up to the taliban now. david s brilliant book the best and the brightest told the story how the best and brightest minds from the ivy league and american business and foreign policy establishment were infected with the delusion during the vietnam war they could manage everything. that delusion is alive tonight and many of the best and the brightest in the american press core who seem to believe that the american military knows how to do things that it has never successfully done in its history. if you are outraged with what you are seeing in afghanistan tonight, may it not be the end of the war that outrages you but war itself. if you oppose what you re seeing in afghanistan tonight, oppose war. war is hell. war is hell in the beginning. war is hell in the middle and war is hell in the end if you
in afghanistan rests on the notion that a tiny group of 2500 maybe of soldiers could perpetually keep the taliban at bay and make the taliban wait another 20 years. if we just left 2500 soldiers in afghanistan. yeah, and that s just not a tenable argument for a variety of reasons. military operational reasons, political reasons, 2500 to 3,000 troops are not going to hold off even in stiffening and afghan army a taliban force estimated 75 to 80,000 battle hardened troops. part of what we re now seeing has likely been going on is that the trajectory was moving strongly against the government of afghanistan in recent months and perhaps years but the taliban was not making full, making people fully aware of their degree of strength and capabilities because as you said, they were waiting for the
meant congress at a certain point was willing to cut funds. all of that is something we should look forward to. we need an afghanistan syndrome now, that s one of the things i m thinking about. i ve also been thinking about the some of the things that president biden said in his speech yesterday, which was in certain ways a very disturbing speech. he essential recalled the afghan military and the afghan people for that matter cowardly was part of it, but the important part was he committed himself, recommitted himself to the withdrawal that was so necessary even if it was quite late. so i think that was very important. the point that i remember thinking i wish he would acknowledge and he was clearly not prepared to was the understanding, he tried to say that we didn t know that the taliban could win. we didn t, you know, there s a lot of talk in the press, as well. we didn t have the intel to know that the taliban was strong
critical moment. if the united states had said we are going to take this little group of people and maybe a few hundred to a few thousand allied troops and contractors and leave them there, then that would have posed the taliban with the question of whether to escalate. and i think we would have gotten trapped into a whole series of the kinds of dilemmas president obama faced in 2008, 2009 when the situation was moving in the wrong direction and we had to either escalate and surge or accept that we were on a trajectory to losing. so no, i really don t believe that there is some sort of minimal permanent war making that you can do and also, for a lot of the reasons you were bringing out which is that war is the fundamental choice of state craft and this is something that u.s. military troops are taught that, you know, in good terms, war is a different kind of act of state from other sorts of acts of state and when you start treating it as this little paint
lose. the best and the brightest thought hell was manageable because of secretary of defense during the american buildup of forces in vietnam during the 1960s successfully run the ford motor company. the best and brightest believed he could successfully run and win the vietnam war. the american military has the best equipment in the world, the american military may well have the best and brightest troops in the world but america s successful opponents in vietnam and afghanistan have something that america has never had, patience. the north vietnamese always knew that all they had to do was out last the american military commitment to vietnam because american patience would run out. the taliban always knew because of that lesson in vietnam that all they had to do was patiently wait for the americans to leave and so the taliban won by waiting.