failures? i ll ask the man who led a g20 effort to rescue the global economy successfully the last time around. a global plan for recovery and reform. former british prime minister gordon brown. then, it has been two months since the united states completed its chaotic withdrawal from afghanistan. i sat down with the lead negotiator of the peace deal with the taliban, america s former special enjoy, zalmay khalilzad. nobody is happy with the final phase of the withdrawal. what went wrong, and what s next for afghanistan? i ll ask him. finally, democrats have been scrambling for months to finalize president biden s $1.75 trillion spending bill. the biggest roadblock has been how to pay for it. i ll talk to a leading expert with a theory that says the big price tag is really not a problem.
15, 16 years, billions of dollars, why was that the case that we in fact were militarily losing ground each year and that the option was either to escalate it and maybe try something very different and some numbers were in order to win, we needed 400,000, 500,000 troops given the size of afghanistan and its population, or stay at the smaller number, the war goes on, no victory, perhaps the if the numbers were low, even losing more ground. and the president of the united states two presidents, not only one. maybe three if you include president obama, that saw they were not willing to escalate that much, and they thought what we were doing was not sustainable. there were charges made that even if you had to withdraw, the biden administration mishandled the withdrawal badly. do you think that that s a fair
changed, and they re adjusting to change in afghanistan. as an afghan-american, somebody who spent so much time in this, how has this left you feeling? well, i m not happy about that i did not succeed to respond to the very understandable human aspirations of the afghan people, their yearning for peace. i tried my very best to bring the two sides to negotiate on a roadmap to respond to the aspirations of the people, what has been at war for 40 years. so that struggle goes on, struggle for not as many afghans are dying now, but struggle for an inclusive afghanistan where ruler and urban afghans, more islamic, less religious in terms of politics, can come to some agreement on a formula that
government, argue that the taliban moves into kabul, there would be a bloodbath destruction of kabul, what happened in the 90s could be repeated, so there was fear as the taliban were coming into kabul. and then there was an opportunity where a message spread across afghanistan like wildfire that anyone who can make it to the airport will be taken to the united states. so you had this massive rush of thousands and thousands of people to the airport and with though scenes. nobody was of the view this was very positively done. in terms of the logistics of getting everybody out, there s no suggestion that any other power could do what we need, but if you look at the totality, it was obviously very undesirable. next on gps, i will ask ambassador khalilzad about the
brown. then it has been two months since the yatd completed its withdrawal from afghanistan. i sat down with the lead negotiator of the peace deal, america s former special envoy, zalmay khalilzad. nobody is happy with the final phase of the withdrawal. what went wrong, and what s next for afghanistan? i ll ask him. finally, democrats have been scrambling for months to finalize president biden s $1.75 trillion spending bill. the biggest roadblock has been how to pay for it. i ll talk to a leading expert with a theory that says the big price tag is really not a problem. but first, here s my take. have we witnessed another sputnik moment?