Original subtitles

Okay. Okay.

Okay, everybody, smile. It's okay.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the President of the United States.

How do you prove

that someone's not telling the truth?

So, uh, how's it feel

being out here in Afghanistan?

We're making good progress.

There is progress.

The progress that Afghanistan is making is remarkable.

Progress across all lines of effort.

We are making progress.

We are seeing significant progress.

Indisputable progress.

We're making real progress.

If the news was good, we're really making progress.

If the news was bad, it's like, well, we had a setback,

but we're still making progress.

Progress with the roads being built,

so farmers can get product to market. That's progress.

Look, I'll be very real with you.

There are times when you get in front of a camera.

It's not that you're lying, but you're gonna--

you're gonna paint

a pretty good picture on the pig.

I remember somebody who was far wiser than me

once telling me this.

The only thing that's classified in this town is bad news.

You know, I heard a four-star in Afghanistan say one time

it's not about winning,

it's about the perception of winning.

And I thought, what bullshit.

-We are winning. -We are winning.

We can and will accomplish this mission.

Across the board, we are winning.

-I sincerely believe we're winning. -I do, too.

We're on track.

Every single day, we're making progress. We're winning.

The conditions are set for winning this war.

Everything changed with a tip

we had gotten about an interview that Michael Flynn had given

to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

It wasn't classified,

but the government didn't want it getting out.

Is it all right if we record?

This is off the record.

So, if we're doing such a great job,

why does it feel like we're losing?

You know, every measurable activity

is failing.

The narrative was completely at odds

with what the public had been told.

We basically know what we're doing out here.

We're basically fighting the wrong way.

We had to go to court, and we found out

there were hundreds of other interviews like this.

There were people who served in uniform,

diplomats, aid workers, Afghans, NATO allies.

There were people who-- If they really speak the truth,

they'll never get a job in this town.

But we could offer

the protection of giving anonymity.

So, it allowed these witnesses

to actually speak with a lot more candor.

You might not have thought

things were as bad as they are.

No, I always thought they were bad.

Well, at least it looks good.

Probably will never work.

We were never going to succeed.

Yeah.

People were basically saying,

yeah, I was there in 2008, I was there in 2010.

And it was a total disaster. And we told the people.

But as it went up the chain,

all the bad stuff had been taken out

or watered down.

It was like they were talking about a completely different war

in a completely different country.

No, that's all we got left.

That's all we got left?

Welcome to Afghanistan.

I'm gonna ask a lot of you

over the next few weeks and the next few months,

and I know you can do it. I know you're ready.

Down four, five.

Run.

That's the building they took off out of,

running that way, that tree line.

Split this way. Hey, get that soldier.

Don't go any closer!

No, you know, it became--

We were there so long. Let's be honest.

And part of the reason

we may be doing a documentary

is that the American public doesn't understand.

A lot of them tuned it out, you know.

It was just another-- We had the Afg--

We had Iraq shoved in there for the X number of years.

Um, so it became sort of the background noise.

It was a war that was going on. And the, uh,

you know, everyone wanted to be there in '01, '02, '03.

I like to say, uh, I won the lottery

or I got the, uh, gold ring on the carousel

when I was selected to be the deputy of what became

the Jawbreaker team, the first team to go in.

CIA had a preexisting relationship

with the Northern Alliance, which was the...

the non-Taliban part of... of Afghanistan,

a small sliver in the northeast portion of the country

that the Taliban did not control.

Tonight, the United States of America

makes the following demands on the Taliban.

Deliver to United States authorities

all the leaders of Al-Qaeda who hide in your land.

They will hand over the terrorists...

or they will share in their fate.

They wanted us to bring bin Laden's head back

in a hat box on dry ice.

This is not about revenge. It's not about retaliation.

This is about self-defense.

I don't agree with that.

The American people wanted revenge.

I wanted revenge. You probably wanted revenge.

I don't think President Bush had any other recourse

to his own constituency

than to say, we know it emanated from here.

There is no government to deal with to say,

"Hey, you fix this."

There's no government in Afghanistan.

It's a civil war.

The big thing we took in with us was money.

We took in three million dollars in cash to help, um,

get the Northern Alliance, uh, onside, to work with assets,

and enable them to prosecute the campaign that we would need.

Taliban, Taliban.

I don't know how we came up with three million.

It was enough for the first, uh, two weeks or so.

And then we needed more.

Where is the American Army?

Where is the American Army?

Yes.

Kabul fell, I think, early November.

And that really signaled the end.

"The Taliban" were routed.

They had either gone back into the countryside, hiding,

or they had retreated across the border,

their leadership, into Pakistan.

On the streets of an Afghan city,

life appears to be returning to normal

following the fall of the hardline Islamic regime.

Yes, the Taliban were routed.

I had high hopes

that Afghanistan would be a safer place.

But we had not gotten UBL yet or Al-Qaeda's senior leadership.

And I think until we got that,

no one thought the mission was over.

I don't know that. I don't think he's vanished--

He's either dead in some tunnel, or he's alive.

And if he's alive,

he's either in Afghanistan, or he isn't.

Local Afghan militia commanders say

they've overrun a cave

where they suspect Osama bin Laden himself

may have been taking refuge.

In what must surely be the closing stages of at least

-the Afghan phase of this conflict-- -Get down!

So, I got there in, like, February of '02.

We land in Kandahar,

and we're standing on the airfield.

The aircraft takes off.

And a 107 round comes flying across the... the runway,

and it hits a mosque and explodes.

And I remember my sergeant major Dave Bruner saying,

"Well, I guess the... the Taliban didn't get the memo

that the war is over." And it was game on.

The course of this conflict is not known.

Yet its outcome is certain.

The question at that point in the war was not,

"Are we focused on Al-Qaeda?"

It's, "How much beyond Al-Qaeda?"

And one of the first and most obvious questions

was this question of the Taliban.

There was a tendency

to kind of aggregate those two together.

The Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies...

Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies...

Arguably, that was, uh,

making the enemy larger than it needed to be.

Afghanistan needs to be safe and secure...

friendly to the West, so that it can never again

be used as a safe haven for terrorists.

I remember being taken aback

at how many valleys there were in the East.

Looking out of the helicopter

and realizing that, you know, for every valley we're in,

there's, like, 25 or more that we're not.

They think they might find safe haven.

Not if we think they're there.

That whole occupation and war was based

upon this myth of the safe haven.

How big of a space do you need

to train and conduct for a hijacking?

I think when I look at any kind of campaign

of that magnitude,

I think you have to have some foreign policy first.

And then the foreign policy drives strategy.

And as a result of the strategy, then you have plans.

I'm not sure we really went

through that process.

There it goes.

-Get a good picture of it? -Shit.

Duran Duran,

"Is There Something I Should Know?"

This war will not be quick.

We know this from the history

of military conflict in Afghanistan.

It's been one of initial success...

followed by long years of floundering...

and ultimate failure.

We're not going to repeat that mistake.

In April of 2002, Donald Rumsfeld

dictates out a memo, a snowflake.

This was classified at the time,

and was later declassified, saying,

"How are we gonna get out of Afghanistan?"

And he ends it with one word, "Help."

Exclamation point.

When I added it up,

I'm like, "Oh, my God, the date on this memo he wrote...

...was the same day that Bush gave that speech."

You're like, how can this be?

I mean, it's just-- You couldn't come up

with a bigger contrast.

We're tough. We're determined.

We're relentless.

Six months into the war, Rumsfeld is saying,

"Help! How do we get out of here?"

"We're never gonna get out." And yet, in public,

he's making fun of reporters who ask him about the quagmire.

No, that's, uh, someone else's business quagmires.

I don't do quagmires. Um...

Early in the war, we had the upper hand.

And we had the opportunity to leverage that upper hand

and that momentum into some version of an outcome

like a defeated Al-Qaeda and a mostly surrendered Taliban

with some elements of a political...

settlement with some conditions.

We rejected that deal.

Nine five tango, over.

So, now all of a sudden...

we're gonna take this destroyed status quo,

this power vacuum,

and we're gonna fill it

with Western styled institutions.

The conflict is entering a new phase. The president

instructed USAID to begin reconstruction work

in stable and peaceful areas of the country

that are free of terrorists,

reconstruction of wells, of the irrigation system,

of agriculture, of roads.

We're gonna raise an Afghan national army.

We're gonna raise a police force.

We're gonna have 14-plus ministries.

We're gonna have federal government in Kabul.

We're gonna have provincial government.

We're gonna have local government.

We're gonna have a judicial system.

We're gonna revamp the prison system.

We're gonna rebuild the police.

Mr. President, you've said on repeated occasions

that you're not into nation building.

I don't think our troops ought to be used

for what's called nation building.

The so-called nation building, I would call it

the stabilization of a future government.

Uh, nation building was kind of the pejorative term

for the maximalist view

of the counterinsurgency campaign, right?

That it was not enough to defeat the Taliban militarily.

You needed to build

those civilian elements of governance,

those pieces of infrastructure...

so that the rest of the Afghan citizens

would find reason to buy into that government.

They would see the services that it'd provide.

Their life would get better.

The United States doesn't cut and run.

We keep our commitments.

It's in our national interest...

that the work you're doing here...

the work of helping the Afghans develop a democracy,

it's in the interests of your children

and your grandchildren.

Covering it, you sort of get the sense

that maybe there is debate over what strategy

or what they're hoping to accomplish.

But in these interviews, they admit openly

that they didn't have a strategy.

They couldn't agree on a strategy.

There was no consensus on what the objectives were.

We tried to establish,

and I think every commander over there

has tried to establish metrics,

measures of effectiveness or measures of success.

The experience in Afghanistan

has absolutely made it clear that just putting up

a bunch of schools isn't going to do anything.

-Right. -So...

How many schools were built in the last 60 days?

Interesting.

You build the structure, you build the thing.

But if you don't have the teachers,

if you don't have the supplies,

and, most importantly, if you don't have the security

of the locals that are willing

to send their children to that school...

you have this thing that you built.

That's not what the Afghan people want.

People of Afghanistan,

just take a look at this building.

It's a big, solid, permanent structure.

We thought the more money we throw at it,

the sooner we'll win.

This was one of the metrics even.

How quickly can you spend money?

We've been able to put in wells.

We've been able to build schools.

We've been able to put in new clinics.

Five hundred and twenty-five schools...

Three thousand, four hundred and six projects,

reaching more than two million people.

Kids are in school. They're learning right now.

And you can see that with your eyes.

That's visible progress right there.

Building schools resonates with Americans.

Elections, women's rights,

those all resonate with Americans.

You get-- Find political clout

back in this country to support that.

The appropriations cycle is based on success.

Do you wanna be the head of an agency

that comes in and says,

"Well, you know that 100 million dollars,

we wasted it all. We didn't accomplish anything."

You think you're gonna get that appropriations?

There were statistics

about life expectancy in Afghanistan.

And we actually couldn't believe it.

So, we went over and we talked to the CIA,

who does a lot of analysis.

They said it is statistically impossible

to increase the life expectancy over that time frame.

Which is hard to start with anyway in Afghanistan,

since they don't have a census!

They don't know how many Afghans are alive!

You know, what's the old saying?

Statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics.

We're also working to educate people,

build roads, provide good health care.

They literally couldn't think of enough projects

to spend the money on.

We bought half a billion dollars

worth of airplanes from the Italians

that couldn't fly,

uniforms for the Afghan military to use in forest lands.

Well, you've been to Afghanistan.

It's mostly a desert.

They were gonna create a soy industry!

They don't eat soy...

...but we're trying to create an industry.

Sexy Italian goats, they put on a plane,

fly them to Afghanistan to have sex

with probably less sexy Afghan goats.

There was no success,

other than they spent a billion dollars.

It was very uncomfortable getting to Afghanistan

and looking at these, uh, half complete projects,

just knowing this isn't gonna work.

U.S. government spending so much money

on certain sweetheart contracts.

You had generals who then go to work

for contractors after they leave the military.

The joke, of course, is that it's not a joke,

it's pretty tragic.

The saying, though,

is that reconstruction was unsuccessful in Iraq,

and it was unsuccessful in Afghanistan,

but it was very successful in Northern Virginia,

and very successful in Maryland.

And anyone who knows that area knows what I'm talking about.

The growth of the defense and weapons industries,

and then everything that's ancillary to that,

all the hotels, the banks, the apartment complexes.

We're spending 300 million dollars

a day for 20 years.

So, all of these things

create this incredibly horrific condition

for endless war where everyone is benefiting.

I would say what told me that we weren't winning

it was that the security in the country

was not getting any better.

From the time in 2002 to the evacuation,

I think I was in Afghanistan every year.

And each time I went back, the security situation

didn't seem as good as it was the last time I was there.

I said, not really sure we're doing the right thing.

I'm...

pleased with the progress

that we're making in Afghanistan.

I mean, there is no such thing as a Taliban.

We have liberated, literally liberated,

village after village.

It's bullshit. We've built more schools.

We've got more cars on the road.

You know, really?

Afghanistan is really better today than it was?

So many senior people, as well as mid-level people,

basically said...

we're losing.

I kind of wish some of them had said it, you know, publicly.

Uh, but I understand why they didn't,

because they would've lost their job.

We are not losing it,

and, uh, the enemy cannot win.

You said you are not losing.

Are you saying that you are winning?

You hear that time and again

that everybody says in public we're winning the war.

But over there, it's clear we're not winning.

You know, that at the low level, it's all bad news.

And by the time it comes out the top,

at the Pentagon or the White House,

it's all rosy.

Out of the despe-- Out of the kind

of the desperate straits

that the Afghan people found themselves, is now, uh...

...a, you know,

a welcoming society beginning to grow.

How exciting. I mean, it's...

it's something good that we're here,

or it's bad that we're here, or what?

No, it's good. It's a good friend.

We used to call it kites and balloons.

Anytime we saw a report that showed a picture of a kid

with a kite or a balloon,

we knew it was gonna be a BS report.

It was just going to be happy talk.

Boys flying kites again.

The Taliban no longer has its,

uh, totalitarian grip on this country.

Um, we are winning this war.

There are a lot of places where I will tell you

we did make it a better place.

I mean, you go to the big cities,

you saw open bazaars.

You saw people making money.

And the Afghans I knew were really happy.

But it never, ever came out of my lips, saying,

"Hey, we're winning this thing,

or I can see the light at the end of the tunnel."

I never did see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Over there!

Where... where? Tell me, sir. Tell me.

The Pentagon would talk about the number of attacks,

enemy attacks. And for a while, you'd think,

"Okay, fewer enemy attacks, the better, right?"

The roadside bomb attacks doubling last year.

Suicide attacks quintupled last year.

No, no, no, that shows the war is going well

because we're taking the fight to the enemy

so they're firing more shots at us.

I think the Haqqani network is getting a little bit desperate.

They've, uh, stooped down

to use females as suicide bombers.

The staggering rate

of civilian casualties is proof to us

of the callous and indiscriminate

nature of the Taliban terrorists.

You know, without a question,

that what the public is going to be exposed to

is going to be necessarily biased in the positive.

There's no other way to go into war.

No nation is going to allow the narrative

to be completely transparent,

particularly when things are going in the negative...

because the second you do that...

you surrender to the enemy.

You authorized to smile in here?

Um...

Are there times you... you say to yourself,

"Maybe I was a little bit

too upbeat about that assessment?" Sure.

But if I say we are making progress

on growing the Afghan National Army,

and here are some indicators...

but I know in my mind we got a long way to go.

That's not lying.

I don't feel that's lying.

The glass is half full.

There is progress in many areas of Afghanistan.

I think I understood why we as a headquarters

and myself were doing that to...

uh, get the resource support that we thought we needed.

General McKiernan is briefing me on...

the situation in Afghanistan...

what he's gonna need to make sure

that we continue helping this young democracy succeed.

When you're in a country that has a literacy rate

of maybe 30 percent...

when the average life span is--

When I get there, it's 43 years old.

When 75 percent of the people that live in Afghanistan

have been at war their entire life,

when there is no government structure...

how do you-- how do you think you're going to win

or create success

short of generational, uh, measurements? I mean...

Ultimately, the solution in Afghanistan

is going to be a political solution,

not a military solution.

Uh, we're not gonna run out of bad guys there

that want to do bad things in Afghanistan.

Coming up! Coming up!

Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on!

-Right there. -Let's go!

Coming up, coming up! Come on, come on!

Officials were under pressure

to report only good news...

so you would look on the latest assessment report,

and you'd see, well, that district,

it's colored that we control it.

But you go out to these small little outposts...

and there'd being a lieutenant, you know,

so a kid who's 23, 24, 25 years old,

and he'd have 30 or 40 American troops,

maybe about the same amount of number of Afghan troops,

maybe less.

And you'd ask them,

what part of this district do you control?

And they'd say, I can control what's in the line

of sight of my machine guns. You know? That'd be it.

And you'd hear that over and over and over again.

And you saw the impossibility of the task

put to the U.S. and NATO troops.

Go in, win hearts and minds.

And, you know, I... Use tons and tons of troops.

you know, I mean, I think that...

it's sort of willfully naive.

So, if it's not sustainable, should we do it?

I love it. I like helping the people out.

They need our help, so I'm here to pull security for them.

There was this one oral history interview

with an Army soldier.

And he said, you know, think about it.

We come into their province

where they've never seen foreigners.

They don't have airports. We come in, and we look like

stormtroopers in Star Wars, right? We're all kitted out.

We've got sunglasses, and helmets,

and radio antennae

sticking out of our head, and guns.

You know, no wonder there was this hostility.

Like, there were nice guys.

Like, you joke, like, it's collegial.

And kind when, like,

the village comes together and shit. But I...

I wasn't a part of their life, and they weren't a part of mine.

I was wearing body armor,

and a big fucking rifle and sunglasses.

And, you know, they were harvesting poppy.

It's just different worlds. I don't know who the enemy is,

and I certainly didn't at the time.

I need you guys to tell me

when people bring these into your village.

Shame on you if you follow foreign... foreign leaders

that come here and talk you

into fighting against your own country,

and they do nothing for you.

I would go out, like, hoping to be shot at.

If we had snipers out and hide somewhere,

we would be told to patrol in certain areas

where it was likely that we would get shot at,

so that these guys could get them.

It's like, well, we're creating the conditions

under which this is gonna happen.

This is the exact spot that we were...

...when we got hit last time so...

When you do these presence patrols,

we sometimes call them, like, bait patrols,

recon patrols, all those types of things,

you're not moving towards something.

You don't have an objective or the enemy is here, right?

It's not like they were trying to, like,

punch a hole in the line.

You're walking around, like, kind of hoping to get shot at.

And they were shooting us because we were walking around.

Yeah, he's right fucking there!

Hey, he's still in there!

The counterinsurgency principle was,

of course, you're gonna put these troops...

into these areas, and they'll be met with resistance,

and we'll take casualties.

At some point, you're supposed to degrade

the Taliban's ability to conduct operations.

At some point, our casualties start to come down.

And all we ever saw was the opposite.

I got him!

Line three, Doc. Bravo, Charlie.

We'd been shot at since we got there.

And we saw them well before it,

so we got to start maneuvering on them.

It took about three hours of kind of shadow dancing.

Eventually we kind of outmaneuvered them

and trapped them against the river.

And enough of the townspeople, we thought,

had gotten out of the way, um,

that we were able to get some air on station.

Big higher-up sent us down two A10s,

so we could kill these dudes.

And the...

A10s come in the first time, it's fucking amazing.

It's the coolest thing you've seen.

After that first run, they ended up doing six total.

But after that first one, after the ground explodes,

we thought everybody had gotten out.

And like, a million fucking people pop out

from behind this little berm where they are

and start fucking sprinting, right?

The guy behind me who's in charge of me

kind of said, "Hey, see that guy in white, fucking..." you know.

I said, yeah. Then he disappears.

Then, hey, he pops up again, fucking kill that dude.

Fuck, here we go. This is-- this is it.

This is my chance to do the thing.

I was getting ready, like, this is the perfect moment.

I dreamed about killing people for, you know, three years.

I had prepared for it.

So, anyway, he popped up again, and I'm tracking him,

but I'm looking for a gun in his hands.

I really wanted to, like before I pull the trigger,

I just wanna make sure that this was, like,

one of the fighters that we were doing.

And at 440, even with a high-powered scope, like,

you know, you see colors and blobs.

So I go, fuck, man, like,

"Does he have a fucking gun or not?"

And he disappears again. I'm like, fuck.

Like, I just missed this chance to kill this dude.

Like, what if I don't have that chance again?

Well, he fucking said to kill him,

so I've got an order. So, like, regardless,

and we're in this fucking combat scenario,

so it's all good. Um...

he pops up again, and he's like...

covering his, like... It-- Like, what I--

In my head, it's his wife and kid,

I don't know. It looked like a woman

and a fucking small child.

And it's just a guy who lived around there.

Um, and he was just upset that, you know, or scared

because these fucking big-ass planes

had just dropped a bunch of 30 mike-mike into his world,

um, on a weird fucking, whatever, Friday afternoon.

Um...

so that was this moment of, like...

personal reflection, because the truth is, like,

I could've fucking popped the guy

the first time I had him, right?

And was I really looking for a gun,

or was I just not sure enough

that I was actually gonna kill him

and then I needed, like, a breath?

I was like, I'll get him again.

But what if that hesitation had been something else?

And what if that guy had actually been Taliban

and had been one of the people that planted one of the bombs

that ended up, like, killing my friends later, right?

I just let a guy off the hook.

And I got to be around

all the other people afterwards, too.

And everybody asks, like, "Hey, Lucy, did you fucking--

Did you shoot during the time?"

On the report, like, "Did you expend any rounds?"

Like, actually, like, "No, I didn't."

"Well, why not? Did you not see anybody?"

You know, how do you, like, tell that story

around these other people? You don't want me

to think you're a coward. So...

I started questioning myself.

And then you start to question the war and shit.

You're like, "Wait," or like,

"Why am I in situations like this?" "And why is it hard

to distinguish between these people?"

Well, this is a new kind of, uh,

new kind of evil.

Now, this... this crusade...

this war on terrorism...

uh, is gonna take a while.

We will rid the world of the evil doers.

Tell him, turn around. Turn around.

All right. He's good.

Show me where they're at. Hurry up, hurry up.

Trying to figure out who the enemy was,

was a real problem.

There was an Afghan special forces advisor,

and he said the American troops

would always ask him, "But where are the bad guys?"

"Show me where the bad guys are in the map."

"Who are we fighting?"

Okay, here's... here's the thing.

I'm gonna ask this question one more time, one more time.

Who was digging?

If you don't know who's who,

you can't speak the language,

you don't know the tribal history,

you don't know the culture.

Some of the Afghans figured out from the get-go,

the way to get the Americans to rub out your rival

is to just call them Taliban.

Afghan commandos and US special operations forces

launched a raid to capture Mullah Sadiq,

a high-ranking Taliban leader.

Sadiq and 30 Taliban fighters were killed in the operation.

That night, I got a call

from the head of the Afghan intelligence service,

and he says...

"Do you know your special ops guys

have just killed...

60 innocent villagers out in Azizabad?"

Immediately, I said,

"Okay, let me-- Let me check on this."

And I call our... our special forces commander.

And this person, to remain nameless...

um...

said the Afghans had exaggerated the civilian casualties.

It was really only a half dozen.

The Taliban and their supporters are running

a very effective propaganda campaign

to discredit coalition efforts.

Exaggerated claims of damage often result in demands

for more money in compensation.

Chris Jackson and I were embedded

with the troops conducting the raid.

Neither he nor I saw any noncombatants killed.

Never in history have military forces

tried to exercise such care to avoid civilian casualties.

The next day...

the UN ambassador had me over to his compound,

ostensibly to have breakfast and talk about things.

And he said,

"Come up to my office. I want to show you a video."

We killed...

civilians in that raid,

more than should have happened

even with a minimum collateral damage.

It was a bad target.

I sent one of my own guys out there...

to start an investigation. And, uh...

the truth was not

what the special ops commander told me.

He either lied unknowingly, or he lied knowingly.

I don't know, 'cause the target, uh, Mullah Sadiq,

I don't think was killed or captured that night.

This was probably sort of a revenge

between private security contractors.

And one might've ratted out the other one

and had a target put on them.

The investigation revealed ArmorGroup relied

on a series of warlords

to provide men for its guard force

at Shindand Air Base.

The company called those warlords

Mr. Pink, Mr. White.

Those names, by the way,

were drawn from Quentin Tarantino movie

called Reservoir Dogs.

Fuck you, White.

That's when I first heard about ArmorGroup

and Mr. White and Mr. Pink, and all that.

They were being fed intelligence

by people with conflicting motives and allegiances.

But if you admit there was a mistake,

you're putting people's careers on the line.

Somebody might get court martialed.

Somebody might get hauled before Congress

to answer for it. So, they only made the report,

the full report public, ten years later,

after USA Today sued them in federal court.

And in the end, in Afghanistan,

the backlash was so much stronger

because of this unwillingness to admit mistakes.

We have two wars going on, and we have more contractors,

more contractors than...

than Defense Department people in those wars.

Well, I mean, you know, if you contract with somebody,

and you don't know who you're contracting with...

...it's an accountability issue.

We don't have the organic, in-house capability

-to provide security. -Correct.

The defense contracts were just this enormous amount

of cash flowing into the war zone,

with Afghan contractors, U.S. contractors,

other foreign companies.

So, the light bulb finally went on.

Maybe we need to stop this or get our arms around it.

The Pentagon called and said,

"We need to find out who these subcontractors are,

who the shadows are that are receiving all our money

and stealing it from us. Can you do that?"

Being a forensic accountant, this was like the Super Bowl.

This... this was the...

the granddaddy of them all.

The mission was to get visibility

on where all the money is flowing to, who's benefiting.

So, I said, "I need financial records."

"Oh, we got all the financial records."

They didn't have any.

Money's coming in from U.S. Treasury.

It's going to the implementing partners,

and it's supposed to be used for roads,

schools, power grids.

But what was it, ten years later?

And they didn't have any financial records.

So, it's kind of like,

what do we do, just stare at the screen?

And nothing magical is gonna pop up.

I'd say, well, how's it coming?

You know, how's... how is the road?

He goes, we don't know.

We've to rely on them telling us,

'cause we can't go out there, it's not safe.

So, eventually we started...

I started going off base to central banks.

I got to a point where I became so ingrained

into the central bank guys that we were playing volleyball

every afternoon at three o'clock.

I mean, it's just-- We became friends.

They hated corruption. They hated the suicide bombing.

They hated the killings as much as we did.

And I was mentoring them.

I mean, they would call me and say, "Tom, Tom."

"I got a million dollars flowing through this account."

"Is that a red flag?"

"Hell, yes. Don't do anything. I'm coming right down."

The fuel contracts, the food contracts,

the weapons contracts.

I mean, that's where the money was.

The Taliban would extort the contractors.

You either pay me,

and I'll make sure your supplies are shipped safely,

or don't pay me, and who knows what's going to happen?

They would talk about this bridge

that kept getting blown up.

And they would pay this local district official

to rebuild the bridge.

He had a brother who was in the Taliban.

So, he'd build the bridge,

and he'd tell his brother in the Taliban,

"Okay, now you can blow it up."

And it didn't dawn on the Americans

that this was why they kept having to rebuild

the same damn bridge all the time.

The U.S. military has often stated

that money is a weapons system.

We came up with a rule of thumb.

Twenty-five percent is being stolen,

and it's ending up in the hands of Taliban

or the insurgents or Al-Qaeda.

Six frag grenades on him.

Now six AK47 mags on him.

He had 10,000 U.S. dollars.

We'd have those gu-- "Who's stealing the money?"

"Who's funding the bad guys?"

"You tell me." "We'll do night raids."

Tell all the people that live here

to step back over there.

-Are those all kids? -Yeah.

I always got a kick out of they asked,

is it okay if we shoot someone if we have to?

They're asking me.

It's-- That's why I said, "Just don't shoot the computer."

Corruption is endemic to Afghanistan.

Endemic corruption and persistent

qualitative deficiencies.

The goodness and the generosity of the American people...

is being abused.

There was a lessons learned interview

with a guy named Barnett Rubin,

who was a State Department advisor.

And he says, corruption's a problem.

But there's one ingredient you need for corruption,

and that's money.

And it's all our money that we're giving to them.

You know, we're the ones that are enabling it.

At every road checkpoint,

the police are on the take.

Today, this country is a rising democracy.

Families have to pay bribes

to get their power switched on, or their ID papers issued.

The United States is here

at the request of an Afghan government

elected by the people.

The idea was, if we can prop up this Afghan government,

that'll win the war. Then there won't be any support

for the insurgency, for the Taliban.

We tried to import

democratic elections to Afghanistan.

And at first, it seemed like it worked.

There was widespread support for Hamid Karzai

when he was elected president in 2004.

We have a presidential election,

and I'm glad it turned out to be good for me.

I know how you feel.

I end up

on the Afghan Army base at the elections,

and I see them stuff the ballot boxes.

And when I report this back up to Kabul,

the embassy response was,

"Well, since it was an illegal

polling station, it didn't exist."

"So, we don't need to get your report on it."

Every election after that,

with the help of the United States,

was rigged.

Again, that kind of speculation is not all that useful.

We have American ideals and expectations

that we think should be transplanted

to a place like Afghanistan.

We think everybody wants to be like us...

everybody wants the same sort of societal structure

that we have in this country, and they don't.

We're developing really a rule of law, uh, group.

This will be the courthouse, basically.

This will be the courthouse.

We built a lot of courthouses,

and we trained a lot of judges.

The whole idea was to create a justice system.

But it was very corrupt

'cause you had to pay people off to get your case heard,

or it would take months or years

for the cases to go through the Afghan courts.

They want immediate justice.

And believe it or not, they had a judicial system.

It just wasn't ours.

You lose, you win,

off with your hand, you've got to pay this.

I mean, it was brutal justice, but it was swift.

And it was a very powerful message

for the Taliban to say,

"We're here fighting for justice, and fairness,

and Islam."

"Those people are all crooks."

What should be the U.S. exit strategy?

When and how do we--

-You're right. -...should the U.S. leave?

Well, we'll keep them prisoners there.

There will be no exit.

I used to fly from Kabul to Dubai, sit in first-class,

and just look for the guys that have briefcases...

...because they must have cash in those briefcases.

And they did.

There was a lot of cash

literally being flown out of Afghanistan

on an Afghan airline

that was owned by the chairman of Kabul Bank.

♪ Kabul Bank ♪

It was a private bank

with a lot of connections

to very prominent public individuals.

The Americans knew that there were problems,

and yet, really turned a blind eye to this.

The run on the bank began last Wednesday

after reports that tens of millions of dollars

had been given to allies

of President Hamid Karzai's government.

This was a real test for the Afghan government.

Was the rule of law going to come out ahead,

or was corruption going to come out ahead?

Whoever has violated the law...

if there is a violation of the law,

will be dealt with legally.

I remember one guy saying, "Yeah, Tom, this is all good,

and we believe you, uh, but it will never happen."

"Karzai will shut everything down."

"He'll never let you proceed."

This was a big debate in the U.S. government.

We should prosecute those people.

We shouldn't tolerate the corruption.

But they recognized it was going in the pockets

of our own allies in the Afghan government.

So, what were they going to do, throw out the whole system?

They just kind of put up with it.

We wanted to teach them the Western culture.

We did.

Corruption, bribery, stealing, money...

It's the Wild West.

The corruption

was just so massive

that they basically turned all the local population away

from the Karzai government.

Afghanistan will not allow the international community

leave it before we are fully on our feet,

before we are strong enough to defend our country,

before we are powerful enough to have a good economy,

and before we have taken from President Bush,

and the next administration,

billions and billions of more dollars.

No way that they can let you go.

Yeah, you better hurry up in my case.

-Thank you, sir. -Most welcome.

-Thank you all. Thank you. -Take care.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Pose together.

Anytime you're in a conflict

where you're asking the question...

"Is it worth it?"

You're probably in a conflict

where you can guess the answer to that.

My experience was that there was a very natural...

cognitive bias at play.

Part of the reason I think

it's so important for us to end the war in Iraq,

is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan,

put more pressure on the Afghan government

to do what it needs to do.

Keep on pushing! Keep on pushing!

There tends to be a stronger bias to action

than to inaction.

You're going on the offense, tired of playing defense.

Let's go! They're hitting the target!

Fifty meters...

-Seventy-five meters! -Fifty meters...

In the past seven years,

our efforts have been undermanned,

under-resourced, and underfunded.

This goal is achievable.

Stay down. Stay down.

Hey, I'm moving! Don't shoot me!

It's easy to believe that we're just not there yet.

A little bit more resources, a little bit more time,

and we'll turn the corner, and something will change.

Since the surge was announced,

there has been considerable progress made

throughout the country.

Up around that corner.

Keep them--

-IED. We're good. -Keep going! Keep going!

The American public thinks

the term "surge" is a military strategy.

Surge in Iraq and Afghanistan was a sign of military failure.

We had to bring more forces.

President Obama has committed nearly 52,000

additional troops to Afghanistan.

Additional military forces

by themselves

will not guarantee victory for the Afghan people.

Was I not as, um...

optimistic or... or...

flowing in praise of all our efforts in Afghanistan?

Proba-- Yeah, that probably played into it.

I'm a pragmatic person by nature,

and I'm not...

I'm not going to sell something that I don't believe in.

In large parts of Afghanistan, we don't see progress.

I have consistently said that, ultimately,

the outcome in Afghanistan will not be a military outcome.

It will be a political outcome.

I wasn't positive enough about "winning,"

whatever winning means, in Afghanistan.

Let's get a new leader.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates

fired General David McKiernan.

McKiernan's replacement,

-General Stanley McChrystal... -The first time

a commander in the middle of a war

has been removed since 1951.

Today, we have a new policy set by our new president.

I believe that new military leadership

also is needed.

And I-- I think--

I mean, in some ways, we're learning as we go here.

Quite honestly, I was told,

"Hey, you could just retire in the summer of 2009."

I had told the Afghans

that I was going to be here for at least a couple of years.

I was here for the long haul. I told my family that.

Uh, I had a son serving in Afghanistan at the same time.

I had a daughter at West Point.

So, if you want to replace me, then fire me.

"Okay, we'll fire you. No problem."

To fire a war commander is unheard of.

The conclusion,

from the top down through the military ranks

if you are too honest, your career will be over.

So the spin only got worse from there.

By the summer of 2011,

it will be clear to the Afghan people

that the insurgency will not win,

giving them the chance to side with their government.

From that point forward,

while we plan to have fewer combat forces

in harm's way--

The lady with the sign

will remove herself immediately.

They're shooting from the left side of that wall!

You got to get the machine gun there.

Pick up the suppression.

Hey, which one is it?

Get up!

Hey, get down, get down, get down!

Down, down, down!

We got one dead ahead.

We got one fucking wounded.

One dead, one wounded.

They were saying that we were doing well over there.

We weren't doing well over there.

'Cause if we were doing well over there,

then why the corruption?

Why the hidden shit?

Why all the moves under the carpet?

Like, Camp Brown got a lot of money

because of Special Forces.

I was out there with the commander,

and there was a stack of TMRs that was--

Or transportation movement requests,

and he was signing them.

Those loads never happened.

I submitted those TMRs at TOIFOR.

I submitted them.

And then they kicked them over to Tuazu,

"Made it look like those loads happened."

But the trucks did not get loaded,

did not show up to Kandahar,

and did not get offloaded at the site.

They were ghost trucks.

Yes, they were fake orders.

He explained to me they were fake orders.

I'm not saying that all of them wasn't real,

but there was definitely a lot of trucks being paid for

that did not get moved.

So then he told me one day,

"I'm going to show you something."

He's like, "But you can't tell nobody."

I was like,

"What the fuck is going on?" In my head.

In my head, I'm like, "What the fuck is going on?"

And then, uh, they brought in duffel bags.

Like, I'm talking duffel bags...

like that, of money.

I'd never seen that much money.

I mean, from where I grew up to where I was at that moment,

I was like, "Oh, my God."

And, I mean, it was crisp money.

So it was just like... like it just came off the press,

like the cash just fell out of the sky.

Because it was... it was U.S. currency,

and it was, um, like a 100-dollar bill.

I mean, I seen it.

I'd seen the money, brand-new, brand-new money.

I had to ask him, I said,

"Well, how do we plan on getting that--"

"How do you plan on getting that money

back to the United States?"

And he's like,

"Oh, we're going to put it in VCRs,

or DVD players." I was like, "What?"

He's like, "Yeah, we're going to rip the guts out of it,

and put it in there." I was like, "Oh, okay."

I had brought it up to my chain of command,

letting them know what was going on.

They told me to keep it hush, hush.

Don't say anything. Just leave it alone.

He's getting ready to leave anyhow.

Steal money, spent TMRs, getting kickbacks,

it was a well-thought-out process,

well-oiled machine we'll say,

because it had to have been in effect, it had to have--

I don't know if it happened six months

before I got there,

or a year before I got there,

or when the war itself kicked off.

They knew how to get that money back to the United States.

It had to have been done over and over and over again.

There was no accountability.

If anybody lost a promotion, it's probably some buck private

who backed up a backhoe into an airplane.

He's probably serving time in Leavenworth.

But not the general who wasted 36 million dollars,

you know, not the people who lied to Congress.

They had me wear a wire,

told me they were going to get everybody else.

And instead of charging everybody else,

they charged me.

If I was the only one charged on the case,

who did I-- Did I aid and abet myself?

I can remember being on the embassy base

and saying,

"Okay, we're finding money going to the wrong hands,"

and someone making the comment, "Oh, don't go down that road."

"Then we got to do a report,

and we'll have to report it to Congress."

"Don't go down that road"? How about fixing the problem?

You know, we issued over 700 reports.

I had doors slammed in my face by generals.

There was this exaggeration after exaggeration

of what we accomplished,

and it went all the way up to the president.

I had people accusing me of killing Marines

because we issued reports.

This report is not an attack on our military.

It is not an attack on our mission, sir.

It is trying to help the mission.

I remember the first time I went over to the Pentagon.

He took all of our audits,

shoved them across the table, and said, "These are shit."

"And, you know, I got your predecessor fired."

There is an odor of mendacity

throughout the Afghanistan issue.

I mean, I'm sorry to get upset about this,

but it's--

After 12 years of saying this,

and telling Congress, and telling the American people,

I'm tired.

I am tired.

There was an interview with Douglas Lute.

He was what they called the "War Czar"

in both the Bush and the Obama White House.

You know, he was very blunt about this war.

"If the American people knew

the magnitude of this dysfunction,

2,400 lives lost, who will say this was in vain?"

For a three-star Army general to even suggest

that 2,400 American troops had lost their lives in vain,

I can't even adequately explain how remarkable that is.

I start to think about it,

and then I say, "What am I doing?"

Knowing what I know,

knowing where I believe this is going to go,

how can I go home,

meet the family of some kid killed over here

and tell them it was worth it?

Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist,

writes a very poignant column

on the occasion of McNamara's death.

Robert McNamara

was the Secretary of Defense all through Vietnam.

He gives a confession towards the end of his life

admitting that they knew the Vietnam War was a lie.

They misled the American public

over and over again throughout the war.

Herbert says,

that's great that McNamara did this.

But what does it matter?

It matters what you do in the moment.

And that really started a process going of,

who am I as an individual?

What am I going to do with my life?

And I wrote a note to my dad, uh...

And he wrote me a note back.

He said McNamara was an evil man, uh...

And that he prayed that our leaders in D.C.

were better than him, but he doubted that.

And he wanted me to do what was right for me.

That's what I needed to hear to...

to have some degree of courage to do the right thing.

I submitted a resignation. I wrote up this letter.

The anger I had...

for the people who knew what was occurring.

That the war was based on lies. That the war could not be won.

And they chose willingly to do what would not work.

On Monday morning, I'm still in Zabul Province,

and I get a phone call

from the director of Afghan operations.

And his first words to me are,

"Are you going to go public with this?"

That upset me

because I had no intentions of that.

But also, too, it showed what they cared about.

They didn't care about what the reality of this war was.

They didn't care about what the escalation of war would do.

They cared about whether or not

their narrative was going to be upset

by somebody speaking to the press.

U.S. and U.K. forces have made progress.

The sense of progress

among those closest to the fight is palpable.

Our strategy is working.

Well, I think we.. we hadn't finished the mission

of getting bin Laden, uh, bringing him to justice,

which almost certainly meant killing him, right?

He wasn't going to be brought to court.

I guess he could have been, but that was not the way

it was going to go down.

You can argue it was worth a trillion dollars.

It was worth the casualties that we took,

uh, "The blood and treasure," as they say. Um...

You could argue that. But if that's the purpose

was to kill Al-Qaeda's senior leadership

and prevent another homeland attack

we succeeded at that.

USA! USA!

Now the pitch,

and it's lined foul into the seats.

Down the third base line one ball, one strike.

And I'll tell you what's going on.

The crowd is chanting "USA,"

and the reason for that

is that there are reports circulating

that Osama bin Laden is dead.

Bin Laden is dead.

Can it be, ladies and gentlemen? Could it be?

After all this heartache, all this search,

all this failure.

Good evening.

Tonight, I can report to the American people

and to the world

that the United States has conducted an operation

that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.

USA! USA! USA!

Justice has been done.

We defeated that part of the threat,

and succeeded in that part of the strategy.

Putting all that aside, because it's a terrorist group,

and because they are trying to provoke a reaction

that could be counterproductive to our own interests,

we have an obligation...

to think about

whether or not we're playing into the enemy's strategy

in how we react to a terrorist attack.

Don't forget. What we're trying to do

is prevent the reoccurrence of 9/11.

And that's a really, really hard objective

because you're never done achieving it.

The tide has turned. We broke the Taliban's momentum.

At that point, you see this shift

in how the United States fights its wars,

where we're just going to use proxy forces.

We're going to use contractors and CIA people, right?

We're going to use drones,

all these things that can't be exposed,

all these things that can't be known.

This morning, I'm sure you may have seen

The Washington Post.

Indicates-- The headline is on the front page,

quote, "Most in U.S. Say

Afghan War Isn't Worth Fighting."

They didn't want there to be coverage

of the War in Afghanistan after 2013.

The U.S. military really choked off access.

A lot of people didn't even know.

They were like, are we still at war there?

You know, 'cause President Obama

had promised back in 2014 that he would end the war.

In just a few days,

our combat mission in Afghanistan will be over.

Our longest war will come to a responsible end.

And that gives us an opportunity to step back

and reflect upon all

that these families have given us.

Today marks an end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

Today NATO completes its combat mission,

a 13-year endeavor filled with significant achievements.

We've been at this for 13 years.

Fourteen years.

Fifteen years of war.

For 16 years, we've been in the fight.

The longest war in American history,

longer than Vietnam,

World War I, World War II combined.

My successor has a solid foundation

for continued progress in Afghanistan.

America is winning again.

We are winning like we have not won in a long time.

And if you can't level to the American public,

why you're there?

For more than 18 years.

Nineteen years, going on 20 years.

You're in trouble.

There is no part of our strategy

which intends to stay in Afghanistan forever.

The way we left...

was not only a national disgrace, in my mind.

Um, it was criminal.

We have taken a decisive step toward peace,

real peace in Afghanistan.

We were fighting for over a year

to see the withdrawal agreement signed

by the Trump Administration and the Taliban.

The Taliban knew what we were in it.

The Trump Administration knew what was in it.

But the American people never did.

The American people paid for this damn war.

The American people gave their kids to die in this war.

And the American people don't know,

but the Taliban knows. So, who are we protecting?

They are nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators,

and, that's right, losers.

We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit.

We'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.

The United States misses that May 1st, 2021 deadline

to have all its troops out of Afghanistan,

even though Joe Biden apologized

and said we'll get out by September 11th.

The Taliban say, no.

And they launched their campaign,

and within four months, they had taken Kabul.

People throughout Afghanistan,

even though they don't support the Taliban,

they didn't fight them. They didn't join them.

They just got out of their way,

because the Taliban, at that point,

were a better option than the Afghan government.

And I think anyone who looks at that can say,

"My God, what did we do in Afghanistan

to make the Taliban a better option

for the Afghan people than the Afghan government was?"

There is a home for you in the United States,

if you so choose,

and we will stand with you just as you stood with us.

Every step of the way, we fucked these people over.

We created a program

that made the illusion of safety possible

if you did these requirements.

And then we made it damn near, um, you know, impossible

to actually complete those same requirements.

For me, since I was already in law school

when all of this happened,

I wanted to take the thing that I was already doing.

Um, yeah, a bar card and being admitted

and having a license to practice law

is sometimes an incredibly powerful weapon.

We've got passports for everybody, um...

How many Taliban...

kind of full-time security guys, fighters, army Taliban guys

do you think are there in Herat, right about?

A hundred? Five-hundred?

A thousand.

Right.

-Yeah. -JAWID:

Fuck, man.

Dude, that's scary as hell. Like...

Yeah, I'm just sorry, man.

I know there's a lot of guys who are trying really hard.

So-- I mean, I just want to say thanks

for supporting the troops that were there for so long.

And, you know, I know it's really hard right now

to go through this, and so, I don't know, man.

We owe you, so I'm going to try.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, Jafar and Mohammed.

Yeah.

The way that anything gets better

is we acknowledge truth.

We talk honestly about what happened

in the last 20 years.

And what scares me the most

is that those conversations still aren't happening.

Nobody's being honest.

There's a lot of political narratives

about who was at fault, um, or what should be done,

or who cares, or who doesn't care.

What there isn't a lot is, um,

of people taking an honest look at themselves,

the American public looking at itself,

DOD looking at itself,

the government and the State Department

looking at itself, elected leaders

looking at themselves and realizing,

every single one of us had a part in this.

If you go back to the very beginning

in the war,

Rumsfeld was asked

at one of his first press conferences...

Um, of course, this conjures up

Winston Churchill's famous phrase

when he said sometime the-- Don't quote me on this.

Okay?

I don't want to be quoted on this.

So, don't quote me.

Uh, he said, sometimes the truth is so precious,

it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies,

talking about the invasion date and the invasion location.

Rumsfeld gave this kind of circular answer.

He was talking about World War II,

and Winston Churchill.

And then he circled back and said,

"I'll always tell the truth."

There are dozens of ways

to avoid having to put yourself in a position

where you're lying. And I don't do it.

But then the follow up question is,

"What about everybody else at the department?"

You've got to be kidding.

Well, I'm just asking.

You know, and everybody laughed.

But, you know, the clear subtext was,

"Of course we're not going to tell you the truth."

You know, maybe we won't lie to your face all the time,

but don't expect this whole enormous Defense Department

to come clean either.

The lies weren't why we lost,

but they reflect

why the war lasted as long as it did.

One of the problems with accountability

this was the longest war in American history,

so there's an awful lot of people

who bear responsibility for that.

When I was going in for the sixth time,

I get this call that there's a lady downstairs.

And she's a Gold Star Mom.

And would I like to speak to her? I said, absolutely.

She says, "Hey, I understand you're going back

to Afghanistan." I said, "I am."

She goes, my son was this guy.

I said, "I remember your son very well."

She said, "I want to know if my son died in vain or not."

And I said, "I can tell you right now what my feelings are."

She goes, "I don't want to know."

"Now, I want you to go to Afghanistan for a year

and come back and tell me my son didn't die in vain."

I took that lady's phone number,

and I had it on my desk for 13 months.

I thought about that lady every single day.

And I went out to the Helmand Province

and found out the things he did.

He was delivering babies. He was treating kids.

He was saving people's lives.

So, when I landed in Dulles 13 months later,

I picked up the phone, and called her.

And I said, "Your son did not die in vain,

and here's why."

I'd hate to have that conversation

with her today.

I would.

Not that her son died in vain.

But how we left it.

All the people that helped us

all the people who fought with us...

there was a lot of men and women that worked really hard,

and a lot of great Afghans

that really wanted peace and prosperity in their country.

They weren't thinking about the perception of winning.

They wanted to win this.

I am convinced that there is a hubris,

an ideal driven hubris in this country

that thinks if we intervene somewhere in the world,

we're going to make it kind of look like us

when we leave.

And that's not an easy proposition.

There's no good war.

War is a--

Almost the most inhumane thing that people can do.

There's no goodness in war.

But we had a chance.

We had a chance to make things better

and leave Afghanistan better than we found it.

And we screwed that up.

But it wasn't because

our American servicemen and women

were not up to the task.

You can avoid history.

But history won't avoid you.

After Vietnam,

we said we're never going to do it again.

After Iraq,

we said we're never going to do it again.

After Afghanistan,

we say we're never going to do it again.

They lie.

They're lying to you.

We are doing it again, and we will do it again.

So let's learn some lessons

before we really screw it up the next time around.