that fraud idea of american greatness also led to magical thinking in the current administration about how this would end. here was president biden again, just last monday. the taliban is not the north vietnamese army. they re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. those could be no circumstance you see people lifted off the roof of a embassy of the united states from afghanistan. it is not at all comfortable. how wrong was he? [ gun shots ] as the sounds of gunfire echo through kabul, you could see a u.s. army helicopter moving over the city. one of several american helicopters spotted evacuating personnel from the u.s. embassy there. a state department official tells nbc news almost all u.s. personnel have relocated to a
security forces was his top priority, but today, ghani fled kabul and supposedly 300,000 strong u.s. funded afghan military has all but vanished. afghans in kabul are making a run on the nation s banks, and many more are contemplating their fate. you are looking at video by al jazeera of fighters milling about in the presidential palace in kabul. nbc news has verified the authenticity of this video. tonight, we re dedicating the entire show to the imminent and catastrophic end to america s longest war. i m deeply depressed this weekend watching the scenes and i ve been thinking about the big lie. we talk about that idea these days. a gross propaganda distortion of the truth to convince the world that he won an election that he lost soundly and fairly, but there have been other big lies in america s history.
endemic corruption in the afghan army. lack of supplies like ammunition, food and water, convinced the rank and file they couldn t depend on anybody and ultimately, they couldn t depend on each other and that s why you saw what happened so quickly, mehdi. yeah. well explained there. appreciate that. comparison. in 2019, the washington post got hold of 2,000 pages of unpublished interviews with 400 insiders. u.s. generals, diplomats, afghan government officials which clearly demonstrated how senior u.s. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in afghanistan, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and making statements the war had become unwinnable. what do you say to people who say u.s. administration, both democratic and republican, as well as the entire u.s. foreign policy establishment basically misled the american people for the past two decades about the
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been seen as not only a defeat of america by a rag tag militia, but a stain on american conscious, a knock on global standing. is afghanistan going to play a similar role? does it compare to vietnam in your view? it compares very well, actually. when you re at the bottom of the military food chain, you have to believe in the mission. you have to be in your leaders and you have to believe in each other and what happened in vietnam is that even after a decade, it was corruption, poor leadership and the united states decided it was going to leave, which convinced the rank and file at the bottom of the food chain that they were going to be on their own. what surprised me in vietnam, i was one of the last combat troops to leave in 1973. what was surprising is that the vietnamese army lasted as long as it did, until 1975. no such expectations here. don t forget that three presidents in a row here said we were leaving.