premium, you stop mitigating the risk of bad things happening. beyond the general s sobering admission that 20 years of war in the most powerful military in the world could have failed to prevent the taliban from recapturing kabul with hardly a shot fired. i have a real sense of tragedy for the afghan people. i think the taliban regime will be hard on so many afghans. that hurts. the other emotion on our effort is that in my entire experience, i never saw people there trying to screw it up. i saw good people with good intentions working hard but i don t think we did very well. [ gunshots ]. we made a lot of mistakes that we ve made in prior efforts like vietnam and others and i
dozen, it s got a god dam rounding error. those are lives. anyone that respects the military should absolutely be calling for a congressional hearing. it means you are absolutely questioning the generals so that we don t replicate what we did in this war for the next one. during the final weeks of america s withdrawal back in washington, i met with almost all of the wars chief architects. the commanders of the war in afghanistan for some tough questions and painful reflections on what went wrong on what they could have done differently and the lessons we must all learn from this 20-year war. what does it feel like to you when you hear about the withdrawal of u.s. service members and see what is going
what would happen that day. the taliban had been threatening to blow up polling stations and kill people in voting lines. it was a relatively peaceful day. more than half a million people voted. it felt good we were able to put our weight behind something that would be so impactful. getting president bush and congress to provide the investments needed to build on these early successes in afghanistan, well, that would prove nearly impossible as attention for the war in afghanistan had already shifted to a new war, an elective war in iraq, and this according to many throughout the military re redirected critical focus and personnel and equipment away from afghanistan. resources that could have saved lives and potentially changed the outcome of the war itself. i accept the fact i was an economy of force and look for ways to use what i had to get to where i thought they wanted us
else. at the end of the day, president obama was put in an unattendable position and i put him there. from my command, a story came out perceived by many people would be almost a direct front to him as though you got a military leader who does not respect the commander in chief. was it tough to end your 34 year military career in that way? it s still tough. after replacing mccrystal with general petraeus we are committed to bring our war to a responsible enter. all four generals would struggle to end the war as obama had claimed he would. what was quite inter
and, i just felt very isolated and trying to even articulate the difficulties of the transition. i am just getting my footing. it has been ten years since i got back. a lot of folks deal with post-traumatic stress because when they come back, they are still constantly on heighten alert. i found myself to be extremely short-tempered, my fuse was lightning fast and i realized something quickly was wrong. i went to therapy and outside of the military, it still angers this day that americans die for a war that seemingly had more aim. i will never forgive the leaders that caused people that i love to die. i love this country but this was a massive mistake.