has been doing for decades. what you ve accomplished is extraordinary. over the last year you ejected them up in their home territory. if we can hold this territory and expand the bubble that i think by the end of the year we can turn a corner in this conflict. the end of the year would ve been exactly ten years ago. we don t need to single out that. this disaster did not start and days ago it started in october of 2001. if you are getting the sense that the same people have been written the same script for two decades they are still doing it now. watch as the pentagon explains
decades. this is the secretary of defense in 2011. expect once you have accomplished is extremely because over the last year, essentially, you have injected the paddle caliban from the. metalik territory. and if we can hold this territory and expand the bubble that i think by the end of the year that we can turn the corner in this conflict. tucker: the the end of the year would have been exactly ten years ago. we don t mean to single out dr. height who is probably one of the smarter people to oversee this disaster, only to point out of this disaster did not start ten days ago. it started in october of 2001 of the taliban was ejected. of if you re getting a sense that the same people who have been reading the same script foo something and then they are still doing it right now. today, pretending everything is a fun. watch as the pentagon the spokesperson said, yes, americans are trapped in kabul.
october of 2001, and that is with the country under taliban control. that group stormed back to power this month at a speed that surprised top american generals. as the last plane took off yesterday, taliban fighters could be seen shooting fireworks and artillery in the sky in celebration they say of the defeat of another super power. joining me now is ralph sanchez and mike memoli. good morning to you both. ralph, i begin with you, what is the feeling on the ground in afghanistan? we saw the celebration on the ground by the taliban and by the final americans who lifted off in the c-17 yesterday. reporter: willie, good morning. a taliban official telling nbc news today, afghanistan has its independence. as far as they are concerned, they have outlasted and outfought the world s major super power. they are now fully in control of that country as they were in
with vietnam, so very few people at the pentagon, the state department are working in the white house ever pause to use the phrase, let s remember that this is their country, not our country, in terms of assembling potential peace accords? ironically at the start of the war, president bush was asked this back in october of 2001, almost 20 years ago, he was asked is this going to be another vietnam could we be drawn into a quagmire in afghanistan and bush was dismissive of this saying we learned our lessons from vietnam we re not going to let this happen again we re not going to founder around in afghanistan we have a clear mission we re going to accomplish it. and his defense secretary, donald rumsfeld would mock the idea that we could get stuck in afghanistan like vietnam. the key issue here is we had a lot of hue bris, because the war
pretty soon after that where we weren t quite sure what we were doing in afghanistan, how long we were going to stay or what exactly we were trying to accomplish. really rapidly, the united states became distracted by planning for the war in iraq and we forgot about afghanistan and let that drift. yeah, mike barnicle, six months in, craig writes and in his interviews finds the united states felt its mission had been accomplished inside afghanistan and began to turn its sights on the war in iraq in many ways, which obviously would be disastrous. yes, willy. it s a sad history of our involvement in afghanistan. and craig you correctly just pointed out that within six months the mission in afghanistan that began in october of 2001 was deemed successful militarily. can you, in your incredible recounting of our history in afghanistan, can you point to other periods where success