And also because, of course, the u.s. companies are competing with the chinese companies, and there are a lot of people that would say, well, if you re going to constrain the u.s. corporations that, just means that the chinese are going to increasingly be dominant. i think it s more about how we adopt to a reality where in the virtual world, in the digital world there s simply a different set of geopolitical players and we need to understand their motivations, their mission statements, what they want to do, and we need to adapt to it. it s kind of like climate change. when we started climate change, adaptation was a dirty word. 30 years later we re living in a world with climate change and we have to start living with the responses, we have to respond to it. i think that s what s happening in this what i call techo polar moment but a lot faster. thank you for your article and your analysis this morning. ian bremmer is the president of the you are asia group. grant woods, the former
Some very clear mission statements that was to defeat the taliban, defeat al qaeda. we did that in very quick order and we over reached and we started to expand our requirements. taliban went away immediately because we made them go away. without mission al qaeda. we continued to progress against that and in order to do that appropriately, we needed to begin a counter insurgency operation. that requires some incredible investments across the board. we started to grow. we got caught and got lost. it was a strategic failure on our part. let s bear in mind, those service members that served on the ground in afghanistan won every fight they got into. deployed themselves and honored this nation exceptionally well. it s the senior leaders failed them. aaron, i know that you negotiated in the middle east on behalf of republican and democratic administrations, secretaries of state.
Keeping our troops on the assumption that we would not lose the war but never win it was for bleeding american credibility even further. general, was it inevitable. if it were ten years from now, 50 or 100 years from now, same outcome. i think it is inevitable. we entered into afghanistan with some very clear mission statements that was to defeat the taliban, defeat al qaeda. we did that in very quick order and we over reached and we started to expand our requirements. taliban went away immediately because we made them go away. we continued to progress against that and in order to do that appropriately, we needed to begin a counter insurgency operation. that requires some incredible investtments across the board.