside, so they would walk out to their sort of sniping positions. In fact, we got ambushed at one point by these guys. They would walk out to their positions empty handed, pick up a gun, shoot off a couple of clips, hide the gun, and then walk away. And it was very, very hard for the US military to react in time to sort of counter that threat.

SARAH CHAYES: That’s pretty much how Afghans actually distinguish. But there is some overlap in how people feel, particularly women. Women are a lot more cut and dried and have a lot less anxiety about these distinctions than men do, actually. So that, for example, in one of these situations where civilians were killed, it was in the spring. It was the first major one of this round of fighting in the south. And what had happened was there was an open firefight, and it was a kind of hot pursuit situation. And Taliban ran into a village, which had been feeding them … Basically the deal was, there was a village and the Taliban were staying in the madrassa, which was a little bit away from the houses. Troops knew that most of the villages had been evacuated during this period, because the Taliban had actually gone around -- this is just outside of Kandahar -- the Taliban had gone around, knocked on doors and told people, “Look, we’re going to be fighting soon, so you should leave.”

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 47

Now, it was interesting because they said it once, and the people said, “Ooh, our opium is in the field. Couldn’t you just wait a little while -- two, three weeks?” And they did. They said, “Fine.” So they waited three weeks and then they went back around and knocked on the doors, and most of the people left. And then what happened was in this one village -- it’s a place where my cooperative, Arghand, has planted roses with local farmers. So we knew what the feeling was in this village. And people were playing two ends against the middle. But the Taliban were in this firefight, and then they went into the village, and the village got -- not bombed, but basically strafed from close support aircraft and about 40 people were killed.

The women in my cooperative, the next morning … we didn’t know this; this happened at night. Early the next morning, one of the women in my cooperative, her husband was very ill, and she asked to go to the hospital. I said, “Of course.” Two of them went, and they came back with steam coming out of their ears, and they said, “The place was packed with them with their turbans out to here, and they were in the corridors, and I wanted to spit on them. What do they think? They’re giving food to these Taliban. How dare they then come down and use the government hospital.” They said, “They’re leaving letters around telling us to separate from the government, but as soon as they get injured, they come and run and use our hospital.” And I found the women very furious about this.

But where I find the overlap is very difficult to tease apart is where you have civilian villagers who are not actually ambushing US forces, but are REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 48

providing the kind of logistical support that any insurgency needs. But to some degree, you know, to some degree, they’re so exasperated with the government that, you know, as I said earlier, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. To some degree, they’re intimidated into it. I mean, you’re out in a village with no police protection, no patrols, no support from your government, and 20 people with guns show up and say, “Give us some food.” What are you going to do?

I would, however, say that there is fury in Kandahar at the suicide bombings. I mean, there's a lot of sense of the honor -- which you were saying about the kid, that Kalashnikovs work faster than typewriters. But that’s honorable. But it seemed to be honorable in Kandahar warfare, fighting other armed groups. What nobody accepts is the death, you know, the murder of civilians in a bombing situation. So even the … When I ask people to rank the governments, the highest marks are for the post-Soviet communist government of Kandahar. That’s what everyone likes the most because it functioned properly, and because it persuaded the Mujahideen -- there was a real negotiation that happened with the anti-Soviet Mujahideen about not doing -- “Please don’t fight in town where people might get killed. You can come to town any time you want for whatever you want.” And the population liked that a lot.

The next down is the Taliban. The next down is us. And the worst is the civil war of the early ‘90s.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 49

JESSICA STERN: We’re not going to be able to get through all these questions, so I’ll say right now that Sarah’s book will be for sale in the forum. She’ll be signing books, and both of our speakers will …

SARAH CHAYES: Hang out.

JESSICA STERN: … will spend a little extra time. But because there’s so many of you, I thought maybe I would take two questions at a time, starting with you.

AUDIENCE: Well, I want to thank you, the panel, for taking the time to come here and address what you learn up there, risking your life and teaching the American people and people who live in this country, like myself, what you learned from there. Also, I want to ask you -- thank you once again -- and ask you what it’s going to take for this war to be over and ...(inaudible) or what it’s going to take for this war to end?

JESSICA STERN: And your question?

AUDIENCE: Shortly after 9/11, the bin Ladens were moved out of the country en masse. And my question is, is there something that I can read to explain this, or was this a memo from Rove to Bush to turn the other cheek? Or for Cheney to dance cheek to cheek with Hal Burton, or what? What was the thinking?

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 50

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: That has been written about. There was, I believe in Vanity Fair and also maybe in Atlantic . I can’t remember, but that has been written about. It was a puzzling thing. But I think it was actually less puzzling than I thought at first. But it has been written about, and …

AUIDENCE: Well, I read the Atlantic article. It didn’t answer my questions.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Read Vanity Fair then. I write for Vanity Fair .

AUDIENCE: I buy all their clothes.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: And do you want, “What it will take to end the war?”

SARAH CHAYES: What’ll it take to … oh, boy. Thanks. [laughter] It’s not going to take one single thing, even the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Capture and/or death, I don’t think it would have really a lot of impact. I think that he’s been a kind of guiding spirit, and he’s certainly an inspiration, but manifestly, not concretely right now, because he’s not very visible. So, as a martyr, I think he would be inspiring to as many people as he is now.

I think it takes this kind of really persistent information-rich work on a local level to improve governance in these places, to have some respect for the REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 51

people who are being governed. And that takes a lot of time; it takes a lot of patience; it takes a lot of effort; it takes a lot of manpower; it takes a lot of acquisition of knowledge. I mean, I’m pretty amazed when I know what the … I think the non-special authorization bill for the US military is up over three billion dollars a year, I think, not including the add-ons for Iraq and Afghanistan. If you take a look at how little of that is spent on things like, you know, interactions with people like Sebastian or me. I think we’ve both done it, but we haven’t been paid for it as opposed to the amount of money that goes into equipment. I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the acquisition of knowledge.

JESSICA STERN: I’m going to take two more questions, beginning with you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I understand what you explained around the opium trade and the anthropological and practical reasons for the Afghanis. However, the cost goes up so high because someone purchases it, okay? So who’s purchasing it? Who are the consumers? And who’s exporting it?

SARAH CHAYES: Well, that …

JESSICA STERN: Let me … Another question.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 52

AUDIENCE: Yes, I am from Afghanistan, and I just come here only, like, 20 days ago. And I thank you guys for bringing these facts to America. My question is the Afghan government is very corrupt. It does not give a damn about the people. And even the President’s brother is involved in drug dealing. Why does the United States government not put pressure on Afghan government to care a little, to give a little attention to people? Because that way, they will win the war, and I’m sure about it.

[applause]

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I think to some degree -- I mean, I’ll turn this over to Sarah, too. I think she knows more. But to some degree, I go back to what I said before. I don’t think the administration really cares that much about what actually happens in Afghanistan. I mean, I think there is the appearance of caring, and not much beyond that.

And so, and on top of that, they’re so overwhelmed with Iraq. I mean, Iraq is such a monstrous and complicated and apparently unsolvable problem. I think they’re just … I think the administration is just overloaded with just that situation. You know, the corruption in the Afghan government, it’s like the very bottom of the list of concerns that we have right now, at least that the administration has. It’s really a shame.

SARAH CHAYES: What’s really interesting is that it took the deployment of European contingents to southern Afghanistan for somebody to start REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 53

putting some of that pressure on the Afghan government. The British and the Dutch said, “We’re not going if you don’t remove the warlord and drug dealing governors of Helmand and Oruzgan provinces.” And that happened immediately once that kind of a bargain was put on the table.

And so, I do think that there would be … There’s leverage, but I think Sebastian’s right. And what was the first one? This is the problem with the …

AUDIENCE: Who’s using the …

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, I mean, who’s using is Europe and us. I mean, heroine now is practically cheaper than a six-pack, I think, on the streets of American cities. Take a look at what the blood-- drug market is here. But it’s the traffickers. This is what I’m saying: all of this focus is being put on the farmers. They’re not really making a huge profit off of this. And so, force, in my view, ought to be applied not to the farmers -- farmers ought to have help with alternatives of various sorts -- and force ought to be applied, in my view, to the major traffickers.

JESSICA STERN: Okay, we’re going to take two more questions.

SARAH CHAYES: There are only three people standing up. Can’t we?

JESSICA STERN: Really? REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 54

SARAH CHAYES: Yes.

JESSICA STERN: We’ll take all three questions at once, and we’ll start with you.

AUDIENCE: The city of San Diego has a sister city relationship with Jalalabad. They’ve built a school there and there’s an exchange with Nangarhar University. I know Denver has some similar relationship as well. You’ve both made it sound as though the train’s left the station and this is over, but was there a moment when civil society initiatives might have made some difference in Afghanistan.

JESSICA STERN: And your question, sir?

AUDIENCE: In your book, Dr. Stern, Terror in the Name of God , there’s a quote from a Pakistani jihadi which has stayed with me. And you asked him, “What’s the greatest thing that you fear?” And he said the greatest thing that he feared was free, secular literacy, free, secular education. I’m wondering if our civil society -- not our government, but our civil society -- can do an open source, all media, local language, free, secular literacy push, flooding the zone with such a thing -- around the world, would that do something to stop all of this?

JESSICA STERN: Thank you. And your question? REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 55

AUDIENCE: I gather from this side that suicide bombing is regarded as kind of an import as it was not for a long time a part of the Afghan scene at all. And I wonder if you would comment on how this is seen in Afghanistan.

SARAH CHAYES: I think I did. Just to be very quick on that one, it’s reviled. Nobody likes it. So then we can focus on the other two.

Was there a time -- it’s really both on civil society -- was there a time that civil society initiatives could have made a difference?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes, I mean, I think it would have, but also they can’t function in a really violent situation. So the sort of civil changes that you’d need, they sort of have to go hand in hand with some basic security. And it’s great to teach literacy. I think that is something that’s terrifying to religious extremists of all religions in countries. [laughter] But if there are firefights in the streets of your town, it’s not going to tip the balance. You really need to provide security as well. I pointed out that we had 5,000 combat ready American soldiers in Afghanistan. It’s just not enough. I mean, they’ve figured out from Kosovo and Bosnia, they figured out what the ratio is of armed peacekeepers to civilians that works, that sort of keeps a lid on the pressure cooker. And I don’t know what that is: 50 to 1, something like that, 100 to 1. I don’t know. But there’s some number that we found -- Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, there’s some number that they have REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 56

come up with of guys with guys, international peacekeepers with guns versus civilians. We’re not anywhere close to that in Afghanistan, and it may mean that it’s just doomed, if only because of that. I don’t know.

SARAH CHAYES: A couple sort of stray thoughts on both of those, all of which support what Sebastian was saying, of course, since we’re finishing each other’s sentences, but the women in my cooperative … I have one of my US board members who got very trill about how important it is that I offer, that I teach the women in our cooperative to read. And I sort of said, “Let’s take one thing on at a time.” And she was quite adamant about this. And so I did propose this to the women, “Well, how would you feel if … ?” And they just … They couldn’t say, “Please don’t make us do anything else,” because that would be rude, and I’m kind of their boss and stuff like that. And so, they didn’t come out with what their very eloquent look said, which was, “We are dealing with feeding our families.” Usually they’re the only breadwinner. They’ve got -- we’re talking ten minimum people that they’ve got to feed and they’re coming to work through body parts. And it’s like, “Don’t make us think about anything else.”

The other problem with flooding is you’re implying, how does one flood? Well, we think about flooding by Internet. A 20% literacy rate, you’re not going to be flooding a lot of people with the Internet. It’s not really culturally appropriate, at least to a place like Afghanistan -- maybe more so to Iraq and other countries.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 57

But the question about civil society, what was the time that civil society initiatives might have worked, we felt -- even I felt when we parachuted into this whole thing back in very early 2002 -- that we had six months. We had a six month window in which we might actually be able to get something moving. And so, we felt frantically under pressure, and I think that was about accurate. And it’s interesting that nothing was happening on the ground in the first six months.

But the other thing that I would urge is that when the US government is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of guns into anti-civil society initiatives like warlord government, then it’s very -- it’s a little bit unfair to cross our arms afterwards and say, “Okay, you guys have to deal with this.” We didn’t provide either Afghanistan or Iraq, those societies, with a situation where the citizens could get any traction. We gave the anti- civil society forces such a huge leg up, that it’s really a bit disingenuous to expect San Diego to be able to balance that in a balance.

And I’d like to -- since I’m preaching -- I’d like to just finish up -- Can I finish up with one last bit of sermon? Is that what I think a lot of this evening’s discussion has been about, although we haven’t said it explicitly, is “us versus them” thinking. And I think we all experience -- We all remember “with us or against us.” And that’s a pretty natural reaction, I think, when humans are attacked, as we were attacked in 2001. However, in my view, it’s not a particularly sophisticated reaction nor is it even a particularly … I mean, we’re talking about civilization here and whose REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 58

civilization is being rejected by whom. I don’t even think it’s a very civilized reaction.

And what I’ve discovered over the last five years, I mean, part of what I wanted to do was to combat “us versus them” thinking, because I think it’s dangerous. Interestingly, a lot of “us versus them” thinking happens right here. [audio skips] --them to behave in the ways that they do. And so, although I think that we both probably agree that the situation is pretty dire in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Sierra Leone, and there’s probably not a lot that you as individual American citizens at this particular phase can do to have a direct impact on those situations, I think if you could carry away from this evening some of these broader ways of looking at conflicts and potential conflicts, even in your neighborhood, or across the river from you, or something like that, that would be … I think we would both be thrilled to have that impact on you.

JESSICA STERN: Thank you both very, very much.

[applause]

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.

SARAH CHAYES: Yes, thanks for coming out.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN 09.25.06 PAGE 59

JESSICA STERN: I think that I speak for all of us when I say that we in Boston are so proud that you are from Boston. You are, listening to you, I feel you're really soldiers for truth, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the work that you do.

JESSICA STERN: Thank you.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you very much.