pentagon and by our state department and by our coalition allies, too. i do have to let you go. i just want to ask again, big picture here, maybe put on your old state department hat here as well. as the world looks at this this morning, as the world looks at this morning where there are no u.s. troops in afghanistan for the first time in 20 years, what do you think the lesson is in terms of american power? i think i don t know that i m qualified to answer that question, john. i think there s going to be a lot of time for historians and acade academics to work their way through that. what i can tell you is we ve learned a lot over the last 20 years and we ve improved a lot of our counterterrorism capabilities, intelligence capabilities. there was progress made in afghanistan. it will be up to the taliban to see what they do with the progress. there s been a lot of progress made. in the course of 20 years of trying to prevent that place from ever being a safe haven again, we did l