Do you think there's a lack of proper critical insight with regard to the military strategy in Afghanistan and U.S. conduct?

I think people who look into what's going on over there know what's going on. I think they understand how we fought this war and how many troops were engaged and what tactics we used and what weapons we used. I don't think there's any confusion about that. I think we've used a lot of Special Forces groups and a lot of normally covert operators.

I think the story of the CIA hasn't even been told yet. So we've done a lot of things over there that people will never know about. And the intelligence community may or may not release that information. But the important thing is that the more we know about a military campaign, the more comfortable we are about engaging in a war. It used to be that if one soldier got killed and you'd see it on TV, we'd pull our troops out. But I think the military's a little overly sensitive to that. And I think people are expecting casualties and they have no problem with frank and fair disclosure of enemy activities and friendly activities.

How would you characterize the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan?

It was quite robust. The operation actually was initially run by the CIA. The idea was to engage local warlords or commanders and then outfit them with Special Forces teams and a couple of Air Force guys to call in airstrikes. Because they're Green Berets, which are directly linked to the CIA, their job is to feed intelligence back to the Pentagon or CENTCOM and allow real-time decisions to be made by the commanders. And the interesting thing is that that actually worked. That was a very successful campaign. There was very little collateral damage. We sort of formed a general idea of how to fight wars in these regions, but it may not be appropriate for Iraq or the southern Philippines or other regions that we go to.

From your sense on the ground, from talking to contacts, and from a U.S. intelligence standpoint, is it really a question of finding a needle in a haystack when it comes to al-Qaida leadership?

They're irrelevant. The war is going through many phases. Originally, we all wanted to get to Osama bin Laden and then we were sort of embarrassed by the fact that not only could we not get him, but we had no idea where he is or what he does or what his organization is composed of. And then we created a bogeyman called al-Qaida, which is sort of similar to the term "Mafia," sort of an all-encompassing term. And that's not really appropriate because most of the people over there are just foreign volunteers who are fighting either in Kashmir or inside Afghanistan. And we've blown this international conspiracy way out of shape; it's really not as big and as mean and as well-financed or as intelligent as our government makes it out to be.

Do you think the government knows what it's doing in that regard? Is it blowing them out of proportion on purpose or are they really just getting up to speed?

They're learning quickly. On Sept. 11, they knew nothing about it. And the reason I know this is because some of my friends work within those organizations and they just didn't want to believe that it existed because it was just such a small Mickey Mouse outfit. And after Sept. 11, they realized that even minor groups could have major implications. But instead of just always knowing that it was a small Mickey Mouse outfit, now they made it into this huge global conspiracy, which it isn't. Which has created all kinds of problems in the Muslim world because we're sort of demonizing the wrong people. The bad guys are living in America and Saudi Arabia and Germany and the U.K.; they're not sitting in caves in Afghanistan.

So what's the way out for significant American troop presence in Afghanistan?

There is no exit strategy. It's absolutely identical to what the Russians did. People respond to what they think is an opportunity. In this case it was an opportunity to overthrow the Taliban leadership, and once you get in there and you destabilize a country, you have a choice: You leave immediately, which would bring down a lot of grief on your heads from the world community, or you stay and try and figure things out. The staying and figuring things out part is a lot more difficult than going in and destabilizing a fairly backward regime. The only thing that concerns me is when George Bush gets full of himself and starts expanding our war to include places as bizarre as North Korea and Iran and Iraq, but doesn't include a lot of the known harbors and supporters of terrorist groups. That makes me nervous.

What are you hearing about us going into Iraq?

They tried to, and then they got told: "You've got to be kidding."

You think Cheney got rebuffed on his trip to the Mideast?

God, yeah. The thing that's important to understand is that the American government knows about as much as the American people know about how to prosecute this war, which is nothing. We're learning day by day what works and what doesn't. The thing that's happening is that there are huge military expenditures occurring, which tends to be an animal that needs to feed itself, and that's the part that's bothersome. Like in Vietnam. We started by sending over advisors and helping a regime support itself, and we ended up sending half a million troops over there and really accomplishing nothing.

What happens is that the intent of the American people is correct, because we did read about and hear about things and we saw things on TV that shocked us so we responded. But we get bored; we have a, like, 120-day window in which we give a shit. After that period, we get bored and we watch something else. I think I saw a shark-attack story on TV yesterday.

We don't realize that we went from spending zero to millions of dollars a month in a foreign country to prosecute a war and we're really not fighting a war, we're just sending more and more troops over and flying B-52s around in circles and so forth.

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