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Our 19th Annual Seminar will bring together an all-star cast of experts to help attendees form their own judgments about just what we’ve gotten ourselves into in this dangerous and volatile region, whether victory is possible, and at what cost.
Is this a war worth fighting? Does the Taliban or al Qaeda pose the bigger threat? How did we lose bin Laden at Tora Bora? Is Karzai the right man for the job? What lessons did we learn from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and how can the U.S. avoid the same fate? Does Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, pose an even graver threat to U.S. security than Afghanistan? How and why are Iran and India working at odds to U.S. interests and trying to tip the balance of power in this fragile region?
KEYNOTE
 Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst & One of Only a Few to Have Interviewed Osama bin Laden.
This seasoned print and television journalist is not only a regular commentator on Afghanistan & Pakistan on CNN, but also conducted the first Western TV interview with Osama bin Laden in which he declared war against the U.S. back in 1997.
He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. where he co-directs the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative and a research fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security. In 2008, he was an Adjunct Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and he has worked as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University for several years.
Bergen has reported on al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and counterterrorism and homeland security for a range of American newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, TIME and Vanity Fair. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
He is the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001), which has been translated into 18 languages, and The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (2006). Both books were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post, and documentaries based on the books were nominated for Emmys in 2002 and 2007. He received the Edward R. Murrow Award for his journalism in 1994.
Mr. Bergen holds a M.A. in modern history from New College, Oxford University.
 Andrew Exum
Military Advisor to General McCrystal (Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan) & Former Army Ranger Platoon Leader in Afghanistan.
Andrew Exum, a Fellow with the Center for a New American Security, has been referred to as “one of the sharpest Middle East analysts around.” Born into a family with a long history of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, Exum, a native of East Tennessee, served on active duty with the U.S. Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division from 2000 until 2004. He led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Most recently, Exum served as an advisor on the CENTCOM Assessment Team and as a civilian advisor to General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.
While still on active duty, but “laid up with a non-combat knee injury,” Exum wrote his first book, This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terror (2004), an “uncommonly powerful” and “extremely honest” account of “in an ultra-hardcore Army unit in Afghanistan.” Exum has also published opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian and many other newspapers.
Exum studied classics and English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
Andrew speaks Arabic and French and is the founder of the counter-insurgency blog Abu Muqawama (http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama) (Arabic for “father or expert of the Resistance”), a site followed by many notable students and practitioners of counterinsurgency in the military, academia and the media.
 Gretchen Peters
Journalist & Expert on Afghan/Pakistani Corruption.
This ABC News & Associated Press reporter has covered Pakistan & Afghanistan for more than a decade and been lauded for her recent book Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs, and Crime Are Reshaping the Afghan War (2009). A Harvard graduate, Peters was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, and won the SAJA Journalism Award for a Nightline segment on the former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
Her work has worked with leading media outlets including The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic, and The National Geographic Society, and she has been a regular commentator on NPR and CNN. She spent five years traveling the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan to research and write Seeds of Terror.
In fall 2009, she entered University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies to pursue a master’s degree in Homeland Securities and Criminal Justice. She lives in Denver with her husband, Pulitzer prize-winning photographer John Moore, and their two children.
 Kori Schake
West Point Military & Defense Expert.
Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy.
During the 2008 presidential election, she was senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, responsible for policy development and outreach in the areas of foreign and defense policy.
From 2007 to 2008 she was the deputy director for policy planning in the U.S. State Department. During President Bush's first term, she was the director for Defense Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council, where she was responsible for interagency coordination for long-term defense planning and coalition maintenance issues. Projects Schake contributed to include the 2002 National Security Strategy; conceptualizing and budgeting for continued transformation of defense practices; the most significant realignment of U.S. military forces and bases around the world since 1950; creating NATO's Allied Command Transformation and the NATO Response Force; and recruiting and retaining coalition partners for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. From 1990 to 1996, she worked in Pentagon staff jobs, first in the Joint Staff’s Strategy and Policy Directorate (J-5) and then in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Her publications include: Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance (2009), “Choices for the Quadrennial Defense Review,” Orbis(2009), “Dealing with a Nuclear Iran,” Hoover Policy Review (2007), “Jurassic Pork,” The New York Times(2006), and “How America Should Lead,” Hoover Policy Review (with Klaus Becher, 2002).
Professor Schake did her undergraduate work at Stanford University, where she studied under Condoleezza Rice. She holds a PhD in government and M.A. degrees in both government and public affairs from the University of Maryland.
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