Good afternoon. I'm speaking to you today from the same spot. President George W. Bush informed our nation that the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime. We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago. We delivered justice to Bin Laden a decade ago. The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden. That was 10 years ago. Think about that. We're going to stay until we have a deal or we have total victory. I've learned the hard way. There was never a good time to withdraw US forces. The Taliban is.

Continuing its offensive.

Across Afghanistan. Taliban fighters have broken through the front lines. The Afghan army has collapsed. The central government has fallen. Panic fills here in Kabul. President Biden said this is not going to be a Saigon, but guess what? There's been an explosion outside Kabul Airport.

One hundred.

And seventy Afghans killed. Thirteen American troops killed. I stand squarely behind my decision. It's time to end America's longest war. Is it a mistake? I think it is, yeah, because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad. I must say that it's a moral defeat for the United States. I think the President is right. Enough is enough. What was all of this for?

That has to be.

The question.

Veterans are asking. Two decades, more than $2 trillion, more than 6,000 American lives, more than 100,000 Afghan lives later, the bipartisan debacle that was the war in Afghanistan ended much like it began.

We made a lot of mistakes.

Now, the real story of what went wrong.

Before I go to my grave, I hope they have a.

Question answered. The mission. Do you think the surge worked? The mistakes.

I personally resented the war in Iraq.

The truth.

Corruption was one of the main reasons. And the lies.

They.

Just couldn't bring themselves to tell the truth. I always love physical fitness and being in the military. It was only probably after being in the military for a while that I realized that I turned to physical fitness and things like biking, that that was de facto mental health for me. To get on a bike and just turn yourself inside out and not think about anything else is a key component of staying sane and healthy. My name is Jason Dempsey. I was a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army. I was in Afghanistan for all 2009, again in 2012 and '13, and then for a brief assessment visit in 2014. What makes the problem of assessing our failure in Afghanistan difficult is everyone can think they're doing their best. We all left with great write ups, and we got a pat on the back. We convinced ourselves that we were doing well, but we never held anybody accountable for a while. Wait a minute. If everybody gets an A, but the overall effort is still an F, who do we hold accountable? It means it's super easy for political leaders to say, Well, the military has this.

Congress has shown, decade after decade, that they have no desire to own any oversight of the way we're fighting. But there comes a point when the line between self-delusion and a lie is irrelevant. If you're still pursuing something that doesn't make sense and you're inappropriately using the blood and treasure of the American people. We have to have these discussions, right? The lives of American soldiers, even if it's just a dozen, it's not a goddamn roundinger. Those are lives. And this war-So anyone who truly respects the military should absolutely be calling for congressional hearing. It means that you are absolutely questioning the generals so that we don't replicate what we did in this war for the next one. This is going in the right direction.

During the final weeks of America's withdrawal back in Washington, I met with almost all of the war's chief architects, the commanders of the war in Afghanistan, for some tough questions and painful reflections on what went wrong, on what they could have done differently, and the lessons we must all learn from this 20-year war. What does it feel like to you when you hear about the withdrawal of US service members and see what's going on?

I have a number of feelings and have course through those feelings over the last few weeks.

Retired four-star general, Dan McNeil, is a veteran of five foreign conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, where he led both US and coalition forces first in 2002.

First, I am doing soul searching to determine is it fair to say I did my share of the task, that I come up short in some way? Secondly, what's the duty owed to those who came home not carrying their shields but on their shields. And that's my problem. I predict I'll likely have a difficult time the next time I go to Section M in Arlington. And then there's a part of me that says we came up a little short. Us leaving overnight and leaving the Afghans. You have the keys on the desk. I didn't think any of us quite saw it unfold this way.

Lieutenant General David Barnow spent 19 months as a senior American commander in Afghanistan, where he established the first US operational headquarters in Kabul.

One of the things we do is what the military calls war termination. We're very good at lining the airplanes and the ships and seizing the capital. Then what? I think that's where in a lot of ways, Afghanistan has presented us with a really intractable problem. Did you.

Agree with President Biden's decision to withdraw US forces?

Yes, I did, Jake.

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry was at the Pentagon feet away from impact on 9/11. He went on to serve two tours as general in Afghanistan, and again, no longer in uniform, as the US ambassador. You were involved in training Afghan police, training Afghan troops. Were you surprised at how quickly the Afghan security forces folded?

I was. There will be people that are former military, active military people from the intelligence community, pundits who have never been to Afghanistan that will say they saw it all coming. And very few saw this coming so fast. It's almost like watching a speeding train go by and wondering if it's going to stop or not.

General David McCearnon commanded troops from 2008 to 2009, under presidents Bush and Obama. At that point, the deadliest period for American forces on record.

I'm emotionally invested in what happens in Afghanistan for a couple of reasons. First, I empathize with the people that live in that country, and they've been at war in some form for the last 45 years. There are good people. I want them to have a better future. I'm also invested in the thousands of Americans that have served over there and have done, I think, an extraordinary job. So I'm very, very worried about what I see. I think we didn't really know what winning was going to be from the start.

Eight years into the war, General Stanley McCrystal took the reins in Afghanistan. His success hunting terrorists in Iraq and transforming JASAC, the military's top secret Special Ops Force, led newly elected President Obama to believe that McCrystal would be the general to deliver his campaign promise of writing the ship in Afghanistan.

Sources say US President, Joe Biden will announce a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. President Biden says that the last US troops will leave Afghanistan by September 11th, on the 20th anniversary of the attack in the World Trade.

Center of the trigger. How did you first hear of President Biden's plans to withdraw all US service members?

I just saw it on the news.

You saw it on the news. What was your response?

I was not surprised. President Biden was in a very difficult position. Every leader is faced with three options. You either do more, you do less, or you do about the same. You muddle along. It was always safest, a little like Vietnam, to do the middle. President Biden's decision to pull everyone out, I didn't agree with it, but there was a courage to it because he knows that he is going to be held responsible by some people, particularly his political opponents. This is going to be a stain on this President, and I think he's going to have blood on his hands for what they did. This is a sight I honestly thought I would never see. Scores of Taliban fighters and just behind us, the US Embassy compound. I believe we are going to regret this decision to withdraw.

General David Petraeus, the general behind the surge in Iraq, commanded the war in Afghanistan during the height of its troop surge, peaking at roughly 100,000 American forces in 2011.

I remember the day that I heard of the decision to withdraw our forces, and in some ways, it was a little bit of disbelief. First of all, I didn't really think that it was not sustainable to have 3,500 American troops, given that we've not had a battlefield casualty in a year and the cost is quite sustainable. But then, of course, it is about the loss, the sacrifice, the race. All that we have done together with coalition partners and together with our Afghan partners, shoulder to shoulder, shana by shana, as it's said. Do you think.

We're going to have to go back?

I don't know if we'll have to go back or not. But there are plenty of people around Washington who experienced both the withdrawal from Iraq and the requirement to go back. So there's plenty of experience in this town when the time comes if we have to.

In 2011, General John Allen, the first Marine to command a theater of war, was tasked with drawing down US troop levels while transitioning Afghans into the lead for all combat operations. We've heard stories about the Taliban telling villagers to marry off their daughters, even very young girls.

We shouldn't be surprised at that. It's not in their DNA to change. And so the way that they inflicted what the Afghan women called the darkness upon them back before we were attacked in 2000. We won. We should not expect that it'll be any different. We've heard it.

Discussed by the Biden administration that there was basically a choice. It was either withdraw or increased troop levels in Afghanistan.

I think there was another alternative.

General Joseph Dunford, nicknamed Fighting Joe for his leadership in Iraq, took command in Afghanistan in 2013 and went on to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Obama and Trump.

With a capable counterterrorism force, around 4,000 US forces obviously accompanied by NATO allies as well, that we could for a period of time continue to address our counterterrorism interests.

The argument against that is that that's just managing a stalemate in perpetuity. What would you say to that criticism?

Well, it depends on how you view our presence in Afghanistan. I didn't see a point where we would have sustainable Afghan forces, a thriving democracy, and a thriving economy in Afghanistan. I viewed our presence in Afghanistan as a term insurance policy. When you stop paying a premium, you stop mitigating the risk of bad things happening.

Beyond the general's worries for the future came some sobering admissions as to how 20 years of war and the most powerful military in the world could have failed to prevent the Taliban from recapturing Kabul with hardly a shot fired.

I have a real sense of tragedy for the Afghan people. I think a Taliban regime will be hard on so many Afghans, so that hurts. The other emotion on our effort is that in my entire experience, I never saw people there trying to screw it up. I saw good people with good intentions working hard, but I don't think we did very well. We made a lot of mistakes that we made in prior efforts like Vietnam and others. I find that sad as well. We could have done better.

What mistakes did we make that we had previously made?

You could start with the idea that we didn't understand the problem. The complexities of the environment, I think, weren't appreciated. We went for what we thought would work quickly over what would have likely worked over the longer term.

Complexities that caused one top national security official to say privately, quote, We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. Did you ever think that almost 20 years later, we would still be there?

No, I don't think any of us did. That's another place where I think we could have done better. I don't think we sat around the table ever and talked about where is this going to be in 20 years? In fact, early in the time that I was there, we were instructed not to build anything that looked permanent. Keep everything plywood, and in some cases, canvas and all, so that we wouldn't give anyone the impression that we were coming there to stay.

But stay, we did for longer than any country.

Before us and.

For potentially worse results. And as US troops left, the people that they fought coming in, the Taliban, resumed control of the country. The question we sought to answer is why.

These are shots being fired in back there.

Up next. Tell me.

Exactly what you need. You're not going to get it because I got to take care of this right thing.

How the Good War became America's forever war.

Really? Sit. Shake. Good girl. The best way I can describe my feelings when I heard that we were leaving, I.

Felt.

This sense of relief, but a thin icing of relief on a huge cake of disappointment. I'm Brett Sheets. I'm originally from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and I served in Afghanistan in 2003 to 2004. When we went over to Afghanistan, which was end of the summer in 2003, we were already in Iraq. And there was a weird sense of whoa, I thought I was going into the main effort. And now it's pretty obvious I'm not. I think after a couple of months, I realized we don't seem to have a target list. Nation building was the vast majority of what we did in Afghanistan. I realized that unless something major changed, that this was not going to work out. The amount of troops, the amount of equipment, the amount of money that you would need to be able to stabilize an entire country like Afghanistan is so gargantuan that some people would say there's no way we could do it, period. But I could definitely tell you there's no way that we could do it while fighting a war in Iraq. I knew we were in deep trouble. Usa! Usa! Usa! Usa!

Usa! Usa! Atop the rubble in New York City, days after America was attacked, President George W. Bush vowed the United States would avenge the nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11.

What's your name? I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people... And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

With Ground Zero still smoldering, the commander-in-chief ordered the United States military to launch the opening salvo of America's war in Afghanistan.

Your objectives are clear. Your goal is just. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty. The Taliban were routed in a matter of really weeks, and so I thought that was an exceptionally well-run campaign. The US was able to play to its advantages and special forces and air power and then precision strikes. There was units up in the.

Hills, placing.

Looking for terrorists.

What did you think your mission was?

Mr. Rumsfeld made it very clear you are to pursue with the intent to kill or capture terrorists, and then you were to build an African National Army.

Do you ever look back and wonder after defeating the Taliban, whether it might have made more sense just to declare victory and leave?

No, you can't just go in and leave. Otherwise, all you're doing is setting the stage for either going back to as bad as it was before, or even worse.

Afghanistan was the war that there was worldwide support for. There was goodwill for it in a way. Nato invoked the article so that all members were behind to help the United States for the first and only time in history.

The council agreed that an armed attack against one or more of the Allies in Europe or in North America shall be considered an attack against them all.

What could have been done differently would the benefit of 20 years of experience? Sure.

I've thought about it a lot. Right after the 9/11 attacks, I would have made a decision inside the US government to do nothing substantive for a year. What I mean by nothing? No bombing, no strikes, et cetera. I would have gone around the world as the aggrieved party and built up a firm coalition for what ought we do about al-Qaeda. I would have done a mass effort to train Americans in Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Dari to get ourselves ready to do something that we knew would be very, very difficult. Hey, somebody answer him. I'm on company.

I can't think of any President that would just, Okay, let's take a year and wouldn't be impeached. The blood lust was so strong.

I freely admitted I know it would have been an almost impossible case to make, but I still think that's what we should have done. Could it have been done differently and more effectively? Sure. However, I think at that time that was the only decision President Bush could have made. The American people, I think, expected retaliation quickly. Let's go. We're almost there. I was at a dinner in Washington here with several senators in about 2007, and a senior intelligence analyst was at that dinner. And the intelligence analyst said to the senators, senators, we've won this war twice already. We won it the first time at the end of the campaign in the fall of 2001. We said we won it a second time in 2004, which happened to be during my era when the Afghans elected their first President. This will be a government based on the constitution of Afghanistan and in respect of the constitution of Afghanistan.

Outside of the military offensive, there were some early successes in Afghanistan trying to rebuild a country devastated by decades of war, including the first direct democratic election in the country's history.

I'm very, very happy because now I'm sure we will have a good government in the future. And now I can make my future. I can make my life by myself.

All those people holding up their finger, showing the die, showing that they had voted. How did that feel?

I mean, nobody really knew it was going to happen on that day. I mean, the Taliban had been threatening to blow up polling stations and kill people in voting lines. It was a relatively peaceful day around the country. Eight-and-a-half million people came out and voted. And so it felt good that we were able to put our weight behind something that was going to be so impactful.

But getting President Bush and Congress to provide the investments needed to build on these early successes in Afghanistan? Well, that would prove nearly impossible. As attention for the war in Afghanistan had already.

Shifted to a new war, an.

Elective war in Iraq. And this, according to many throughout the military, redirected critical focus and personnel and equipment away from Afghanistan, resources that could have saved lives and potentially changed the outcome of the war itself.

I accepted the fact that I was an economy of force, and I just looked for ways to use what I had to get to where I thought they wanted us to go.

The White House was so focused on Iraq that according to a memo from Secretary Rumsfeld obtained by the National Security Archive, President Bush did not even know who his own commander was. Rumsfeld wrote, quote, He said, 'Who is General McNeil? ' I said, 'he is the general in charge of Afghanistan. ' He said, Well, I don't need to meet with him. Who is General McNeil? He's this man, the man who was fighting to stabilize Afghanistan while his bosses were fixated on overthrowing a different regime in Iraq.

The essence of your question is, did Iraq consume resources that could have been applied to Afghanistan? The answer to that is just too obvious.

You're saying that you didn't have everything you needed?

That's correct. Don't forget us if Iraq happens. The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun.

The chain reaction repercussions for not having what was needed in Afghanistan proved at times deadly. Does this.

Look like fun? Go army.

Since many of the military's helicopters had been sent to the front lines in Iraq, a number of combat outposts in Eastern Afghanistan were placed in vulnerable positions at the bottom of mountains for easier resupply by road.

We're sitting in a bowl, so we're constantly under observation.

Positions made even more vulnerable by their low troop numbers, overmatched by the growing number of insurgents. Do you think that, in retrospect, it was a mistake to go to war in two different places at the same time?

Certainly, the war in Iraq took away focus from Afghanistan... I mean, it was still occurring by the time I went back as an ISAF commander.

General McNeil returned to Afghanistan in 2007 to serve as commander of the NATO-led ISAF Forces. But this time, he finally got that meeting with the President.

It's just he and I sitting in the Oval Office. And I had not been expecting this. I expected him to say, Here's what I would like you to be able to do. But he said, What do you think you can do? I said, Well, I'll get the Europeans outside of their wires and they'll get a little more involved in patrolling and being out amongst the African people. That'll be good enough. That's just about the way he responded.

What does that mean, good enough?

I never tried to define that. But after that, he said, And here's another thing. I want you to always tell me exactly what you need. Tell me exactly what you need. You're not going to get it because I got to take care of this Iraq thing. I personally resented the war in Iraq.

When Lieutenant General Barno arrived in 2003, he had about 57,000 fewer troops in Afghanistan than were in Iraq. 57,000. The following year, that gap doubled to about 115,000.

You had a V8 engine in Iraq tuned up and you had something much less in Afghanistan. So everything was harder. Here's an example. Summer 2009, we have a horrible problem with improvised explosive devices, IEDs, and mines. We have a total of three what are called route clearance companies to open up routes. In Iraq, at the same time, with far less incidents at that point with IEDs and mines, there are some 90 route clearance companies. And that didn't change until there was a large surge that was approved by the Obama administration.

Right, but that's eight years.

That's eight years. Now, what happens in that eight years? You have a Taliban, which has generally a safe haven in the frontier provinces and the federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan. They become resurgent. And eight years, we don't grow fast enough and well enough the capabilities of the government in Afghanistan and the army. And there you are. We're continuing a war. They actually came pretty close to targeting Cheney. A suicide bomber detonated himself.

The Taliban version was the true one, and the US military version was the lie.

That's right. What we were doing in Afghanistan fundamentally was we were building a military for a nation that did not exist. Let's say the Chinese military has been funded by a billionaire. He's trying to rebuild Louisville, Kentucky. He has all the best intentions in the world, saying, Hey, let me take over your police force. Let me help you reshape your city in a better image. Do you think the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, aren't going to be like, huh, one, maybe I don't believe them, and two, how can I rob these dipshits of all their money? You saw a ton of that with what we were doing. The reality was all these folks were working on patronage networks, whether tribal, ethnic, familial, that had kept them alive for decades. All of us walk in and start throwing billions of dollars of cash around. Of course, you're going to start seeing some predatory action. We were feeding into a cleptocracy instead of sitting back and thinking, Well, wait a minute. Who is this guy's real chain of command? Who does he really listen to? If you fight a war for 20 years, by definition, it's not going in the right direction.

In 2016, Craig Whitlock, a veteran staff reporter for The Washington Post, received a tip about a little-known government report into the war in Afghanistan, known as the Lessons Learned Project, led by Special Inspector General John Sopko.

It's fact versus fantasy. This is this problem that we identified early on, this odor of Mendacity. There was this exaggeration after exaggeration of what we accomplished.

After a court battle to obtain the hundreds of secret interviews conducted by Sopco's team, the Washington Post won, and Whitlock published his findings in a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers, later expanded into a book. We've got to understand... What these interviews and the lessons learned project revealed, he says, was a far different history of the war in Afghanistan than the one the American people had been told.

The non-watered down version was it was much worse than you thought in Afghanistan. Freedom is taking hold in Afghanistan. We are prevailing. We're winning, but the war has not yet been won.

Do you think that all the public officials that were saying positive things about the war were lying, were deluded, were hoping that it.

Would get better? Sometimes, sure, I think they were optimistic. But as the war went on and it became clear that Bush's strategy wasn't working, these public pronouncements almost became less excuseable. They just couldn't bring themselves to tell the truth. In September 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the commander at the time, General Carl Ikenberry, gave an interview to ABC News, and he's immediately asked, How is the war going? He starts out saying, We are winning, but I also say we have not yet won. Two weeks earlier, there was a classified diplomatic cable from the US Ambassador in Afghanistan back to Washington. That cable started off saying we're not winning, right? And gives a very pessimistic account saying the public needs to brace itself that things are going to get worse.

How do you feel looking back now at those remarks?

So much of it has to do with the context at the time. 2006, tactically, you look at the battlefield and you see some worrisome signs, but you're also seeing progress at that point with the Afghan government. You're seeing more international support coming our way. And so that kindof comment at the time that we are winning, yes, you can say at that moment. Much work still needs to be done here, but the enemy in Afghanistan, they will fail.

General, did you ever feel under either the Bush administration or the Obama administration, any pressure.

To.

Publicly convey a rosier state of the war than was the reality on the ground.

No, Jake, I did not. You may unwittingly tend to emphasize short-term progress that you're making without giving due diligence to the longer term problems that are on the horizon.

The reality was that five years into the war, the horizon was not looking good. The Taliban were gaining strength. And in early 2007, Nik-Gah-Nik-Gah-Nik-Gah-Nik-Gah-Nik-Gah-Nik-Gah-Nik. And then carried out a suicide bomb attack at Bagram Air Base, killing 23 people and narrowly missing its intended target.

So in the end of February 2007, Vice President, Dick Cheney, had made an unannounced trip to the region because things weren't going well in Afghanistan. Late in the morning, there's a Taliban suicide attacker that drives a Toyota Crawl up to the front gate of Bagram Air Base, sees a convoy of SUVs coming out of the gate and blows himself up and kills 23 people. The Taliban goes online and makes calls to journalists to claim that this was a suicide attack intended to target Dick Cheney. Immediately, the US military denies this. It was completely.

Coincidental that.

He was here at the same time this attack occurred. Word had leaked out about his travel plans and that they actually came pretty close to targeting Cheney when he was planning to leave. They missed him by about 30 minutes.

That's remarkable that the Taliban version was the true one and the US version was the lie.

That's right. What does this attack say about the strength of the Taliban in Afghanistan? I'm not sure it says anything. Because you've got an isolated attack, as we've often said.

The facts bore out just the opposite. In the years preceding the violence at Bagram, roadside bombs had more than doubled. Suicide attacks had risen at least fivefold. Meanwhile, some government officials up and down the ranks were painting a much sunnier picture.

I'm impressed by the progress that your country is making. We ought to applaud the President. We ought to applaud the Secretary of Defense. We have liberated Afghanistan.

Their descriptions of the war seem to ignore the rising Taliban insurgency and the longer-term problem standing in the way of genuine progress in Afghanistan, starting with its neighbor to the east.

You know this? No. In the US and Pakistan? No, but these are tough issues.

Was Pakistan our enemy?

No, that Pakistan was not our friend. The things they were doing were simultaneously supportive and duplicitous. It made defeating the Taliban when they were actually being supported to a great degree by the Pakistanis almost impossible. The fact that 10 years into the conflict that we were to finally find Bin Laden in Abu Dhabath, which is a big Pakistani military city, should tell us something about how good a friend Pakistan was. I think it really comes down to the United States never really fundamentally understood Afghanistan and what made it tick. And it didn't understand the motivations of the Taliban, where they were gaining their support from.

Support that was not only coming from Pakistan. Many Afghans who may have not liked the Taliban's harsh brand of justice saw them, nevertheless, as the lesser evil compared to the corrupt Afghan government and its burgeoning military.

There was a continuing problem with corruption in the army, and that was discouraging. I'll give you an example. One of the senior leaders, while I was there, made a deal with the Chinese to buy boots for the Afghan forces. That leader was, my understanding, given a kickback for buying the boots for the Chinese. He then gave them to his soldiers and those boots fell apart and they didn't take care of the soldiers the way those boots were designed to do. And I think that's really critical because in my view, the confidence of the Afghan people and their government and their institutions was either a source or a source of weakness. And we've seen it at various times, both.

You quite literally wrote the book on.

Counter-insurgency nation building.

Did that work in Afghanistan?

This is my.

Afghan.

Campaign service model. I was an eager young lieutenant, a newly-commissioned. I wanted to do my part, so I was ready. My name is Luis Vega. I'm an army captain, and I served in Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013. I remember a lot of briefings of like, we need to get to the Afghan people first before the Taliban, and we need to win their hearts and minds. And that's how we're going to win this war. I thought, okay, that's a unique strategy. But I was in. I'm holding the stalls right here. Zee. The problem is you show up with your team of 18 to 20-year-old gung-ho patriots that have testosterone coming out their ears and are ready to defend their country. And you're saying, We're going to drink some chai tea, and we're going to talk about how we're going to irrigate this farm, build this well, build this bridge. And all the while, you're going to be maybe attacked, ambushed. And so my soldiers started to grumble and tell me, Sir, I'm showing up in full battle, rattled with a combat load. I got my weapon at the lo and ready. I'm asking these people to trust me when I don't really trust them, because so many times the Taliban uses those guerrilla tactics of embedding and saying, I need you to either take out as many Americans as you can during this meeting and you're going to go meet Allah, or I'm going to murder your entire family.

And so then it builds distrust with us, between us and the people. And that was something that was very frustrating for me. And it started to wear on my unit and me. We're losing our nation's blood and treasure, and that was a hard pill to swallow. You train us to be fighters and then ask us to be nation builders. And we're forcing it down their throat. They had us doing a job that we were not trained to do. That's where I think it was doomed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, April 17th, 2002. Before a room filled with cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, President George W. Bush officially announced a new phase in the war in Afghanistan. Peace will be.

Achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop.

Its.

Own national army. Peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls, which works. It must.

Have been quite a challenge for Americans who knew nothing about Afghanistan, knew nothing about the culture to all of a sudden find themselves serving as not just soldiers, but diplomats, nation builders.

Et cetera. The army during this period of time didn't really have any counterinsurgency doctrine. I remember going down to one of my battalion commanders, a Lieutenant Colonel, right down the Pakistani border. I said, Mike, how did you get your unit to move from just counterterrorist strike operations in your first couple of months here now to doing counterinsurgency across this province, all across this part of Afghanistan. He looked at me and he laughed. He said, Easy, sir. Book's a million. Com. He was on the internet in the middle of nowhere, ordering books off of Amazon on counterinsurgency, getting them out to his company commanders and his first sergeants to be looking at and figuring out on the ground while they were actually doing these missions.

In 2006, four years after troops began trying to execute counterinsurgency strategy on their own, the US military would finally issue updated counterinsurgency guidance co-authored by General David Petraeus, a strategy that focused less on conventional warfare and more on securing the support of the population, ensuring aid and infrastructure, trying to win the trust of.

The.

People. You quite literally wrote the book on counter-insurgency, Coyne, what our viewers might understand better as the idea of nation building. Did that work in Afghanistan?

I think it actually did work during the period that we had the resources to do that. The problem is that in a situation like Afghanistan, you do have to be prevailing, if you will, in the security realm, because that is the foundation that allows you to do all of these other tasks. People say that counterinsurgency doesn't work or nation building doesn't work. Well, actually, I disagree. We did counterinsurgency in World War II. We just did it after the Armistice. That's exactly what the Marshall Plan was. It was building nations that would be durable and resilient against the threat of communism. I think in rural Afghanistan, which is most of Afghanistan, it has not worked. And generally speaking, dissatisfaction with the government was a greater factor than fear of the Taliban. They might dispense harsh justice, but they dispense justice.

The US counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan failed, according to General McCearnon. And we now know there were many who saw it failing as a strategy in real time. As one member of General Stanley McChristol's Afghanistan assessment team told government investigators, implementing an effective counter-insurgency campaign requires, quote, a level of local knowledge that I don't have about my own hometown, not about his own hometown, let alone about Afghan villages nestled in the Hindu Kush.

We would breach a compound and somebody would run out with an AK-47, and we would, as our rules of engagement allowed, we'd shoot him and kill him. Over time, what we learned is almost every compound in Afghanistan had an AK-47. If somebody came in your living room right now and you had an AK-47, you might go to defend your family. I think we killed a lot of people who were defending Hearth and Home. I think we created a tremendous amount of ill-willed and fear in the Afghan people. Most of the time, we got the individual that we were conducting the raid without firing a shot most of the time. But when you run that many raids, eventually, some of them are going to go bad. And there were some pretty horrible mistakes.

Mistakes, meaning innocent civilians, wounded, or killed. Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that more than 47,000 Afghan civilians lost their lives during America's war in Afghanistan. Forty-seven thousand. And no matter what stories we told ourselves about why those mistakes happened, it is that number, not the battles the US won or even schools that the US built, that number that may have ultimately mattered.

I will never forget this one incident the rest of my life. The United States had bombed a wedding party, and I said, Okay, I am going to personally go down and offer my condolences to the families, to the tribal elders of this tribe. I went down there and spent three or four hours talking, yelling, listening, drinking tea. At the end of it, we had killed 20 members of this wedding party. At the end of it, one of the elders who lost four or five family members shook my hand. I said, Do you think that would ever happen in the United States of America? I don't think so.

How did it come to happen that we bombed a wedding party? What happened?

Because we lost positive identification of the target in the weather and the altitude, and mistook them for a group of fighters. We really made an effort that year, and I think succeeding commanders carried it on is number one, any allegation we investigated. Secondly, we opened up our investigation results to the United Nations, to the Red Cross to anybody who wanted to come look at it.

Later reports found that 47 people were killed at that wedding party. And year after year, innocent civilians continue to lose their lives, year after year, increasing the challenge to winning Afghan hearts and minds.

Civilian casualties and the manner in which military operations are conducted has been a source of serious concern to the Afghan people for a long, long time. Coming up.

We.

Have a clear and focused goal.

Obama's surge.

I probably spent more time thinking about it than anyone else. When he won, it was transformative. We had a first black President, commander and chief, and I was like, well, if it's any time to serve the country, perhaps now would be a great time. My name is Richard Brookshire. I was a sergeant, and I served in Afghanistan in 2011. How do I feel about Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan? It's a difficult thing to tread because as a young black man, you want to admire this person. And I do in many ways. But when I looked at his presidency and the choices that he made — Thank you very much, everybody. I think Obama was a liar. I think he misled people to believe in a hope and change agenda, specifically in Afghanistan. In the mastermind of 9/11, the architect of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, is dead. They captured and killed Osama bin Laden. And I remember the day that it happened. I was in the chow hall, and nobody was reacting to the fact that Osama bin Laden had gotten killed because we knew that that's not why we were there anymore.

It's when I started to really fall out of love with Obama. The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat Al Qaeda. I see him delivering a speech as if he's accomplished some great feat, and perhaps in a propaganda sense, he had. But all I saw was a lot of money being poured into a country that did not want us there. There are literally schools in Brooklyn that don't have books in the library. There are breadlines in this country right now. There are people who are facing eviction, what could that money have done for the people who actually called this place home? So help me God.

Congratulations, Mr. President. In January 2009, America inaugurated a new commander-in-chief, whose top foreign policy agenda item was the seven-year-old war on Afghanistan. To finish it and get out.

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is a cause that could not be more just.

A just cause, complete with a new strategy and a new commander, General Stanley McCrystal.

He didn't talk in that mission statement much about if Afghanistan is unstable and ungovernable and all, but Al Qaeda is going, Is that good enough? Is that success? So it became an implied requirement that says you've got to create a sovereign Afghanistan which can defend its own borders, which keeps police inside itself, which can prevent the reemergence of an Al Qaeda safe haven inside.

Mccrystal's predecessor, General David McCearnon, had been sacked by President Obama's Defense Secretary, Robert Gates.

We have a new strategy, a new mission, and a new ambassador. I believe that new military leadership also is needed. Mccearnon, shortly before he had been fired, had been visited by Secretary Gates in Afghanistan, and McCearnon spread the word to other senior officers. He said, Well, it looks like we maybe have done too good of a job telling people how bad things are over here. 2009 is going to be a tough year. There are the baseline problems of poverty and literacy, and violence. That's not going to turn around quickly. So whether Gates intended it or not, there was a very clear message sent out to other senior officers, which was, We don't want you to be pessimistic in public. Secretary Gates tells me, Go over and do a strategic assessment and tell me what you need to be effective. I came away with a number of conclusions. One that the situation was much worse than it was perceived in DC. The staff came up with a conclusion we needed 40,000 more people. And the 40,000 were designed, in my view, to be a bridge to allow us to build up Afghan forces over the next couple of years.

Mccrystal's 66-page assessment, calling for a revised mission, refocused on building a stable Afghan military. A drastic jump in troops and a massive financial investment was promptly leaked. At the White House, some believed leaked intentionally to put pressure on the new President. In the.

Last 48 hours, Afghanistan has become an even bigger problem, at least publicly, for President Obama. I was asked to go to Copenhagen to meet President Obama, and we got on Air Force 1 and sat down and had an absolutely pleasant, straightforward meeting. I read about it later that it's one of these woodshed moments. It wasn't. That's not. Now, we didn't even have a conversation about the leak or anything that I remember. I knew that I hadn't leaked it, and I was absolutely confident my people hadn't leaked it.

Regardless of who leaked the assessment, there was a lot of skepticism about it in Washington. Perhaps the leading skeptic, then Vice President Joe Biden.

The surge, I was opposed to it. Now, what I did was I spent a lot of time with the President trying to convince him as well.

But while most all the focus on the Crystal's plan seemed to be on how high troop levels needed to go, the question that others were considering was if any number of troops at all could solve the problems in Afghanistan. Ambassator, Eike and Barry, concluded they would not. And in a classified diplomatic cable to then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, he explained why. Reason number one, quote, President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner.

Not only President Karzai, but many of the Afghan political elite, they just didn't see this war as we saw it. As we're talking to President Karzai, he said, Look, I'm with you as long as you are defining this problem as a war against terrorists. If this is a war that's going to be fought on my territory, where you're bombing my villages, when really the threat is across the border, I can't support you. Yet that conversation was lost.

What was your reaction when you read, Ambassador, I can't remember. -and it was in the Secretary's statement when you saw that it had leaked. And do you disagree with it?

I was not aware of it, was being written. It was sent to me from the chairman, and I didn't agree with it. I think he was a strategic partner we had. The next 18 months will likely be decisive and ultimately, enable success.

Despite the doubts around town, General McCrystal moved forward with his plan.

We can and will accomplish this mission.

And President Obama signed off on a 30,000-troop surge. 10,000 fewer than requested, and it came with an expiration date.

After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. I advised against the withdrawal date, but then President Obama asked me if I could support it. And the answer is, Of course, because he's the commander-in-chief and he's got perspectives I don't have. He believed that we could not have an open-ended commitment.

And at the end of the day, do you think the surge worked?

We did achieve some military results on the ground, but they were not to be lasting. In my view, we did see improvement, but that improvement is always limited unless you can follow it with governance and economic development. Otherwise it's not sustainable.

And how did those other two parts go? Predictably harder.

Soon.

After the drawdown of troops began in 2011, Afghan security forces found themselves unable to maintain much of the recent territory gains. And the influx of cash that had accompanied the increase in forces appeared to be backfiring.

Us officials would say, We spent too much too fast. We were the biggest drivers of corruption because we were throwing so much money at this country, people were going to put it in their pockets. And that severely undermined everything we were trying to accomplish. I didn't start thinking it was going to be easy, but just how hard it was in Afghanistan really brings to mind, Okay, is this strategy viable?

But by the time General McCrystal had begun questioning the viability of his own strategy, he was no longer in charge.

Today, I accepted General Stanley McCrystal's resignation. I did so with considerable regret, but also with certainty that it is the right thing for our mission.

On the job for only a year, President Obama fired McCrystal after a controversial magazine profile published, unflattering and downright dismissive comments about Obama administration officials, comments made by McCrystal and his close aides. Ending a long and distinguished military career.

I've probably spent more time thinking about it than anyone else. At the end of the day, President Obama was put in an untenable position, and I put him there. From my command, a story came out that perceived by many people would be almost a direct affron to him, as though you've got a military leader who doesn't respect the commander-of-chief.

Was it tough to end your, I think, 34-year military career in that way?

Of course. It's still tough.

After immediately replacing General McCrystal with Iraq's surge mastermind, General David Petraeus, President Obama would appoint four more generals to command the war during his administration.

Our coalition is committed to this plan to bring our war in Afghanistan to a responsible end.

And all four generals would struggle to end the war, as Obama had claimed that he would.

What was quite interesting-Good evening. -is in May of 2011, Bin Laden is killed. Justice has been done. That would have been President Obama's possibility of saying that mission is completed, and then to begin the withdrawal.

It sounds to me like you're saying, with the benefit of hindsight, that you think we should have withdrawn after Bin Laden was killed?

Yes. So Jake, I think that's an important question. Had we left at any point over the past 20 years, there would have been residual risk. The assessment from the intelligence community was al-Qaeda would reconstitute and once again pose a threat.

December 28th, 2014. It appeared that the President was ready to assume that risk, releasing a statement announcing the conclusion of the war in Afghanistan. In reality, that conclusion would not come for another seven years.

When he claimed that there was an end to the combat mission, that just patently wasn't true. So you had scores of Americans losing their lives in combat. It's the lobster pot analogy. Easy to get into, hard to get out of.

When we come back. Was the war in Afghanistan ultimately a failure?

Dusty and I have politically different views, and so we look at the war through different lenses. Mine's a little bluer than his, I would say.

Like most married couples, Katie and do not agree on everything. For these two married Marines, those disagreements include the decision to end the war in Afghanistan.

I understand why President Biden made the announcement and as an officer support my commander-in-chief's decisions, but I did have a bit of concern. It's a damn disappointment. It's a terrible situation, and we're literally just like peace out in the middle of the night. I left the keys in the car. You got it. It's going to have to take a guess by. What is going on?

Dusty was a major in the Marines and deployed twice to Afghanistan. First in 2009, then again in 2011. Katie Cook, who would become the first female Blue Angels pilot, served in Afghanistan in 2013.

It sucks as a service member looking back at Afghanistan and knowing that you gave them that glimmer of hope and now that it's gone. Right. That feels terrible. I think there's going to be a lot of service members who are thinking like, was it worth it? I literally dedicated my.

Life to this cause.

And it's worse off.

Than it was.

It's like a multifaceted question. Was it worth it? Was it worth it for the loss of life on any side? No. Was it worth it for what we've gained, I guess, as an identity? Together, maybe so. I have no regrets. The people that we helped there, they have a face. I've touched them, I've shaken their hands. I've been able to greatly affect their.

Lives in a.

Positive manner, and.

So have the.

Marines around me. Everything that we did there, all the money we spent, all the marriages that were sacrificed.

Or.

The events that people missed out on, all of these things that are intangible losses in addition to life and limb.

That a.

Lot of people sacrificed, was it worth it? And I don't think the answer is yes. For better.

Or for worse, President Biden will be remembered as the commander-in-chief who ended the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Yet it was President Trump who set the wheels for withdrawal in motion.

My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts. I didn't see a clarity on President Trump's strategy for Afghanistan. I think that it was a four-year period in which we didn't have clarity to ourselves or to the people that we were fighting against or fighting with.

In fact, in 2020, the Trump administration would strike a historic deal with the Taliban that excluded those the US had been fighting alongside for 20 years, the Afghan government. And while many have argued that the US should have negotiated with the Taliban years earlier, Trump's deal may very well have set the stage for both America's ultimate withdrawal and the Taliban takeover.

I inherited a deal to President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

Do you think that the Trump administration's agreement for bringing the case to Afghanistan was inevitably going to be a roadmap to surrender to the Taliban?

It definitely facilitated that. They gave them the experience of presenting themselves as a state or a quasi-state.

Roya Rahmani was appointed Afghanistan's first female ambassador to the US and served during the negotiations.

When the negotiation with the Taliban started, it should have been not a two-segment negotiation, one with the US and Taliban and another one US talking with the Afghan government. It should have been more of trying to bring everyone together.

So that was a.

Mistake, you think? That was a mistake. It gave them the platform, it empowered them, and it gave them the time.

Time and manpower. The agreement brokered by the Trump administration forced the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, thousands of whom would later help topple the Afghan government, leaving the hard fought progress that US interventions successfully achieved in parts of Afghan society hanging in the balance.

There is a lot of good that was done. The Afghan people, especially in the cities, cherish what it is that they have come to enjoy.

Women's life expectancy increased by nearly nine years. Literacy jumped 28 % for young men and 19 % for young women, and child mortality dropped in half. Yet the full cost of those gains have proven nearly immeasurable.

The cost was considerable in blood and treasure, lives lost, families shattered. But this is where the 9/11 attacks are planned. That's where the training of the attackers was conducted initially. We got rid of them. We got rid of their leaders. And I felt that this was a mission of consequence for our country and a privilege to perform.

In your view, was the war in Afghanistan worth the cost?

I'm probably too emotionally biased to give a really good answer to that. It would be hard if I was a disinterested party to argue that it was, but in my heart, I have a different conclusion, I think it was. If we step back now and say, Just because we didn't get the exact outcome we wanted, we shouldn't have tried, I think would be a mistake. What was our mission? To prevent Al Qaeda from attacking the United States, prevent Afghanistan from being a sanctuary, and also mitigate the risk of mass migration. And I believe over the course of 20 years, that was achieved. We shouldn't confuse the outcome with saying that we did that at an appropriate level of investment. Would I like to have seen us accomplish that mission with fewer young men and women having lost their lives, family suffering, casualties? There's no question about it. But at the end of the day, I'm not willing to say it wasn't worth it. I think we had to retaliate in Afghanistan for the attack on the United States of America. Now, for the 20 years after that, have we done it the smartest, best way?

Probably not. Probably lots of things we could have done differently. My first impulse is to say, Yes, it was worth it. But I no longer am certain of that. But before I go to my grave, I hope they have that question answered. If anyone had said on the 12th of September 2001, when we knew that the attack had come from Afghanistan. We're going to be there now from this point on for about 20 years, and it's going to end with us leaving and Talibaning gone back in power. Could you imagine the reaction of the American people?

Was the war in Afghanistan ultimately a failure?

The 20-year war in Afghanistan was, for the results that we have achieved were not worth the cost.

When we come back, the forever impacts of America's forever war.

I will never forgive the leaders that caused people that I love to die.

Did those generals lie to us? For most Americans, the end of the war in Afghanistan has had almost no impact on their lives. But for the small percentage of those who voluntarily served and sacrificed, and those who love them, the impact of what they have experienced will linger long after the withdrawal.

In terms of the emotions that the end of all this brings, I realize it's going to take a long time to process. Because I've been thinking and writing and mulling over Afghanistan for so long, and I'm coming to the realization that I'm still not done. It's going to be another six, nine, who knows how many years. I'm a little choked up, only because two of the guys I started my army career with and served with in my young lieutenant days both committed suicide within the last month. You can't say that it was about Afghanistan. Every suicide is a unique event. You can never say, Well, this is why. But we've lost 30,000 of post-hospital veterans to suicide. It's hard. When you get back, you lose friends to suicide. Green is for a new era and prosperity. You either survive all that or they go back again as their sixth deployment and they don't make it home from that one. Coming home was a difficult process. You just had this experience of being ripped away from everything you knew and loved, thrown in the middle of a war zone, in the middle of a country, so different from your own.

And I just felt very isolated in trying to even articulate the difficulties of the transition. I'm just getting my footing. It's been 10 years since I got back. A lot of folks deal with post-traumatic stress because when they come back, they're still constantly on heightened alert. I found myself to be extremely short tempered. My fuse was lightning fast. And I realized really quickly something was wrong. I went to therapy outside of the military.

It.

Still angeres me to this day that Americans died for a war that seemingly had no aim. I will never forgive the leaders that caused people that I love to die. I love this country, but this was a massive mistake. One of the fundamental questions we need to be able to answer as a country is defending your nation when called a fundamental responsibility of citizenship. Go, go, go. Hurry up. If it is, it shouldn't just be volunteers that do that. If you don't think that being a US citizen entails answering the call to arms if the nation is attacked, then we've lost something that we've always had as part of our history. I think when we go to war, every zip code should be at risk. Every family should be at risk because then the threshold to make decisions to go to war will be a little bit more responsibly arrived at, I think.

How do you do that? You think we should have a draft?

I personally think that we should. Now, I know many of my peers would disagree, but I think it's very dangerous to have a case where you have that part of service being done by a very small percentage of people. One of.

The defining things about the last 20 years is the one % sacrificing, serving, going through everything, and the 99 % not. And whether that chasm is sustainable?

I feared it would not be. There was some very heavy lifting going on from 2005 into about 2011. It's been a very heavy lifting.

Because ultimately, the one % would say, We're not doing this anymore. Yep.

It's almost like looking at America. This is still an experiment in democracy. Nothing is guaranteed. Look at January the sixth. But so far, it's held up beyond my expectations.

We have some questions here, if you'll indulge me, from a number of Afghan vets. We've read these questions to all of the commanders. The first one is from Jason Dempsey, a retired army. If you could have done something differently as a commander, what would it be?

I probably would have been far more fervent in my plays, my first time over there that more had to be done outside of the military. At that time, the State Department was taking only volunteers to go to Afghanistan. They weren't direct in anybody. I think we had to look at all the dimensions of US power we were applying there and put it in an expeditionary footing just like the military was.

Brett Sheets, former army. If you could have run the war independently, what would you have done differently?

Well, I would have tried to get the inputs right a heck of a lot sooner than 10 years after we invaded the country. The right level of forces, the right organizational architecture, the right concepts, the right leaders. We squandered opportunities on which we might have capitalized early on.

John Mike, Fairfax, retired Army Special Forces. How do you explain why we've been in Afghanistan for 20 years?

I think because we fought 21-year wars. I think we had people with a longer time horizon that were seeing this as a marathon as opposed to a seven-month sprint on a deployment or a twelve-month sprint on a deployment to include the commanders who we've rotated through scandalously often, I think we would have a potentially different outcome because people could have had some accountability for the decisions they made.

Katie Cook, Marine, do you think the US is now perceived with greater strength or weakness after our involvement in Afghanistan for the past 20 years?

Sadly, I think we are viewed with greater weakness. From 9/11 on, I think we showed the world how long the dog's leash is. And people learned that there was limits to our ability to do things. And we learned it ourselves. Up next, the collapse.

They.

Were ordered to surrender. They were ordered not to fight.

Who ordered them to do that?

I wake up every morning hoping that I'm waking up from a nightmare. But I am waking up into it. Fear is spreading in Kabul as the Taliban installed themselves in the presidential palace. Thousands desperate.

To.

Flee for their lives. Kabul's airport is in a state of chaos. I don't have words to describe the emotions. From guilt to anger to betrayal. Who betrayed you? Everyone. The entire international community, the Afghan leadership. There's been an explosion outside the airport. One hundred and seventy-Hundred and seventy-Hundred.

One hundred.

And seventy-Hundred. One hundred and seventy, Afghans killed. Thirteen American troops killed in this horrific attack. There was great surprise in the intelligence community about how fast this collapse occurred. We should have maintained a military presence in Kabul until the so-called mission was complete. I think that the Biden administration's strategic choice about ending the US mission in Afghanistan was the correct one but poorly executed. We were all watching the speed at which the districts were taken over. When President Ghani came here, this was already the reality. That was June. So what is surprising? The fact that the military dissolved? The military was not strong. I'm proud to report to the American people that the Afghan Army is in the fight.

The US has been talking about how great the development of the Afghan military forces has been.

Afghan forces now have full responsibility for security across their country.

For 20 years, we've been hearing about this.

Afghans will secure and build their own nation and define their own future. The military became more organized, better trained, and the best trained team in the past 20 years, they have ever been. What they lacked was leadership. They were ordered to surrender. They were ordered not to fight.

Who ordered them to do that?

The Palas.

President Ghani told the Afghan security forces to surrender to the Taliban?

I cannot say that he himself directly told them, but my understanding is that Kabul decided to tell these Afghan security forces not to fight.

When you heard that President Ghani had fled the country, did that surprise you?

It was shocking. It was disappointing. The American military, we could provide advice, we could provide training support, but we couldn't give that Afghan army a soul. Only the political leadership and people of Afghanistan could do that. And that was a failure. The Afghan government remained extraordinarily corrupt. Corruption was one of the very main reasons of how things turned out. The Afghan security force development has been advanced considerably. Afghan forces are better than we thought they were, and they're better than they thought they were. The Afghan commanders who make up that core have never lost a battle against the Taliban, and they never will.

General, there are a lot of Americans.

Who.

Look at the collapse of the Afghan military and think, Did those generals lie to us?

No, they didn't. You don't stand up in front of 40 infantry men as a young 21-year-old Lieutenant and say, Troops, I think we've got about a 30 % chance of taking that hill. Follow me. No, you're taught can do. Glass half-full.

Do you think that one of the problems may also be that the incentive structure within the US military is to be able to say that something has been achieved, as opposed to acknowledging that something cannot.

It's a very valid point. And yes, it's more unwitting. It's just the climate. We can get things done. And that's something that the military indeed needs to take a look at in our history of Afghanistan. It's early to do a post-mortem, and I'm humble about my ability to articulate all the things we should have learned along the way at this point. But clearly, the integration of our diplomatic and military efforts, clarity on our objectives, consistency in the application of pursuing those objectives, I mean, I think there's going to be lessons learned in all of those areas. These are not battles or fights of a decade, much less a few years. This is a generational struggle with Islamist extremism. I mean, you have to keep at it. I think we still have ways to go as America to see things through the eyes of the people who live in that country. What is it they want or don't want instead of trying to instill or impose a Westernized approach to an intervention? Our ability to establish viable governance was just extraordinarily hard. If I have anything where I am most self-critical on, it is the understanding or the appreciation for how difficult that would be.

I think there were three inflection points. Point number one was right after 9/11, we missed Bin Laden. Had we put a lot of ground troops in there, we probably would have gotten Bin Laden. Point number two was when President Bush made the fateful decision to invade Iraq. Iraq was consuming all the oxygen in the room. Much of our strategic attention was diverted into Iraq to the detriment of the war. The third inflection point was when we finally did kill Osama bin Laden, that would have been President Obama's point to quickly try to draw down the military mission. There really was no clear political end state that leads to deep questions. Was it worth it? What was it all about? What do.

You say to gold star parents or veterans who wonder if it.

Was worth it? I would just simply say to the families for what I have failed to do, I'm sorry. I did the best I could.

Why do you blame yourself?

If this is a failure, then I carry my share of it.

What's your message to the US veteran sitting at home? He lost a leg in Afghanistan, watching these events and really having a tough time with it. What do you say to that?

I would say you and your comrade, you helped us walk. So many people started thinking differently, doing things differently, expanding their worldview, treating their women better. It's not reversible. That progress would stay forever. And your sacrifices made that happen.

For years now, I've worn this bracelet on which I etched the names of the eight soldiers who were killed in 2009 in the battle at combat outpost Keating in Afghanistan.

Thompson, Kirk.

Scousa, Griffin, Hartt, Gallegos, Martin, and Mace. Every one of them was killed doing something to help his brothers there during that battle, whether supplying ammunition or returning fire. On the occasions when I'm asked, Did they die for nothing? I say no. Because beyond the achievements for the Afghan people, the sacrifices our service members make are not contingent on victory. Their selflessness exists unto itself. No service member enlists thinking the Pentagon or presidents never make mistakes. That's what makes their willingness to sacrifice all the more remarkable.

Now.

Whether our leaders and the decisions that they made are worthy of these men and women? Well, that's another matter.

That is.

For you to decide.