Good afternoon. I'm Peter Bergen. I run the International Security Program at the New America Foundation and it is my great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, Mike Waltz, who has this wonderful new book out, Warrior Diplomat, the Green Berets Battles from Washington to Afghanistan, which really outlines Mike's quite unusual career as both being somebody who's creating policy in the White House. He was South Asia Advisor to Vice President Cheney and also then carrying out the policies in the field as a special forces officer. Mike is also runs a successful business. He's a fellow here at the New America Foundation and so he's going to outline kind of the big ideas and some of the interesting stories in the book and then we'll throw it open to a question and answer session with everyone here. Thank you, Mike. So thank you, Peter, and thanks everyone for for coming out today. Let me just take a brief moment and kind of talk about big to small, some of the broader strategic issues that I've tried to address in the book and that really underline a lot of both my experiences, as Peter mentioned, in the White House working for Secretary or for Vice President Cheney over in the Pentagon working for Secretary Gates and Rumsfeld and then as a reserve special forces officer out in the field. So bear with me one moment. Let's take a little bit of a history lesson looking back on the war and in looking back on it thus far where I think we've made some critical mistakes that historians decades from now will look back on. The first is that our strategy never really adjusted with the insurgency as it began growing past 2001. So we had a very CT focused strategy, a counter-terrorism focused strategy targeting al-Qaeda and targeting key Taliban leaders. But as that as we kind of that died down and as the Afghan government stabilized, our strategy didn't necessarily coalesce and evolve with it. And what that drove, unfortunately, was a perennial under-resourcing of the war effort. So we found ourselves as violence began to grow in the kind of 2003, 2004, 2005 time frame. We found ourselves chasing the violence rather than putting the resources in necessary to get ahead of it. And there were some important reasons for that, one of which most obviously was the Iraq War. You know, I was on the ground and saw the kind of sucking sound of resources, whether it was helicopters or predator drones or what have you, getting pulled away from from the Afghan theater over into Iraq. But where it really came into a play was once the insurgency had reconstituted and the Taliban had truly reconstituted about 2006. And I came back from from my tour back to the Pentagon and said, hey boss, you know, this isn't going well, and there was nothing to give. We were truly were, that was the, you know, kind of the nadir, the depths of the Iraq War, and there was nothing to commit. So we found ourselves more and more reliant on NATO to provide those resources that we didn't have at that point. That's not a moral statement on the Iraq War. It's just a more a statement of fact from my perspective. No country can fight two wars as well as it fights one. So that's one. The other kind of critical mistakes looking back is, which I just mentioned, is handing the effort over to NATO and handing a mission over to NATO that it frankly wasn't prepared to do. NATO, I was both in the Pentagon and then out on the ground as we transition the lead for security over to over to NATO, which was the ISAF coalition. And they frankly thought they were getting into kind of a Bosnia style peacekeeping mission. I was there on the ground in Helmand when the Brits came down. I was in a Rosegon when the when the Dutch took over and over in Kandahar when the Canadians took and they came prepared to do what they call kind of soft beret patrolling and engaging with the populace. And frankly, in 2006, they ran into a buzz saw that their political constituencies weren't prepared to deal with. So they signed up to do peacekeeping and found themselves by the time they deployed in a full blown counterinsurgency effort. So that was that was to and I write to that quite a bit in the book and being on the ground from French special forces that. You know, didn't have the equipment, didn't have compatible radios. Sometimes didn't even have enough ammunition to being with Dutch forces in a Rosegon and in asking them to work with us. It had to go all the way up to their parliament for approval because of the national caveats. So it it both instituted it promulgated this kind of under resourcing. But then it also really tied our hands in trying to fight an enormously complex war with the 42 nation coalition. So that's to three is we've never gotten our arms around Pakistan, not then or now and the sanctuary that they afford. And Seth Jones and others have done studies of counterinsurgencies over time and none that they've found have been successful when the insurgent enjoys unfettered sanctuary next door. And then for what I'd say is the probably the most critical was announcing our withdrawal years in advance of that withdrawal. I was standing in my headquarters in 2009 when President Obama gave his speech at West Point announcing the surge. But then in the same speech announced the end of the surge and my operations officer standing next to me. That's like, can you imagine Franklin Delano Roosevelt announcing D-Day, but then announcing to the Germans and to the world that it would only last six months to a year and kind of what the effect. So not a perfect analogy, but it was one that one that he threw out and it had immediate effects on the ground. Two weeks later, I was up in the mountains in host province. Meeting with a mangal tribe elder named Gafoorzai and a gentleman that I've been building a relationship with for the better part of a year. Many, many cups of tea, many, many meetings, many hours of kind of getting to know each other, building that relationship and building a level of trust because one, it was the largest tribe in that part of Afghanistan. Two, they wanted to work with the Afghan government and against the Haqqani network, which is the which is the predominant insurgent group in that area. And then three, he had about 1500 tribal militia, which they call Arbaki, well trained, well armed that I wanted working with us on this new program called eventually called Village Stability Operations. Two weeks after the speech at West Point by President Obama, I go for this kind of final signing of a statement of commitment with with Gafoorzai and very cold reception, didn't offer tea. Finally, after a few minutes, kind of got to the bottom of it and he said, look, you know, we always suspected it. We've seen it in the past, but now your president has said it. You're going to abandon us.  And I tried to kind of talk the nuance. No, he was only announcing the withdrawal of the surge. It's not all US. The nuance was lost. They heard that America was leaving period. And it had some truly detrimental effects in other ways as well. You know, we saw corruption actually spike after that announcement. It's kind of the get out, you know, get the money out while you can. We saw government officials that we had really been kind of gaining traction with reform efforts, be less inclined to do so. You know, we really, frankly, were were undermined by that policy statement within days, within weeks of its announcement. It was a fascinating case of how, you know, a policy kind of intended to go this direction immediately on the ground, sent the tactical and operational effort a totally different direction. So, you know, and this is how I ended the book. You know, the thing that Mullig of Forzai left me with was as we were leaving that meeting where he withdrew all of his support and pledged not only to not work with us, frankly, told me they're going to be hedging their bets now with the Haqqani Network. He said, look, until you're prepared to have your grandchildren, not your children, but your grandchildren standing shoulder to shoulder with my grandchildren, we can't work with you and this will never work. And that's really a theme that that kind of commitment or lack thereof that that runs throughout the book and the signal that that sent both to the region, to the Afghan government, to the Afghan populace and to the enemy has has really hurt us throughout the war effort.  So where does that leave us? Today, I think we frankly have to be very blunt, a policy of hope and a lot of assumptions. Right now, we're assuming it was just discussed today at the London Conference, but we're assuming that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police can stand on its own. I find it I find it difficult to wrap my mind around how the ANSF, Afghan National Security Forces are going to do alone without our support with 42 nations, 42 Western nations couldn't do in the in the last 10 years. And personally, I've been hearing that in Pentagon briefings and in the White House since about 2005 that the Afghan National Army would be able to stand and operate on its own in 2005 and 2007. No, now by 2009, then by 11 and now by 14. The next assumption is that we're assuming this unity government will hold. As we all know, the Afghans haven't politically, peacefully transitioned in its entire history. We have a very tenuous situation right now in the same year and at the same time that we're announcing a zero option. I think it's, frankly, almost borderline irresponsible from a policy standpoint. We're also assuming that any types of reconciliation talks will progress in our interest. We're assuming that ethnic tensions won't continue to rise. And I think Washington grossly underestimates the amount of ethnic tension that's that's on the ground right now. And then most importantly, we're assuming that Al Qaeda can't and won't and isn't already reconstituting in the wake of our withdrawal. You know, I just did a I just did a Q&A with Dana Perino of Fox News and and we kind of went through all of this. And she said, Mike, I got it. It's always the simplest questions that are hard. She's why should the American people care? I mean, really, we've been at this for 10 years. We invested billions of dollars. We've lost thousands of lives. That all is scary. But why, you know, why should they care? Why think we see now with ISIS in Iraq, what can happen in the wake of our withdrawal and our precipitous withdrawal?  Having a reconstituted Al Qaeda on the doorsteps of Islamabad with the keys to nuclear weapons should petrify you. It certainly does me. And I, you know, we can talk about the nuances of that analogy and there's a lot, but I but I think that there is some real issue and I have real issue and I write to that in the book with just turning our back on the region. So what's the policy going forward and and how are we going to get this I think is aptly called long war to a better place. Well, a few years ago I gave a talk to a bunch of new congressional staffers that were coming in in the wake of the 2012 midterm elections. And I talked about a country in Asia that at one point had a higher illiteracy rate than Afghanistan does today, had no roads, no infrastructure, no real political system and certainly no army because it had been occupied for the better part of 50 years in the country with South Korea and it did indeed have a higher illiteracy rate in the 1940s than then Afghanistan does today and it's not a perfect analogy. There are many, many smart people in this room that could poke holes in it, but I do think it's a great example of what sustained US engagement can do over a long haul and I argue at the at the end of the book, despite all of the mistakes that we've made and that we certainly need to learn from that the sooner we stop attacking this in 18 month, three year, four year increments and start wrapping our minds around that this is going to be a generational multi-decade effort, I think actually the sooner will be in a better place. And the examples of Germany, South Korea, Japan, while not perfect, I think are examples of what American engagement can do over the long haul. So that's kind of those are the underpinnings of the book from just kind of a policy and and thematic standpoint. What I tried to do in chapter by chapter is, you know, rather than talk about these things, I tried to have you experience them through my time on the ground, my time in the White House, my time over in the Pentagon, and then also of course, my men with me. You know, the introduction starts with there we are in the Black Helicopter, we're going after a Taliban commander. He was responsible for the death of my first KIA and several of our Afghans in that tour. Really a bad character. Well, we we enter the home in a night raid and we accidentally kill his eight year old little girl. I had just skyped with my little girl the night before. The emotional toll that that had on us, the impact it had on our counterinsurgency campaign in that area in Gosney Province, but then flashback. There I am with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and President Karzai talking about the issue of civilian casualties and the effect that that's going to have on or or not have on on Afghans for the war. And each chapter, you know, kind of goes into that type of back and forth, trying to look at these issues from from all angles, whether it's Pakistan, and there we are, you know, what do we do with its nuclear arsenal? What do we do with its support of the of the insurgency, but yet we're dependent on it for both air and ground supply into the war? But yet there I am literally getting rocketed from inside Pakistani military bases along the Afghan border. And and how do we how do we bridge that or that the Afghan National Army is not ready and will not be ready for at least a generation, or you know, the total lack of continuity. When I took command in coast province, I commanded all the special forces in Southeast Afghanistan. I had about nine months of data to deal with our lack of continuity in terms of learning from previous lessons of knowing what we have done. I wrote right in another chapter about a patrol that we conducted in the Tagaw Valley outside of Bagram Air Base. I went around to every intelligence officer I could find this was in 2005. We've been there four years to just talk to me about who had been there before from the United States. Who did we talk to? What coalition efforts? We knew that there have been some development projects there. But why? Why in this village and not in that village? I mean, it just didn't exist. All I could find were a few target packages targeting some of the key Taliban leaders that we knew transited area. So, you know, I titled that chapter patrolling the ambush because that's essentially what we were doing. I mean, we went out to the area to kind of figure that stuff out ran into ambushes. I was nearly killed. A an Afghan Sergeant that I become very close to was killed died in my arms and I'm still taking care of his family today. That sacrifice turned in, you know, I would like to think was worth the information that we gathered. But I'm not confident that that went into some type of repository that others could then learn from. In fact, I know it didn't because I looked for it on my next tour. And it was gone. We just didn't do a great job in that. So I so I talked to a number of those issues in each chapter. I also try to address, I think some fundamental issues that the army has yet to deal with. Yeah, one is the layers of bureaucracy that we had to go through to conduct each mission. In one chapter, I write about the 12 approvals that we had to have to go after one Taliban commander. And I literally had a elder on the phone, a proud old man that we had a great relationship with his sons were working with us in tears. Because Connie commander that had that had threatened his life was next door, looking for him, begging us to come get him. And I couldn't get all of the approvals to go about 10 kilometers down the road. And we ended up not only losing that elder, we lost his sons, and we lost that village, because we couldn't conduct the night raid. So I mean, there's, there's looking at it, I think from a different perspective, we've all heard about the negatives of conducting direct action and night raids, where there are a lot of positives and there are a lot of negatives to our inaction as well. I also look at just the overall issue of risk aversion that we found. You know, I one of the issues I don't think we've fully wrapped our minds around is that this is the first and longest war in our history that we fought with an all volunteer for force, not the first, but certainly the longest in previous wars. And we need to look at what that does to our incentive mechanisms. You know, in previous wars, coming out of the draft, you were in it to win it.  Well, now a tour is a one year blip on an otherwise promising military career. So the incentive often became don't mess anything up. Don't get a base overrun. Don't take too many casualties.  So the default reaction in many gray areas became in action. And and I say that carefully because I never in want to intend to disparage anyone's motivations or service to their country. It's more of a fundamental issue that we haven't really, I think is a military started started to deal with them. We and we felt that risk aversion get permeated in a number of ways. One other quick anecdote was I came across that just, you know, kind of a perfect example of this. I came across a base that we were working with on the Pakistani border that was manned by an infantry platoon, 18 soldiers in this platoon. If you think back to everybody saw the the movie Loan Survivor, where the four Navy SEALs were were were killed and and eventually the one was captured four man unit out conducting reconnaissance. Well, after that kind of a rule and edict came down that no less than six individual soldiers out on a patrol. Okay, that makes sense. After the base were not the fire base were not was overrun in 2008. And other edict came down no less than 14 US soldiers guarding the base. So you can see now do the math this platoon had 18 soldiers. They couldn't necessarily leave their base because they wouldn't have enough but they couldn't go out because they didn't have enough to patrol. And so they ended up having reinforcements flown in every time they even wanted to just go down to the bizarre where the Taliban were openly harassing a girl school that was down in the village below their base. I mean, think about the signal that that sent military platoons right at the top of the hill. And you have Taliban commanders openly shopping in the bizarre shutting down shops and harassing a girl school. And every time they saw a helicopter come in, they knew that okay, the Americans are coming now guess who got ambushed. So it was kind of those tactical and operational permeations of the risk aversion that really come from some fundamental issues that I that I tried to address. There's a little bit in there for lawyers and rules of engagement and law of land warfare. There were a number of instances that you know anyone who's had to fight in a in this type of war have had to deal with didn't make it any easier on me. There was a certain one where mortar rounds started coming into our position. And we saw them walking in. One of my snipers finally found who was calling him in.  No weapon wasn't armed. But every time he raised the cell phone, we saw another round come in. He's looking at me with the Hey, sir, what do we do? Make the call. And I told him to put a warning shot down at his feet, which he did and it splashed rocks on the kid. He dove behind some cover, but he came back out, raised the binoculars, raised the cell phone. And another round came in and wounded some of my Afghans. At this point, I have hostile intent. I'm clear from the Geneva Convention. But I still make the decision to just keep putting warning rounds around the kid until he fled. Who knows if the Taliban had a gun to his family's head if you know what the situation was. But that was a call that I made at that time. Was it right or wrong? I think it was right. What I felt that way, if I was explaining that to the family of one of my men who were killed by one of those water rounds, I don't know. So I want to bring those type of experiences to the average, to the American reader as well, aside from these broader policy issues. And then just a few other things that affect today. And how do we move forward today? And what I'm convinced is a 100 year effort. I think, yes, this is our nation's longest war. I think we're about 13 years into a 70, 80, 90, 100 year long effort. Just as we were in the early days in the war, in the effort against communism. I mean, at the end of the day, we're fighting an idea. We're fighting an ideology. And that is by far the hardest thing to defeat. And I think we've seen that now. We had the adulation after we killed Osama bin Laden. But the idea of extremism, much like the idea of communism, has survived. And it's going to take a long time to undermine that. One of the ways that one of the things that I think we're doing right is forming a moderate Arab coalition. This isn't the first time we've done it. One of our key partners there, the United Arab Emirates, have been with us in Somalia. They've been with us in Bosnia. They've been with us in Afghanistan. They were with us in the intervention in Libya. And to have partners like that, I was out on the ground with them in several of the chapters of the book in Southern Afghanistan. And just to kind of put a face on this, to have an American officer standing next to an Arab officer, talking to groups of Afghan villagers. And to have the Arab say, this is not the way. Look at Jakarta. Look at Istanbul. Look at Dubai.  And oh, by the way, you would take it a step further and say, look what the United States did for Germany. Look what it did for Japan. Look what it did for Korea. That kind of a voice immediately undermining the ideology and frankly the ignorance that the Taliban was espousing was worth battalions of U.S. soldiers. And then the other piece that I've become very passionate about is girls' education and women's empowerment. We need to take that out of this kind of feel good humanitarian realm and put it squarely in the national security realm. It is a national security issue. No ideology can suppress 50 percent of its population and oppress 50 percent of its population. And I think the more we put brave leaders like Malala, you know, the U.S., I mean the the Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Peace Committee doesn't get a lot of things right in my opinion, but they got that one. They got that one right now about fell out of my chair. I was so thrilled.  And those are the type of women leaders that we need to empower and that we need to really put the full force of our government behind in terms of emphasizing. And the last thing I'll leave you with and then I'll turn it over to questions is the issue of our of our veterans and the impact that it's having on us, particularly if you start if you buy into that we're into a multi decade or multi generational effort. It truly is having a detrimental effect, but that doesn't mean that we're not ready to continue to do it. We don't need sympathy. What we just need is probably just some support and almost kind of a technical assistance. And how do we translate these wonderful skills that we've walked away from this effort into the private sector or into the next life into? But most of all, I'd ask for your support for the families. You know, it's an all volunteer force, as I was saying earlier. No one forced us to go do what we're doing. But the families kind of get drug along and they have to live with the consequences good or bad. If we don't come home or in and often even when we do come home, it's really the families that are suffering. And we wouldn't have the military that we have today without their without their support. So one of the things I want to make sure everyone's aware of is 100 percent of the profits from book sales from Warrior Diplomat will go to the Green Beret Foundation and the Matthew Puccino Foundation, that focus on the children of our operators that that weren't able to come home. And I think I'll stop with that, Peter. Thank you very much. Sure. Thank you. That was a really brilliant question. Very rich with both. You know, you really get a sense of the big policy questions and also your experience on the ground and how how they connect. So, you know, when I heard the all presentation, I, I, I, there's kind of a big question here about the United States, which because I think there's a big tension between the United States, the way it views itself as a country, which is we basically were created trying to escape from an empire. And therefore we have a natural aversion to anything that we might construe as empire building.  So I guess there's there's a big question, which is, do we have does the United States have the political will to do the kinds of things that are required to actually not win because you can't really win, but at least manage the situation so that Afghanistan sort of on a reasonable glide path. Yeah, so I'd answer that in two parts. The first is, yes, we do have the will, but we need our leadership to begin explaining why this is so important. I'd ask you, when is the last time we've had President Obama mention Afghanistan? You know, and and and really begin making the case he did in the campaign and I was thrilled to hear it and make the case of why we need to make this investment, why this is in our national security interests. And a lot of people, you know, if you go back and look, if President Truman or President Eisenhower had announced that we'll have 30,000 soldiers in South Korea for 70 years, that probably would have been a little bit difficult to swallow at the time. Yeah, it's a tough sale. Yeah. Well, let me let me ask you another question, because I think you and I completely agree about Afghanistan and the what the way forward is, but it seems to me I wanted to get the Empire. Okay, I want to get the Empire piece to the other pieces. You know, I think we take a lot of things for granted. You know, we the world has enjoyed its longest period of relative stability since World War Two in the history of the world. And a lot of that is because of the overlay, frankly, of American military power, whether it is keeping pirates at bay on Somalia, the Suez Canal, the Mlock and Straits.  You know, they've come from from our projection of power. And we're seeing now, in my view, we're seeing the consequences of when we've kind of turned our back and looked inward. And we're seeing the I mean, name a success story right now in the foreign policy realm, we're kind of seeing the wheels come off the bus and this kind of moniker of stability that we've overlaid. And, you know, it goes to the fundamental question, does American engagement do more harm than good? I would offer that it has done fantastic good, not to say that we haven't made a number of mistakes along the way. So, you know, I could imagine president, I mean, candidate Hillary Clinton or candidate Jeb Bush both putting in their platforms, hey, you know, actually going to zero at the end of 2016 is not such a smart idea. But for Hillary would be good politics that would distinguish her from Barack Obama, for the Republicans that were sort of fit with kind of what their base probably would be happy with. So, you know, I think this and we other things, you know, we've negotiated a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghans that goes to 2024. A great, you know, a lot of effort was put into that. So, but at the same time, we were announcing the full withdrawal. Right. But so I think that the politics have all changed around there clearly, as you mentioned in your presentation, ISIS in Iraq speaks for itself. Well, that that that talk that I gave in 2012 to a bunch of congressional staffers and made the South Korea analogy and made the case for multi decade effort, about a half dozen staffers walked out of the room. I wasn't it was not welcome. And when I checked later, almost all of them were Republican. So I think this issue of, you know, America's role going forward, can we afford it? Do the American people have the will for it? What are the cost benefits is on? I think it's on both sides of the aisle. Okay, the Rand Paul, but you know, the debate about the surge in 2009, you know, there was I, you know, there was one option that the Pentagon, there was a kind of kernel, what is it? It's like a group of colonels in the Pentagon were trying to think through one of the issues. One of the ideas they came up with was go light, but go long, right? Which I think looking back on it might have been the smartest because at the end of the day, the Afghans don't really care if it's 21,000 or 15,000. They just want to basically we're obsessed with numbers. We're obsessed by number. They want to hear that our grandchildren are going to be standing next to their again and that we're with them. Or at least, you know, but it's going to be the long term commitment. So but what there is a sort of minimum number below which it doesn't make any sense.  What that number is? Well, I mean, there's, there's been a number of studies, you know, look at what we what we need to do. You know, we need to keep the air base of Bagram open. That takes several thousand just to just run the thing. We need to continue our counterterrorism campaign into the Pakistani kind of lawless tribal regions in the FATA. We need to continue mentoring and training the Afghan National Army and and the police, but the army as a priority. And right now we have folks at such a high level that if the trees are falling, you know, in the forest, so to speak, I don't think we have the visibility to know down at the tactical level within the Afghan army. So we need to to push those back down. It's a minimum number like 15. Yeah, and you add that up. I think you're at about 15 to 20,000, which in up until about 2007 is where we were. Yeah.  And you mentioned this term national caveats. Can you just explain what that meant in practice? Yes. So each there at that time there were 42 nations in the in the NATO ISAF coalition and each kind of basically had its own rules of engagement, its own clearance process. They all reported to the commander of ISAF, but they all also had their own national officer there that reported back to their capital and could kind of override things and it just created between that and then each one being assigned to a specific province and not being able to move and shift and reinforce. But a kind of example, the Germans wouldn't fly at night. That's right. So I mean what other examples bring to mind? Well, the the Dutch could not could not embark on offensive operations. So for instance, we just wanted them to pull security for some sniper teams that we had out what that was, an offensive operation potentially had to go back to their parliament for permission to borrow one platoon. Well, to command the control problems.  And it's like, is it better to have a I mean, even with all those caveats, it was better to have 42 people nations in the tent? Or was it more or did it kind of reach a tipping point? I mean, they called it flags to post and when we became almost, you know, obsessed, I would say with getting more members of the coalition that, you know, I mean, I write in the book at one point, I was visiting in my capacity from the Pentagon and I talked to a group of sergeants. We had 36 US soldiers training 24 NATO mentors to go mentor the Afghans because they came kind of frankly unprepared. You know, I think we really underestimated the level of atrophy that NATO's military, you know, experienced after, after the end of the Cold War. Number one, number two, you know, NATO was really designed to do territorial homeland defense. We are now asking them to do things that we take for granted but be able to move maintenance and supplies and aerial refueling out to an expeditionary kind of environment.  I guess there was an advantage even if because there's not only the military dimension, of course, like, you know, you get the British, you have DFID, which is a huge aid organization, the Dutch and all these other countries coming in and they, they have pretty good soft power projection, right? Sure. They do, but think, you know, what you have to have out in the field is very close military civilian integration. NATO is a military organization, and they often look to the EU to do a lot of the civil policing advising and doing those other things. And so you didn't have that integration that you often wanted. You know, look, Peter, I think at the end of the day, yes, there is there's fantastic benefits to having a political coalition, but we have to be very clear about what they can do on the ground, both from a political will standpoint, but then also from a military capability. So how would you assess how the coalition is doing right now against ISIS, since we are in a coalition? We are in a coalition, but we have a very in the other pieces, as is frankly the proportionality of American leadership and kind of American heft within it. Right now we have a heavily American led coalition. I talked about I think there's real benefit to having Arab partners there from a messaging standpoint and from just from a broader strategic standpoint, but actually down on the ground, it can get it can almost work against you from a coordination. This issue of civilian casualties, you know, General McChrystal, when he came in in 2009, kind of really tightened up the rules of engagement. And were you were you there then? I was on the ground. I was it, you know, and I think that he was, you know, he really was it was it a sort of miscommunicated in a way to people on the ground in a sense. It made them overly risk a verse or yeah, you know, that it it needed to swing.  And there was it was it was it was too heavy handed. Part of that was just how few forces we had on the ground, how isolated we were. But part of it was we needed a shift in kind of thinking a shift in mentality from a counterterrorism focus to a counterinsurgency population centric focus. The pendulum, though, went too far. General McChrystal, I think was right to issue the edicts that he did. The problem was then the next layer of command and the next layer of command and each layer of command you went down got more and more and more cautious. There's no one wanted McChrystal's finger in their boss's boss's chest. So they overinterpreted it overinterpreted and it really tied our hands so that in situations where we really did need support. And you saw this, you know, from the captain captain Swanson, the Medal of Honor winner. What have you where the questioning and hand ringing in the middle of firefights was was frankly egregious. And it was a re it was an overreaction. Petraeus tried to kind of write the pendulum when he came in. Unfortunately, General McChrystal didn't have the opportunity to but it did it did swing too far and it really retarded some of our efforts. I mean, in that part of the world, Peter, you know, people respect strength. And when they see the Taliban and insurgent and the Hakanis pushing and pushing their limits and constantly attacking whether it's our bases or what have you and they see a very tepid response because of this bureaucratic wrangling it sends a message. You know, you sketched out, I think you had four big reasons why things in Afghanistan may a lot of things have to go right if the things to go right. But, you know, what what what is going right because I think a lot of Americans who may, you know, listening to this perhaps on C-span. I want to have a drink millions of Americans watching this on C-span. You know, I think they tend to bracket Iraq and Afghanistan together kind of unfairly. You know, Iraq, the violence is 12 times greater and the civilian casualty rates just off the charts right now. Right. And the fact is, I mean, you've spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. I mean, what has gone right in Afghanistan, you know, accepting all the things that we know that went wrong? Well, you know, first, look, a lot of things have gone right. I mean, my intent here was let's let's learn from the lessons. And, you know, in this book, from the last 10 years, looking at it from all of the different angles that that that I've worked at for the next however many years that we're going to be into it. That doesn't mean we didn't do a lot of things right. I mentioned girls' education, which was which was just non-existent in the early days of the war. And, you know, my company now works with a number of woman-owned businesses in Afghanistan that are thriving that you just wouldn't have seen even five years ago, much West 10. The economy, broadly speaking, and Ashraf Ghani should get a lot of credit for this for stabilizing the currency for such a for such a war-torn country, has has been okay. I hope it survives the withdrawal of donor funding. It certainly has the potential to you know, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about sending a long-term message that we are invested in Afghanistan, it is in our national security interests, and that we're not going to abandon it is for outside investors to come in and to exploit not exploit, but to work with the Afghans to take advantage of many of the natural resources that they have, that we're seeing the Chinese and Russians already move into, you know, from a security standpoint, we were starting to really get things right with the Village Stability Operations Program where we took what I call my tribe of special forces, army special forces that Green Berets that specialize in culture, language, and working with indigenous with indigenous forces to putting them into the village and putting them into tribal areas that had asked for our support, we were seeing truly starting to see some benefits there. And I think the Afghan National Army is a success story in many ways. I was going to ask you about it. But we have to give it, we have to give it time. Well, they're taking a lot of casualties suggesting that they're fighting and they're not running like the Iraq Army just did earlier this year. And I mean, I think that the if you lost people around Washington a year ago, how would the Afghan National Army do? Most people would say it's going to be a complete catastrophe. That seems to be basically wrong. Well, but but in fairness to the Iraqi army, we were, you know, folks who are following it closely were looking at the the violence and the casualties and the fighting that's been going on for the last two and a half, three years. I mean, this isn't a brand new problem in the last six months. They did finally collapse. I'm worried, you know, we just saw a base get overrun in Helmand Province, a fairly large base. Where was it? Down in, it was sanctioned. Yeah. Yeah, and singing. Yeah. One of the bases down there, Bob Robinson is named after one of my soldiers that that was killed there and and and and is now being threatened by a Taliban overrun. So I worry that we're beginning to see those initial kind of indicators that we saw two years ago with the Iraqi army. I'm not so sanguine. Not so sanguine. Yeah. One final question before opening the audience, you know, Helmand was the was a huge amount of a lot of Americans died there. A lot of Brits died there. Did that make any sense? I mean, the whole point of counterinsurgency is to protect the population. Only one percent of the population was living in Helmand was. Why did we do that? Yeah, I mean, Helmand Helmand made sense from the perspective that it is the Helmand River is a it's it's a virtual highway into or was gone and into Hank Kandahar. Should we have focused on Kandahar city first? Yeah, absolutely. I think our sequencing was off and that happened for political reasons of the having to do with the Brits and then with the Marine Corps wanting to have their own was like trying to defeat Nazi Germany by attacking Austria first. Yeah, fair enough. That's a great OK. That's a great great. Let's throw it open to questions. And if you have a question, can you wait for the mic and identify yourself and raise your hand? This gentleman. Hi, I'm 12 Malikzad. I'm with the Voice of America Afghan Services. I have two questions. One part, one question with two parts. The first one is about Pakistan. Pakistan time and again has shown that they're not interested in in having a clear foreign policy towards Afghanistan. The civilian government says one thing. The military does another thing and the civilian military government that has not has no power over the military. What can United States? It's kind of a broad question. But what should be United States strategy towards the military, not the civilian government towards the military? Because this at the beginning of this year, United States and about one six one point six billion dollars to Pakistan. And over half of that goes to the same military that's funding Haqani that's funding the other Afghan Taliban across the border. What can United States can do to prevent the military to stop supporting? And the second question is about NATO's new new mission starts in a month. The resolute support, I guess that's the name. The main purpose of that mission is to train Afghans. Would you consider this new method for a lack of a better word a failed strategy because training Afghans is not going to not going to defeat the enemy is just going to create more soldiers for the enemy to kill because for Afghans they're there to make money to bring food home. But for Taliban they're there to they're willing to die. I know a lot of Afghans Afghan families who have lost children. And when you ask them that what do you think the first thing that they say about their their child is they say that oh that was the only bread maker at home. So they're in the army to make money not to fight. And it's pretty clear. I'm still supporting some of the families of the Afghan soldiers. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.  Yeah, yeah. So what would you suggest for for this like new NATO mission in Afghanistan that how should they approach this training that actually benefits Afghan army? That's too easy questions. So first on first on Pakistan which I think we could have a whole other forum on. You know from one perspective yes, I hear you. Pakistan cares about its own interests as any country does. And you know from the again I know I sound like a bit of a broken record. We saw a shift both out on the ground and then back here diplomatically with Pakistan about 2005-2006 when we you know when we did the full shift over to NATO and I think it became very clear to them at least in in kind of off the record discussions that this was a beginning even that early of the eventual US withdrawal that's not making an excuse but that's just looking at it from Pakistan's viewpoint and that they're going to be left you know holding this mess so to speak as they viewed Afghanistan and they're going to work through their proxies and we all know that working through surrogates and working through proxies is you know a key part of Pakistan foreign policy at least I think that's accepted now. What do we do about it? One I do think we need to relook the issue of of our monetary support to the Pakistani military but we have to be very careful. I've sat in many many of these debates and are we truly prepared to one either let Pakistan become destabilized given its arsenal or two make an enemy of Pakistan that were I mean how far down that path do we really go and every time we did from a policy standpoint it got so scary in many ways that we pulled back and just continued trying to change their behavior. So in my view their nuclear arsenal is the key and we have to be very careful about how far we let Pakistan get destabilized that said as we're providing funds are we providing funds to buy more tanks to face India or are we providing funds to help them fight the kind of insurgency one and two as we shift there if we try to work with the Pakistanis to shift towards focusing on this extremist problem that's now threatening Pakistan as well we have to I think we have to really think about whether we're willing to accept the Pakistanis being more reliant on their nuclear arsenal now vis-a-vis India so I mean it's a broader it's such a broader regional problem but I think we have you know the United States needs to think about what its priorities are and on the train and advise real fast you know I agree with you I agree with where I think you're going you know it's kind of like right doing training only it's kind of like telling the coaches of a football team you can only go with your team to practice once they go out for the big game though you've got to have to wave goodbye at the gate we need to do the advising which means going out with them and conducting operations to also facilitate the enablers the medevac the air support all of the other things that's going to take a long time for the Afghan army to to be able to develop just to follow up on Pakistan I mean we had a it was an off the record discussion so with General Sharif the new head of the relatively new head of the Pakistani military and he was sitting in that chair and you know he had come to Washington and he went down to Tampa to St. Com and you know if you look at where relations US-Pakistan relations were in 2011 they've kind of come a long way there was there was the Raymond Davis affair the border incidents the border incidents there was the bin Laden killing I mean but things have sort of things seem to be a lot more normalized and a big factor here is the Pakistani military operation in North Azerestan which is something that the United States has been wanting the Pakistanis to do for a long time so what's your assessment of how that operation has gone? You know the operation first the operation was advertised months in advance and then there's a lot of speculation about why that was was advertised you know and talking to folks out on the ground they kind of saw a shift of the Haqqani network out of the area of operations up into the northern parts of the Fata so there are many folks who believe and I'm not sure where I am on it that that was frankly for show and to both claim it internally and I think it's a little more complicated because this was actually a very rare example where the military actually wanted to do the operation and was being constrained the civilian the civilian government was saying hey wait a minute we need to extend these negotiations to the Taliban we're never going to go anywhere and they didn't but if you're a civilian leader you do want to sort of show hey we did everything we could before we Yeah I think in fairness there is a growing chorus within Pakistan of we can't you know the genie's out of the bottle and we can't control this thing anymore and we truly have to take it on and that is encouraging I think there has been a cease change that is encouraging I don't know that I'm willing to go that far to say that the military writ large and it's most senior leaders have kind of changed their calculus on the usefulness that you know of using proxies but I do think there is a growing chorus particularly among some of its junior officers that have been out there fighting the Taliban fighting them but again you know what's the constant theme here is time it's good you know as those that generation you know continues to progress it's and you know Ghani the new president Ghani went to Pakistan I mean as General Sharif the Pakistani chief of the chief of army staff went to Afghanistan I mean it seems to be like you know Karzai was publicly enormously critical of two countries the United States and Pakistan you are not hearing that often for yeah so but which in a kind of pretty unhelpful way for all concerned right so I think you know Ashraf Ghani yes there is a sort of issue about the you know Dr. Abdullah and he not agreeing on every cabinet position but I mean they're both technocrats they're both pretty savvy people and they both have you know that if if it doesn't work between them this whole thing goes south right and they realize that and I think we have two I think we have two very reasonable well educated you know decent men in those positions but it's it's almost like having you know Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the same White House I mean still and I'm not worried about them so much I'm worried about kind of the secondary and tertiary layers of of warlords and strong men behind them that are going to lose patients at some point and are already beginning to to hedge and and do things that are unhelpful so I don't think times on our side but I am yeah still trying to be optimistic and what about these you know we've seen a series of attacks in Kabul yesterday the U.S. State Department released a very very explicit advisory saying you know U.S. personnel shouldn't like go anywhere in Kabul I mean the you know is this the Taliban trying to show the flag because and but you know really hitting mostly soft targets essentially or is this something bigger or is this I think you're I mean you know from Jalalabad to Kunar to Helmand and in the east and up in Kabul you're starting to see a pretty concerted push I'm I am praying that we can get a new set of ministers and really get a responsible government in place before the spring and before what I expect will be a pretty hefty now the New York Times the New York Times did say the Obama administration seems to have changed the rules of engagement for 2015 in terms of like actually letting American advisors get involved in well it's letting and fair it's letting yeah it's letting us provide air support again down on the ground which had been essentially turned off by both President Karzai and the administration so that's turned back on right from from both Ghani and the administration which is a positive but in order to be able to really use that which is what we're seeing in Iraq right now you know it's we're running a lot of sorties we're not dropping a lot of bombs or doing a lot of things on the ground because you need those folks tactically out with and tell so tell me tell us what is what's really happening on the ground because it's not very clear in terms of what the we so we're drawing down I mean you mentioned the vision village stability operation which are all sort of special forces in our local community which are pulled back they're all being they're all gone they're all pulled back so we pulled those folks back they do what's kind of what's known as an over village overwatch where they go out and visit these local they're called Afghan local police but many of them were recruited from tribal militia in my view that's the worst of both worlds either you don't have that type of program with all of the inherent risks that come with that or you're out there with them so you know exactly what's going on who who's wearing what jersey but to create you know this kind of this kind of force and not have the oversight that we bring I think is really dangerous so that's that's one and two all of our advisors have been pulled up to the core level well anybody here who's served in the military knows that a core commander doesn't always know what's going on down at the platoon and coming up that's true both conventional NSF or what is it that's that's across the board conventional we still have special forces teams with their commandos right which are doing which are able to go out and do offensive operations with the Afghans and the lead and us a company that's very open to another question sure this gentleman here in the front hi thank you for your service and for your book thank you Burton Gerber Georgetown University the media and the American government and observers and everyone refer counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency often without making distinctions about what they are and dealing with a counter- dealing with an insurgency requires different kinds of skills and deployments and so forth than terrorism yet our government for instance still has counter-terrorism centers and I don't know of any counter-insurgency center Iraq now we're confronting the Islamic State the president was clear when he made a statement that we will degrade and destroy ISIS those were the very words he used uh... and that clearly uh... would indicate a recognition that ISIS is an insurgency not a terrorist organization although it uses terrorist tactics clearly what kind of confidence do you have that the president in the u.s. government is committed to the long-term effects long-term requirements of confronting an insurgency like i s certainly it has garnered some coalition it hasn't deployed the kind of forces like for instance the the uh... air uh... the airstrike personnel do you think that which we live realistic what the president is said about degrade and destroy you know i'll go back to some of my analogies with with the cold war with our efforts against communism uh... you know if you look at you know at the end of the day over the course of history people who are disenfranchised feel like they don't have opportunity or disconnected from their governments that don't see a better path for their for their children have gravitated towards some type of movement whether it was socialism communism now extremism that they feel gives them a mechanism to to address those grievances at the same time you have people who use and abuse those movements you know it's all about power and and main to either maintaining power or seeking power so i mean taking a very macro view i think the entire extremist islamic extremist movement is an insurgency to some degree against either the gulf monarchies or what they see the western liberal societies or you know that the kind of abuse of government if you want to really drill down that's you know uh... that there they have grievances against so yes to answer your question i think we need to take a broader very broad view of how do we undermine uh... this ideology just as we undermine i mean you know people ask me what does victory look like and i'll tell you i think victory looks like when isis al-qaeda you know uh... has below what have you can't recruit anymore their ideology has no draw think back to the eighties gsg nine red brigades think you know those those communist groups uh... shining path down in peru we're very powerful could recruit and we're furthering furthering their agenda and now they're now they're a joke and what happened to the draw of that ideology and i think we have to get uh... this current one to the same place and i take your point terrorism is just a tactic it's just a mechanism to follow up on that so communism as an ideology actually didn't last very long it was seven decades basically and it expired really big i mean when the soviet union expired and i'm sure there's still communist professor somewhere at some french university but it's a very minority position so it was very tied to the actual experience of the soviet union and the fact that it just didn't deliver and ultimately yeah i think that was the biggest sort of variable so the the ideology that sort of fuels isis is in a sense older and it also claims uh... that it is sort of a god uh... sort of centric ideology i think i think those sort of ideology are often harder to kill or even to manage or you know hope that they exist so i mean sketch out a future what you said i mean in your earlier remarks that this could go on for a hundred years so i mean uh... and the other people who talked about a thirty years war and you know i mean this is something that could go on for a while but how would it what would the and i explained what the end looks like but how do we get there because yes i think you're the gentleman's you know in a sense critiquing sort of where the obam ministration is but you're also endorsing the fact that there is this arab element of the coalition which is obviously very important a moderate arab right so what else could can we do and how how do we hasten this and and of course the american government has a sort of kiss of death problem in a lot of this because you know we can't talk about islam in any meaningful way and we're not necessarily the best messenger so what is so you're advising the president in uh... you know february twenty seventeen what would you say to him or her you know there's there needs to be a few components and and some of it is is looking at ourselves internally we're not organized as a government to really conduct this type of of effort and and to put it it's over simplistic but our our skills that we need whether they're border patrol agents or police advisors or what have you are in our civilian agencies or our ability to operate an unstable spaces in the military so you had this kind of you know at least over the last fifteen you know fourteen fifteen years this constant back and forth of you know i've got platoon leaders from the eighty second airborne trying to figure out how to be town mayors and then you know you you've got uh... you know we're reaching out we need we need to help either iraq afghanistan control its borders last time i checked the border patrol is an expeditionary and so so it would first of all we need and we've we've made attempts at doing that whether it's the p r t or whether it's uh... you know whether it's the uh... the office in the state department the civilian response corps but we need to look at a kind of a broader uh... effort you know that that that we essentially take a stability approach to many of these areas and then we could talk about how do we prioritize uh... one two is countries like the u a countries like turkey although not under the urtigan government uh... really need to be key partners in this and i and i tried to give that anecdote in the book of i can't i mean i just can't overstate uh... how powerful that message is coming from you know coming from moderate air of elements that can say do things towards the ideology whether you know sitting down with a group of mullahs and and really explaining to them of kind of how they're getting it wrong that we just can't do uh... so there needs to be an Arab coalition element there needs to be a whole of government element in a reorganization kind of almost a uh... adjointness across our interagency for us to be able to address it and then i think there's a political dimension that you that you hit on in terms of wrapping the american people's minds around the fact that this is you know this is going to be a long-term effort is in our national interest to begin doing it much like we had in the fifties and sixties uh... i get it there are many in perfect uh... elements of that analogy with the cold war and communism but i think there's a lot of commonality to that people can so yeah okay that took a seventy years to defeat this effort and and while we don't have a soviet union you know that that is kind of the big enemy you know this is these are non-state actors but we do have i mean we've got what hobbyism mean we have certain certain states that i think have been more responsible than than others have to be careful about how is it because i think that the kind of analogy you know anybody bombs abortion clinic in this country is a christian fundamentalist almost without exception very few christian fundamentalist bomb abortion clinic so like there are a lot of millions of what hobbies in there that's right so we just have to be very careful about your how we identify uh... because that doesn't make you a violent salafi no it doesn't know it doesn't now it makes you a conservative with a right your religion of choice ladies gentlemen other question this gentleman here like katalana with veteran crowd i served a very short time as a civilian advisor uh... during two thousand ten two thousand eleven winter on the economic development side on the uh... i'd like to hear your comments on the shift from a bottom down top down approach to economic development where we spent billions and i had to sit next to consultants doing the post mortem on the capitol bank collapse where our taxpayer assets went to to buy properties and uh... uh... western institutions uh... that is banks uh... probably won't exist in afghanistan in the long term uh... u.s. treasuries position is you know we we need them to adhere to basal two or basal three that's never gonna happen so where is the bright spot on the horizon for uh... bottoms up economic development and how are how are women part part of that change in your view terms of women-owned businesses in our prices sure uh... you know i've had the opportunity in the last few years to run business to really work with the afghan private sector i've never uh... i've never come across a more entrepreneurial uh... society uh... you know that i've worked and lived all over the world uh... afghans truly will kind of bootstrap and and and make their own future for themselves have just given a little given a little help uh... so i think part of it's through both women and men through the private sector through bringing in private investment there's a lot of folks in the middle east particular that are looking to deploy uh... investment dollars but they need i mean they need the basic things you know what does every investor want they want predictability and they want some level of stability uh... and and frankly in a lot of these conferences would come to me or you know i see charlie back there from the commerce department say what's the united states going to do you know this was you know are we gonna turn out the lights in twenty fourteen this was a few years ago when there's there's constant questions so folks held on to their dollars so to answer to answer your question more succinctly through the afghan private sector there's enormous there's enormous opportunity uh... the top down bottom up you know we've struggled with that uh... ashram was you know one of the biggest proponents of putting those funds through afghan ministries under the kind of the the guys of the will never develop capacity if you're always going around us at the same time we have to be responsible stewards of taxpayer into donor dollars and and we wanted to get to where it's going to make the most impact as fast as possible so we had the the p rt mechanism to to do that there needs to be a balance of both uh... pretty much like in anything yeah ashraf khani and claire lockhart came in basically they had something called a national solidarity program which is very small grants on a local basis that seems to be sort of and it that hasn't cost a great deal of money compared to what we put in that that's basically been a success you know it was a success from in and again i've worked from from nimras you know all the way up uh... into nangahari success in areas that are relatively stable uh... you know we broke up my uh... special forces unit broke up a number of rings that were extorting the national solidarity program in pactia and host in two thousand nine two thousand ten everyone new so this is a program that basically alex tribal uh... or that elects you know local councils that are authorized to receive the funds and then basically you know helps them make local decisions on where the eight dollars are going rather than folks doing it from cobalt or even worse westerners trying to make those decisions but what's happened was the insurgents would literally have a gun to their head go withdraw the money in and give it to us or else so i i i i know a lot of my remarks were very security focused but whether it's national you know whether it's in s p or the private sector or better governance you have to have you know i mean security is just the oxygen that all of those efforts the gentleman also about the about the cobalt bank which was like you know basically a one billion dollar robbery yeah uh... but the ghani administration is now handing down some pretty stiff present sentences i mean this yeah i think it's absolutely the right move because i mean without that no one's going to i worked counter narcotics policy from in the defense department for years and and spent years of my life uh... frankly undermining folks in the state department that wanted to make our counter narcotics policy eradication and aerial eradication were actually spraying crops of the very people we were trying to win over had and do push for more of an interdiction strategy and we pushed president cars i and others arrest a handful of these most notorious guys that it it sends the right signal to your people it sends the right signal to them in these kind of drug and criminal networks and and i think it really you know what tamp down some of this most egregious behavior so i applaud the move gentleman here good afternoon my name is chris day i'm from third group and i have a bit of experience in iraq and in afghanistan and from every deployment i've seen the thing that you said that struck me most was that risk aversion is probably the military i think biggest problem uh... i was wondering if from your experience at senior levels of uh... department defense are people aware of this and what it means for people at you know the company level and below you'll read it chapter in there when uh... at that time assistant secretary uh... mike vickers now undersecretary for intelligence mike vickers came out and visited some of our teams and i walked him through the problems that were going on you should have seen that that the death stares i was getting from the kernels that had come with them but i having been on his end of things as his advisor at one point i knew what he was coming out he wanted to kind of get some ground truth and dog on it i was going to give it to him uh... and let them and really make him aware of these layers uh... that kind of accumulating and as i was saying each one is put in place for good reason it makes sense in isolation but it was a cumulation over time that uh... that cause a problem i was in the pentagon when president cars i first complained about night raids to secretary rumsfeld and the commander at the time general i can bury you know then said every time we go after a talban commander at night has to come to a three-star level for approval you'd imagine what that did so the answer is is mixed sometimes are aware sometimes it's done on purpose uh... you know in that case he wanted to come to his level to to tamp down the numbers that were going on and sometimes there you know sometimes they're just not aware uh... and there's a real reluctance for civilian policy makers who are going out to the field to begin you know that have that seven thousand mile screwdriver and begin questioning and and and changing how we conduct things you know how we conduct ourselves operation it's a tough tough problem like that raises a really interesting so you know the bin laden raid was watched in real time by the commander in chief and right many of his and it's really the first time in history that a tactical operation was being seen in real time by the commander in chief by the commander in chief yes but not back here and but obviously the technology exists for for the president or anybody in his cabinet to be theoretically micromanaging what you know an operation you do in the field in or is gone so how does that change things that's changed a lot of things i mean you know we've had a lot of discussions about drones i think we're having one in in a few weeks and uh... in the fact that that's had and kind of modern warfare you know it's a mix between risk avert to answer your question a little bit further the risk aversion that i think is steeped into what i call a careerist force rather than you know all volunteer force because now we have folks that are focused on this is one spot in their career and then between technology that literally allows things to be managed uh... from afar and i've i've had it done to me and and and i'm sure you you have as well uh... it it plays a huge role it's one of the reasons i take umbrance though to flip that around this notion that we often hear in the media that you know are our special forces guys are kind of some cowboys that are out there just kicking indoors willy nilly or were dropping you know uh... health fire missiles from predator drones you know it kind of the flip of the switch there is an elaborate process with lawyers at every level uh... standing right at the commander's shoulder with a series of uh... kind of criteria of whether we can take that shot or whether we can go on that raid to the point that i argue in the book to our detriment it at our hands are too tight the pendulum has swung too far uh... and it really as i said our inaction often had greater consequences in our action that answer your yeah sure hi i'm hail often had a little bit time in afghanistan and uh... i've been part of the uh... so the gorilla insurgency along with your community and a few others uh... for uh... few decades now that is tried to fight the coin battle inside the policy realms in in the beltway here and in the combat commands uh... what would you offer as advice how do we fix the policy when we woke up in this alternative universe this morning where we've got representatives from the joint staff do d advertising that the afghan national security forces in police are going to be able to take care of this problem at the same time we're sitting here listening to you introducing your book and all the things we know about the reality we have a severe policy disconnect so what would you offer for advice and how to fix that and don't you say vote for the right people that well i mean you know that the signal and direction in the street you know it's some ways the way it should work i mean the strategic direction by the civilian elected commander in chief is you know the military should and large degree uh... in a civilian in a civilian run military be in line with that uh... but there's some fundamental issues within particularly the army itself that are also at play regardless of who gets elected into four uh... eight years from now and one is that the is that the army in particular still wants to fight big wars this is getting into a long conversation with the military industrial complex that requires big equipment big shiny objects that employ a lot of people in factories spread across all forty nine counterinsurgency doesn't have a constituency doesn't require a lot of stuff special forces is what percentage of the uh... u.s. military but i want to say about of of the army at least army special forces it's in the it's like three four percent my my impression overall it's like one half yeah it's very it's a hot very inexpensive and it doesn't have a lot of bright right now it's right attached to it um... so is the army uh... you know i mean it's there obviously there's some very bright people like general McMaster and you know trying to like you know kind of retain the lessons learned do you think the army is doing an okay job if you look at the army straight the twenty strategic vision that it just uh... released this fall i think it was an important step in the right direction the holy grail for moving the massive tanker that is the u.s. army is doctrine and it starts uh... and hr McMaster is now the deputy the army's doctrine command uh... trade off which i think with which i applauded uh... so so there's some i think some of the right people it's been a decade long effort if not longer to get some of the right people in place and again it's that you know like we're just talking about with pakistan some of that younger generation but i hope stays in the military to try to to affect some change rising up and part of it is the world situation isn't changing and we can the army this administration can wish the world to look differently and one a shift where it wants to shift but the enemy gets a vote and they're certainly voting right now and it's going to require highly trained highly skilled culturally attuned uh... special operators that are willing and capable and able to live amongst uh... you know local national populations and and take a by with an approach and through approach you know one of the disconnects right i think going on right now with with iraq is boots on the ground or no boots on the ground and i think to a lot of folks boots on the ground means another invasion and divisions rolling through we're talking about just taking the trainers think many of us are talking about and letting him advise letting them do what they're what they're trained by the way the three thousand american soldiers who are in iraq right now do they wear boots they do they're on the ground so you ask their families there right they're in the they're in a war and how many were there a year ago about what three hundred so i mean is this is this like nineteen sixty three with kennedy well at least in nineteen sixty three they were able to go out with uh... with the vietnam south vietnamese army and help them do i mean again i mean the analogy that i've received the most response to is the football coach that they can't leave practice right i can't go to the game that's a great analogy you know and when we have to be able to go to the game but on that note uh... let's give uh... lieutenant general mike waltz a the round of applause thanks for your time


Hello, beautiful. As you may know, I have been a hairstyles for many years. Actually, I think almost 10 years now, and that's like not including the times I did hair without having a license. That's a lot of years, as a hairstylist. Over my time as a hairstylist, I've learned a lot about this industry and I wanna share it with you today with a one-on-one sit down. We're gonna decide if you should become a hairstylist or if it's just not the right career path for you. I'm gonna share with you all my pros and cons and then I'll share with you my pro tips to becoming the best hairstyles you can possibly be and what you should do and what you should look out for when starting your career as a hairstylist. Let's start off with the good, with the positive, with the great. Working with the public can be fun.  It's honestly really fun to get to know your clients and become good friends with them and it's so cool that you basically get to hang out with people for a living. When you build that solid clientele, that is what it feels like. It feels like you're hanging out with friends and it's dope. And when you have a full book of clients you love for the day, the day goes by so quickly. It just feels like you're having fun all day. It's always those days where you have a full book of like friend clients we'll call them for today where you end the day and you're like, I cannot believe I got paid to do that. Like this is amazing and this is a lot of fun and I love my job. Next, you get to make people feel beautiful for a living. I think clients cry because they feel so beautiful and they never felt like that before. First of all, it makes me so happy that they feel so good. And second of all, I love the idea that you can make somebody more beautiful with their hair.  It is powerful. Okay, next, being a hairstylist is super creative.  It is a very, very creative job. I like to think of hair cutting as like doing architecture. Like really creative architecture where like doing hair color is extremely creative painting and styling hair is like sculpting. And so when you combine all those things together, you set the most fulfilling creative job ever. It is so much fun to be able to create a piece of art that is wearable for somebody to walk around and show it off and feel excited as you are creating the look as they are wearing the look. Like it is really cool. Next, there are so many different ways you can grow in this career. Just because you're a hairstylist doesn't mean you have to work at a salon. You can be a salon owner, session stylist that goes to shoots and does models hair all day. You can be a colorist. You can be a hair cutter. You can be an educator. You can become a brand ambassador where you travel and you teach people how to use certain brands products. Like there's so many different things you can do under this one roof of being a hairstylist which is great for somebody like me who gets really bored really easily. There's just endless possibilities. Next, you get to decide how much money you want to make. Yes, you heard me right. If you wanna make $10 a day, you can. If you wanna make $20,000 a day, you can. I mean, you can really make as much money as you desire. It's really all about what you put into it. You will get out of it, okay? So if you want to make a lot of money in this career, you can. There is so much damn money to be made within the world of beauty. Not that it's easy to do, but it can be done. Next, we should talk about just the atmosphere of the salon.  It can be a really fun place to work because most hairstylists are very unconventional people. They are artistic people. They are very outgoing people. So it just creates this atmosphere where you're just like best friends with everybody. You have a lot of commonalities that make you end up being friendly even outside of work.  Like that is not how salons are. At least from my experience. We would all get drinks after work. We would all hang out in the back rooms. It was just such like a community of hairstylists and you really wanted to be around those people because they have a lot of similar interests to you. And it was a lot of fun. Next, you get to get a lot of exercise in.  If you like being active and you don't like sitting at a desk, you don't like just staring at a wall all day or a laptop screen, this would be good for you. This is an ADHD proof job. If you have to be stimulated all the time, this is it. You are constantly on the move.  You never stop. You are getting so many steps in, which I actually really like because I love being on my feet and I love a good walk around, you know. And one of my last pros is that this is a cash heavy job. You are gonna get a lot of cash, which is great. Cash is always nice. You know, you can do what you want with your money. It's always nice getting that big bundle of cash going home. You know, tips are nice.  I had to add that in there. So I'm sure I hyped up all of you guys at this point and you're like, that bread. I wanna become my own sales now. Like you've convinced me.  There are cons lists we are going to get to right now. We'll start off with one that I just mentioned as a pro but reverse it into a con. You're on your feet 24 seven does get very tiring. And if you are not into that, you do not wanna be the most active mother in this planet.  It is manual labor.  You will wanna go home and just vegetate after every work day. All right, but you'll definitely get your steps in. Some of these are also just smaller things that I personally experienced. You don't get to eat often. When I was working at salon where I had just like way too many clients, there was no time to eat.  I would take anything. Like a lot of hairstyles would not eat during the day and just drink coffee. It would be like 10 to 12 hour days where people would just drink coffee and will not eat the entire day until they got home. It was always like breakfast before your clients and then you would go home and eat. Like that was it. Next, it takes a long time to start making money. I had a boss one time always say, this is not a get rich quick scheme. You don't get rich quick. It takes a long time. Typically you have to go to school. You learn for many years as an apprentice. Sometimes like up to three, four, five years even. I've seen people do five years of apprenticeship and then you get on the floor and then you have another like two years, three years depending on how busy the salon is until you build a full clientele. And then if you decide to switch salons in the middle of that, you're back at square one. So sometimes it can take a really long time to build a clientele, to make money, to figure out what you're good at. I mean, everybody's path is different but I have pretty much never seen anybody just go to school and like immediately start making a lot of money. It doesn't usually work like that. Next, working in salon can be very high school like. I don't know if this is everywhere in the world but definitely in New York City and in Massachusetts where I'm from. Every salon I worked at had a lot of drama and that was just the name of the game. People were hooking up with different people.  There was always just drama. It was a little nasty sometimes.  You often get some people who are very catty. That's the truth. You have the option to not get involved with it but from my experience, it's very hard not to get involved. Next one is sort of a con, sort of a pro. We'll just like leave it in no man's land. You have to go to school. A lot of people think you can just like be a hairstylist but to work in salon, you do have to be a licensed hairstylist. You have to go to school. I think the least amount of time it takes is like a school year. So about eight months or so in New York and Massachusetts, every state is different. Some are much longer. Some take over a year to complete the school. Some take I think even two years to complete. It all depends on how fast you do it as well. You have the option to go to school for a full day or for half days or for night school. There's all sorts of different programs. So just look up what there is to offer near you and go from there. But for me, I just felt like it was just a lot of school. Like I already knew so much before I went into school and I just wanted to be done with it so bad and like get on with the show. So next, working with the public can be brutal.  I don't like you. We have no chemistry. At this point, should I just like mess up her hair so she stops coming to me kind of moment? Never did that. But there's definitely been times where I'm like, how can I make this woman go away? Like get out of my chair. It's tough sometimes. You have to really just like remember that it's your job and not.  In the beginning of your career on the floor as a hairstylist, you get whatever is given to you. You don't get people who necessarily like you.  But in the beginning, you get a lot of random people, a lot of walk-ins, a lot of people who don't tip, a lot of people who are just plain rude, a lot of people who you'll do amazing hair on and they'll be like, this looks awful. There are people who just do not care about your feelings at all.  I've had clients walk out. I've had people get mad at me for various reasons.  I've actually had a woman write a bad review about me because I refused to wear hair because it was so damaged. I've experienced everything at this point in this career and yeah, with the good comes the bad and you get a lot of great people that come to you and you get a lot of awful mad people who just hate their lives and that's the reality of working with the public. This is another personal one for me. You aren't always going to feel satisfied with your work. Sometimes there's time constraints that you have to work through. There are certain things that end up happening with hair color that are just unpredictable sometimes and unfortunately you have to sometimes just confront your client and be like, because of the time constraints, because of these certain factors, we're just not gonna get the end result that we thought we were today. You definitely have to do a good job at warning them before you start but overall sometimes shit stuff just happens when it comes to hair color and you're just not left with a great feeling and I know for me, I love to make people feel beautiful and when I can't, when I feel like I've failed at that, it's a really, really, really depressing feeling. This one sucks, okay? And this is just the truth.  You could be like, I'm a lawyer or like I'm a doctor or like I'm a photographer.   Some people think this career is only for high school dropouts and people who just didn't wanna go to college and people had nothing better to do with their lives. You know, there is that stigma and I think at one point that might have been the thing but at this point in this hair styling world, that is just not the case anymore. So many of us are extremely talented and take this job very seriously and make a whole lot of money doing it. So those are my cons but if you made it this far and you still feel like you wanna be a hairstylist, then I have some insider tips for you to share.  You're gonna wanna spend a lot of time looking into the salons you're applying to. If you have the opportunity to, right? I know some small towns only have one salon, two salons. I know that not every lives in a big city but if you have the opportunity to apply to multiple different salons to get a job and apprentice somebody, please do your research. I ended up at so many awful places with awful bosses because I didn't do my research and I just like took the job. I just thought like, oh, this is a beautiful salon. Like I want to work here but I didn't do my research. Like I didn't really understand what was going on. Really take your interviews seriously, ask them how their experience has been working there. You can see on their face if they actually like it or not.  So do your research. Next, don't go in debt over school. If you cannot afford a school that is extremely expensive, do not go to one. Most of the time you're not going to learn anything different. The education comes after school. Your apprenticeship is so important. So don't go into debt over school. I went to a school that was just local in my town. I did not pay a lot at all. I paid like a fifth of what people paid for other schools. Just do your research and get a great education and don't break the bank. Next, you're going to definitely want to invest in your learning after school. Please take advantage of the classes that salons provide. You know, usually they're free. Usually your boss wants you to attend classes if you're at a good salon.  That is not the right place for you. Continue to learn and continue to grow your knowledge about hair constantly or you will fall behind. There's always more to learn. There's so much to know about hair. Next, you're going to want to take breaks. If you were financially stable just enough to take a vacation during this time of like being an apprentice and building your career and also just during your career, please do. I've been burnt out so many times because of my lack of vacations. I don't do well at taking vacations. I tend to just work myself to death. But don't do that because you will start hating hair and you will start not wanting to touch hair anymore. So take time for yourself. This is a tough career, but it is very rewarding. And if you do not take breaks, you will not feel that rewarding part as much.  As funny as this sounds, this might be my most important tip of the night. I've had so many times where I put up with just jerks.  It is not worth being mentally tortured. I definitely let it go for too long and I ended up quitting all the toxic places and I was just so much happier after. So just be careful. I know sometimes it's not that easy to just quit and it's not that easy.  And that's just how life is.  It's not worth it. Next, if you aren't feeling fulfilled at the salon you're at, move on. If you feel like you have no chance of moving up from assistant to hairstylist on the floor, quit. If you feel like they aren't giving you education as an apprentice, quit. If you feel like there's nobody at that salon that you aspire to be like, quit. When you are applying, you should know how they plan to educate you during your apprenticeship. For me, I would get like a book where I'd have to check off like every single different kind of color application. I'd have to do so many different models a week. There was a huge education program at the salon that I was at during my apprenticeship and it was great. We learned a lot. They really cared about you learning and I recommend you guys find a salon like that as well. Next, do not feel like you can only work in a salon. I do recommend like doing an apprenticeship at a salon because like you're just never gonna see as much hair as you do than within a salon in one day. It's a really easy way to just get your hands on so many different heads in one day. Otherwise, it's not gonna be very easy for you to like branch out and become like an assistant for a celebrity hairstylist or become an assistant for a session stylist if you don't have that salon experience. Everybody's gonna want this salon experience so you pretty much need to start there. If anything, you need to get that experience and before you then go into different career paths within this industry but it is possible to not ever work in a salon again. I have hairstylist friends who only do house calls and session styling and celebrity styling. So if that is what you want, you do have to start in a salon typically but you can move past the salon at some point. My next tip is working in a big city is super fulfilling but don't do it unless you are willing to put your all into it. Unless you are willing to just be a hairstylist 24 seven, do whatever it takes because say for New York City or LA if you wanna make it big in these cities you have to grind. There are so many people who move here trying to be a well-known hairstylist and everybody will push you out of the way to get there. You need to eat, sleep and breathe hair. Just be aware of that if you decide to do this as your career and you wanna move to New York City or LA and pursue it and make a big name for yourself. Be ready to put in the effort and the work and have a good work ethic and drive and be really passionate because that'll get you through it. And lastly, my biggest tip of all, once you become a stylist on the floor, post your work on social media. You will never build your clientele these days without doing that. People wanna go to people who post their work on social media. Post videos, tutorials, post before and afters, post everything you possibly can.  If you wanna build that clientele, you gotta be posting. That's my biggest tip. So, I know that was a lot of information but I really hope that helps you decide if you want to be a hairstylist or not. I've been in this career for about 10 years and I love it. There's something about hair that just excites me to this day.  And that is all for today, guys. Thank you for hanging out with me. If you'd like to follow me anywhere else, you can do so with my links right here. These are all my ads. This is X-Mondo's and this is my Instagram handle. And you can also check out my hair care and my hair color line linked right down below or go to xmodohair.com to check out what we have to offer. And that is all for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to live your extra life. And I'll see you next time. Bye.