If, as you argue in Overthrow, arrogant, reckless meddling in the affairs of other countries has been going on for a century before George W. Bush entered the scene, that suggests it will continue to go on after he leaves. Do any among the current crop of presidential contenders give you a reason to believe otherwise?

Large countries are always going to be looking to expand their influence and power over small countries. If you go to a schoolyard, you are going to see a big kid trying to take something away from the small kid. It’s the same dynamic that goes on in international relations. I don’t think you are ever going to see a time when rich and powerful nations never try to take advantage of poor and weak nations. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There may be times when intervention can actually be positive.

I only hope that when our country intervenes abroad, we do it first of all in cooperation with other countries, and secondly, in a carefully thought-out way. The worst thing about so many of these interventions is that they not only bring tragedy to the target country, but they fundamentally undermine the security of our own country. We achieve short-term goals, but in the long run, we often find ourselves worse off than when we started. What I would look for in a president is somebody who would think carefully over the long-term implications of intervention. Any president who does that will intervene only very rarely if ever.

Presidential campaigns are by nature so antiseptic and so scripted, it’s sometimes hard to figure out who candidates are and what they really think. I’m not sure many of our presidential candidates have even thought through themselves what they think about these issue. The problem is that there seems to be so much momentum within the political class for instinctive, angry reactions to other countries that the spectrum for debate is very narrow. Somehow we have gotten ourselves to a place that suggesting that the United States should concentrate on its own development, and should think carefully about long-term implications of intervening in other countries, is seen as a sign of weakness. Actually, the way to keep our country strong is to avoid involvement in foreign situations that weaken us.

I think most Americans by now have some sense that 9/11 had some of its roots in United States’ support of Afghan militias fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. However, you emphasize an extraordinary aspect of this support in “Overthrow” – that the U.S. had absolutely no say in who got these millions. “That was left to Pakistan, which had objectives far different from Washington. The Pakistanis chose to support seven Afghan factions, all of them in varying degrees fundamentalist and anti-Western, and also worked systematically to undermine and destroy others that were leftist, secular or nationalist.” Why doesn’t America blame Pakistan more for 9/11? And why do we continue this hands-off approach to that country?

We subcontracted the war against Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan to groups that had interest very, very different from our own. It was another example of trying to achieve a short-term goal and not stopping to think about the forces that we were unleashing and the effect that those forces might have.

As far as Pakistan goes, we have pursued a very narrow policy there of just supporting small groups and a few individuals. It’s another country where people who fundamentally support basic American principals see themselves cut off from the United States, and American leaders wind up supporting people who essentially detest everything the United States stands for. We feel that these alliances are productive because they produce the short-term goals we want. Specifically, in terms of that region, we wanted to push the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. That seemed like a great victory. When we look back now, and see all the forces that were unleashed by that project, it doesn’t look like such a big victory after all.

Were Benazir Bhutto’s fears of the Pakistani ISI’s ongoing ties to the Taliban justified, and do you believe they had a role in her assassination?

Benazir Bhutto was one of those people involved in promoting fundamentalism inside the Pakistani military and security forces. She used those forces for her own political ends. She helped unleash forces that ultimately may have contributed to her own death. During her time in power, she was never a true supporter of democracy in Pakistan, nor was she a supporter of groups that wanted moderation and religious freedom in Pakistan. It may be that at the time of her assassination, she had matured to a point that she actually was going to begin supporting the concept of democracy. It was too late for her though. She’s another example of political leaders in many countries who try to manipulate forces by allowing extremists to increase their power, later to find that those extremists turn against them.

In Robert Kaplan’s essay “Cultivating Loneliness,” he singles out your work as a correspondent as the type of locally-engaged, anthropologically rich, boots-on-the-ground reporting that is being lost because of the Internet’s ability to give a sense of what’s going on somewhere without having to actually be there. Do you agree that your kind of reporting is on the decline, and if so why?

One thing I always look for when I’m reading articles and commentaries on foreign affairs is a dateline. I want to know that the person has actually been to these places. Too much of the journalism that we read in the United States about foreign countries is written by gasbags who just look out their windows in Washington, and think that when they’ve called their sources in the Defense Department, and their sources in the State Department, they’ve gotten a complete view of what’s happening in a particular country.

One of the lessons I have learned most often, it’s a lesson I have learned a thousand times, and I never cease to be amazed by it, is: it’s remarkable how much you can learn about a country when you actually go there. No amount of reading or thinking or interviewing here in the United states can give you as much information and feeling and knowledge about a country as a single day being there. You cannot be a foreign correspondent while sitting at home staring out your window. Everyone seems to think they have the knowledge necessary to comment on world affairs, but fewer and fewer people actually want to go out into the world. Part of this goes back to a fundamental aspect of the American psyche which I think separates us from people in most other countries. In every other country in the world – including big countries like Russia and Germany and Brazil – people think of themselves as living in one country that is part of a world made up of lots of other countries. They think, we live here, there’s another country over there, there’s another country on the other side – we are one country among many countries. Americans don’t think like that. Most Americans, either explicitly or implicitly, feel that the world is divided between two groups of countries. One group is the United States. The other group is all the other countries in the world, which are strange, vaguely threatening and made up of people who are unhappy. And they are unhappy for a very good reason, which is that they don’t have the one thing that is really worth having in the world, which is a chance to live in the United States. We have a very self-centered view of the world, and rarely can imagine how the world looks to others. It takes me back to a wonderful line from the old Scottish poet Robert Burns, writing in old English. He wrote: Oh, that some god, the gift he gee us, to see ourselves as others see us.”

I hear you are working on a project about Rwanda. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is and when we’ll see it?

People associate Rwanda with genocide. Actually, at this moment, Rwanda is perhaps the most exciting place in Africa or the developing world. Development specialists are focused on what’s happening there. People involved in reconciliation are amazed at the progress Rwanda has made. Rwanda is emerging as a true star of Africa, and the reason for this is the country’s leadership. The president of Rwanda [Paul Kagame-Ed.], who was also the commander of the revolutionary army that overthrew the genocide regime, is one of the most extraordinary figures to have emerged on the world stage over the past few decades. He is of course completely unknown in the United States, but more and more people in Africa and beyond are beginning to focus on him as a really exciting figure. His whole life, his revolutionary trajectory, the way he organized the war that he fought in Rwanda, and most important, how he has worked to rebuild that country and turn a place that was nothing but a cesspool of death and hatred, into a place that’s full of optimism and hope, is really one of the most fascinating untold stories in the world today. My next book tells that story.