Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) s01e04 Episode Script
The Good War
[helicopter propellers beating]
[reporter 1] Today, US soldiers raised
the American flag over Kandahar.
And it was not just any flag.
This flag was flown
over Ground Zero in New York City,
and was signed by relatives
of some of the victims
of the World Trade Center attacks.
[reporter 2] Meanwhile, on the streets
of a southern Afghan city,
life appears to be returning to normal
following the fall
of the hard-line Islamic regime.
[Chandrasekaran]
After Kandahar is liberated,
it's clear to the remnants
of the Taliban leadership
that's still in Afghanistan,
as well as the fragments
of al-Qaeda's leadership
that's still there,
that it's game over for them
in Afghanistan.
[man speaking Pashto] If Taliban
could have responded to America's demands
and had handed over bin Laden,
and if they had destroyed
al-Qaeda's military bases
inside Afghanistan,
and had not let them in the country,
it's obvious that the Americans
would have not entered Afghanistan.
[man 2, in Pashto]
Their defeat was inevitable.
We told the Taliban
that they would not be able to resist
against this invasion in the cities.
That they'd be forced
to abandon the cities.
That they should review their strategy.
That their military centers
were not capable of putting up a defense.
And that they would be easily crushed.
[in English] Most people assumed
the war was over at that point.
[Soufan] Unfortunately,
taking down al-Qaeda,
and taking down the Taliban regime,
and taking down Afghanistan,
and destroying the terrorist cells
around the world was just a step
for some people in Washington
to go to another war.
And it's in Iraq.
We start pulling resources away
from that legitimate battle that we had.
The battle to retaliate against 9/11.
To go to a country
that had nothing to do with 9/11.
[fighter jet flying]
[Bush] On my orders,
coalition forces have begun striking
selected targets of military importance
to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability
to wage war.
[dramatic music plays]
[man] In Afghanistan,
the end of 2001 was a period of optimism
and a period of potential,
where Afghanistan,
coming out of the dark years
from roughly 1996 until 2001.
And it's as though the screens were open,
the sunlight came in,
and Afghan people saw an opportunity.
[reporter]
For the first time, the sound of music,
banned during the Taliban regime,
was blaring again on the streets.
Long lines as men waited
to shave their beards,
mandatory under Taliban rule.
[in Pashto] A new hope was found
for the people of Afghanistan,
especially when
the international community came.
[reporter, in English] With the Taliban
gone, Kabul's people return.
Those who could not tolerate
the Taliban's intolerance
come home to make a life
in the capital again.
[woman] After the fall of Taliban,
we came to Kabul.
So I brought that burka to wear in Kabul,
but when I came to Kabul,
many women were not wearing burka
because Kabul was not controlled
by Taliban anymore.
I could go back in the streets
without the fear of being whipped
by Taliban,
and the sense was that
at least I can breathe as a human being.
[artillery fire]
[Chandrasekaran] The United States
military does a great job
at fighting wars, at vanquishing enemies.
It's not always so good
at figuring out what comes next.
And once the Taliban had been pushed
out of Kabul and Kandahar
and then out of the country writ large
the US military didn't really have a plan
for, "What then?"
How do you help this country
find some stability?
How do you help provide basic services?
How do you help bring this country
into the modern world?
[man] It was not clear, directionally,
what we wanted to do
and when we wanted to do it.
What we did know is we wanted
to be damn sure that,
whatever developed in Afghanistan,
it could never again serve as a base
for an attack beyond Afghanistan's borders
into our own homeland.
And that's where the disagreement started.
I felt that, uh
Well, you gotta get into nation-building
if you want that guarantee.
You gotta have communications lines
roads, good roads so you can move forces
around as you need to,
that farmers can get produce to market,
and so forth and so on.
Then you had the minimalist line saying,
"We don't care about any of this."
Uh, "Let's just not do any
Let's just get out."
This was the Rumsfeld doctrine.
Knock off a regime
that you really don't like
with the minimum force possible,
and get out.
Don't worry about the rest of it.
If we need to come back in a decade,
we'll come back in a decade.
[Whitlock]
In December of 2001, General Tommy Franks,
who's the war commander for Afghanistan,
is summoned by Rumsfeld, who says,
"We need to go see President Bush
at his ranch in Crawford, Texas."
"You need to give him
the options on Iraq."
This is while the battle of Tora Bora
had just ended.
Still looking for bin Laden.
They're mopping up in Afghanistan.
Right away, same general is ordered,
"We need to escalate planning in Iraq."
[reporter]
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
met with NATO leaders to discuss ways
to fight the war on terrorism.
[Rumsfeld] The only way to deal
with the terrorist network that's global
is to go after it, where it is.
[Bush] Evidence from intelligence sources,
secret communications,
and statements by people now in custody
reveal that Saddam Hussein aids
and protects terrorists
including members of al-Qaeda.
We said very boldly, there is no
al-Qaeda relationships in Iraq.
And a lot of people said,
"Yeah. They are. They're all over Iraq."
"We might as well take care of them
while taking care of Afghanistan."
Flawed. Very flawed.
[Whitlock]
A lot of these neo-conservative,
conservative hawks
in the Bush administration
thought that in the first Gulf War
it was a mistake
to leave Saddam Hussein in power,
that the United States
should've taken him out ten years earlier
and had a chance to and missed it.
And so, they saw this as an opportunity
to do something about it.
[Soufan] We tried to convince
the whole world in the UN
that Saddam and bin Laden
are working on developing WMDs.
That was the speech of Colin Powell.
[Powell]
What I wanna bring to your attention today
is the potentially
much more sinister nexus
between Iraq
and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
A nexus that combines
classic terrorist organizations
and modern methods of murder.
[Soufan]
We knew at the time that this is baloney.
But then we thought to ourselves,
"Maybe they have intelligence
that we don't have."
And later on we knew
where the intelligence was coming from.
It was coming from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.
When he got caught, he was tortured
and tortured and tortured
to admit that bin Laden and Saddam
were working together to develop WMDs.
Secretary Powell said
that the information came
from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.
[Powell] I can trace the story
of a senior terrorist operative
telling how Iraq provided training
in these weapons to al-Qaeda.
Fortunately,
this operative is now detained.
And he has told his story.
[reporter]
Sixty-five thousand American troops
are now poised in the Persian Gulf.
If President Bush gives the order,
that number would explode
to 250,000 within three to four weeks.
[Cheney]
The United States made our position clear.
We could not accept the grave danger
of Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies
turning weapons of mass destruction
against us or our friends and allies.
[Bush] The policy of my government,
our government, this administration,
is regime change.
We will not allow
the world's worst leaders
to threaten us
with the world's worst weapons.
[Powell] We will not shrink from war.
[Cheney]
Inspections are not an end in themselves.
[Bush] A liberated Iraq could show
the power of freedom
to transform the Middle East,
by bringing hope and progress
to the lives of millions.
[reporter]
From San Francisco to Oregon to Tampa,
protesters rallied against war.
[woman] I really think
the war against Iraq is wrong.
[Whitlock]
There was almost unanimous public support
to take military action
in Afghanistan after 9/11.
Iraq was a very different situation.
We had not been attacked by Iraq.
There was a really impassioned,
even bitter, at times,
public debate over what to do
about Iraq, if anything.
[reporter] Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said flatly today
that however much the Iraqis may deny it,
they do have weapons of mass destruction.
[Perle] Weapons of mass destruction
in the hands of Saddam Hussein,
plus his known contact with terrorists,
including al-Qaeda terrorists,
is simply a threat too large
to continue to tolerate.
[Whitlock] There's no question at all
that journalists should've been
more skeptical
of the Bush administration's sales job
on the idea that there were
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
and that Saddam Hussein
was prepared to use them.
[Miller]
The US intelligence community believes
that Saddam Hussein has deadly stocks
of anthrax, of botulinum toxin,
which is one of the most virulent poisons
known to man.
[reporter] He has contacts outside
in Sudan and Afghanistan with terrorists.
They did, indeed, have a contact
between Atta and an Iraqi diplomat.
[Rumsfeld] We do have solid evidence
of the presence, in Iraq,
of al-Qaeda members.
[Cheney] Simply stated, there is no doubt
that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction.
[Bush] Well, the reason I keep insisting
that there was a relationship
between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda,
because there was a relationship
between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
[dramatic music plays]
[reporter]
Chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix,
has issued his final report.
He says UN inspectors found no evidence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
When we went to Iraq and we realize
all these things were baloney
all of it was false
they went back to Ibn Sheikh, said,
"Why'd you lie?"
He said, "Well, you were torturing me.
I gave you what you want."
[Whitlock] In May of 2003,
Rumsfeld goes to Kabul and declares
that major combat operations are over.
And this was the same day that Bush
went on the aircraft carrier off San Diego
to announce
"Mission Accomplished in Iraq."
So it was this orchestrated moment
for the Bush administration
to declare on the same day
that the wars were over, in effect.
And, of course, they were wrong.
[reporter] Crew in Iraq have been busy
washing the blood off the streets
after bombers killed three American
soldiers and nearly two dozen Iraqis.
The main reason we went
into Iraq at the time
was we thought he had
weapons of mass destruction,
It turns out he didn't.
It appears that there were not
weapons of mass destruction there.
[man] You said you knew where they were.
I did not. I said I knew
where suspect sites were, and we were
[man] You said you knew where they were,
near Tikrit, near Baghdad,
and north, east, south and west of there.
Those are your words.
[Whitlock]
The reason we went to Iraq, ostensibly,
was 'cause of Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction.
And that clearly turned out
to be completely false.
[reporter] The number of US military
deaths has surpassed 2,000.
[Whitlock]
Not only was it going badly in Iraq,
but the whole reason behind it was wrong.
Turned out to be not true.
[interviewer] It turns out,
none of the reasons stated or given
about going to Iraq turned out to be true.
I think that's a little bit
of a hyperbole.
There There It
It wasn't only
about weapons of mass destruction.
Um, yeah That
That wasn't the only reason.
[Bush] Saddam Hussein
is a homicidal dictator
who is addicted
to weapons of mass destruction.
[Powell] If he understood the crisis
that he has brought down
upon himself and his people
as a result of his developing
these weapons of mass destruction
[Cheney] He could decide secretly
to provide weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists for use against us.
[Card] They violated
the UN resolutions 16 times,
16 different UN resolutions.
They did not comply.
They didn't let weapons inspectors
So, there was a non-compliance
with at least 16 different resolutions
from the United Nations.
And President Bush felt
there should be a consequence to that.
[man] Strategic narcissism is the tendency
to define the world
only in relation to us,
and to assume that what we do
will be decisive
to achieving a favorable outcome.
And I think
while people oftentimes debate,
"Should we have invaded Iraq in 2003?"
I think it would be
more fruitful to debate,
"Who the heck thought it would be easy?
And why did they think it would be easy?"
Many of the policy decisions
that were made in that year,
from 2003 to 2004,
made what was already going to be
a very difficult situation much worse.
[Bush] I wish the intelligence
had been different, I guess.
[interviewer]
If the intelligence had been right,
would there have been an Iraq War?
[Bush] If he had
weapons of mass destruction,
would there have been a war?
- Absolutely.
- No. If you had known he didn't.
[Bush] I see what you're saying. Uh
You know, that's an interesting question.
That is a do-over that I can't do.
It's hard for me to speculate.
[crowd chanting]
[Hoffman] Looking back
on the past two decades,
I think it's hard to ignore that
the invasion of Iraq was, in some ways,
the move that began
to unravel the success we're having
in the war on terrorism.
It wasn't only the invasion
that played into bin Laden's narrative
that the West, led by the United States,
was waging war against Islam
and was going to serially invade
Muslim lands and occupy them
but I think even more so,
the images that were flashed
over TV screens
throughout the world of Abu Ghraib,
gave a material dimension to that,
that underscored US claims
that they were liberating Iraq.
[reporter] The military has described
these pictures of American soldiers
abusing Iraqi prisoners
as the misdeeds of a few,
but how many people knew what was going on
at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad?
[Hoffman]
The fact that we ended up invading Iraq
has, I think, been heralded by many people
as one of the most significant
foreign policy errors in American history.
[crowd shouting]
[Filkins] If you look back
and you ask yourself what went wrong,
to me, really, the biggest turning point
was the war in Iraq.
I mean, in 2001 and 2002,
Afghanistan was like
It was alive,
it was hopeful, it was happy.
I mean really, it was amazing.
But then what happened
was all the resources, all the attention,
a lot of troops,
particularly the Special Forces,
everything got moved out.
A couple years after that begins
the really powerful Taliban resurgence.
And those two events are not unconnected.
[artillery fire]
Allahu akbar!
Now you've got two bad wars
going on at once,
and the administration struggling
to cope with both at the same time.
And for the remainder
of the Bush administration,
Iraq was the focus
and Afghanistan was the afterthought.
[woman 1]
They didn't talk English at all around us.
[woman 2]
Your next-door neighbor could be anything.
Allahu akbar.
[Rauf] I was born in 1948.
I had a vision that said,
"Feisal, you're gonna go to America."
"You will live the rest
of your life there."
"And your role will be
to introduce Islam and its spirituality
in the American vernacular."
America at its ideal
is something very precious.
This idea of the equality
of all human beings
is something which is
a very profound truth
and something which actually expresses
the universal value
of all religions in the world.
[crowd shouting]
After 9/11, I discovered
it's at these moments of crisis
that we, who are seen as spokespeople
or leaders of our faith communities,
need to engage, to explain.
And I had a vision of establishing
an Islamic community center
that would be the Muslim version
of a YMCA.
With programs like sports,
lectures, talks, panel discussions
to bring people
from these various faith communities
to play together,
to get to know each other,
to have fun together, et cetera.
And from that comes a sense of community.
[reporter 1] There's a massive turnout
expected today at a rally protesting
the controversial Islamic center
that was recently approved to be built
just steps from Ground Zero.
[reporter 2] This battle
over the mosque at Ground Zero
[reporter 3] The mosque at Ground Zero
- [reporter 4] Ground Zero mosque.
- [reporter 5] Mosque on 9/11
[reporter 6] So-called Ground Zero mosque.
[announcer] The Ground Zero mosque.
[Rauf] Fox News knew
that calling us the "Ground Zero mosque"
would arouse the kind of passion
that they wanted to arouse.
Their arguments were not really coherent.
[reporter 1] There is some indication
that the building of this mosque
is actually
a Muslim Brotherhood operation.
[reporter 2] We're calling it
a 9/11 Sharia recruiting center,
because that's what he's doing.
[man 1] If they put a mosque up right here
in the shadow of the World Trade Center
before we've finished building it back up,
what's next?
[man 2]. No mosque.
Not here, not now, not ever.
[crowd] No mosque!
[woman] The mosque is inappropriate
for the suffering and the sensitivities
of the 9/11 families.
[crowd] USA! USA!
[Giuliani] All this is doing
is creating more division,
more anger, more hatred.
[man] It's a spit in our face.
Go build it uptown somewhere.
[woman] We should not be building
a mosque to reward the terrorists.
[wistful music plays]
[Rauf] I basically was forced
to give up that project.
[sighs] It was painful.
It was painful.
Because I also knew that
it would've been an enormous success
and it would have been a model
of how to build communities
across differences
celebrating our differences,
and yet creating a sense of a community.
Imagine if we can solve
this problem in America.
How much good would result out of it?
[jets roaring]
[Obama] We've spent over $600 billion
so far, soon to be a trillion.
We have lost over 4,000 lives,
we have seen 30,000 wounded,
and most importantly,
from a strategic
national security perspective,
al-Qaeda is resurgent,
stronger now than at any time since 2001.
We took our eye off the ball.
[Chandrasekaran] When Barack Obama
was campaigning for the presidency,
this young charismatic figure
who had never served in the military,
who had already been clear
and on the record
that the Iraq War was a mistake,
and intended, if elected,
to withdraw troops from Iraq.
He couldn't be seen
to be against both wars.
So for him, Iraq was the bad war
and Afghanistan was the good war.
[Obama] The people of Afghanistan
seek the promise of a better future.
Yet once again,
we've seen the hope of a new day
darkened by violence and uncertainty.
[Chandrasekaran]
He embraced the Afghan War
as the war that he'd get right.
[Obama] After eight years, some of those
years in which we did not have,
I think, either the resources
or the strategy to get the job done
it is my intention to finish the job.
[Chandrasekaran] But then what happens?
A few months after Obama is inaugurated,
the calculus in Afghanistan
shifts for him.
Stan McChrystal is sent out to Kabul,
and he's given orders
to assess the situation on the ground
and report back.
"What do you need
to turn the tide in Afghanistan?"
[McChrystal] It's very difficult,
and sometimes it requires patience,
and sometimes you have to be willing
to accept more risks to do it.
[Chandrasekaran]
He writes a highly confidential assessment
that includes a recommendation
for troop increases.
There's a high-end asking
for 80,000 to 90,000 additional troops.
And there's a mid-level
that's in the 30,000 range.
And it puts Obama in a box
because the president is on the record
as saying Afghanistan is the good war.
Afghanistan is the war
that he's going to turn around.
And now the top American general
says he doesn't just need 10,000 troops,
he needs tens of thousands of troops.
The additional 40,000 would take us
to 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan.
This is a huge commitment of resources
in the time when the economy
is struggling or even failing.
The new approach was largely centered
on the principles of counterinsurgency,
or COIN, if you will.
Terrible acronym, C-O-I-N.
[speaking indistinctly]
[man] Hello. How are you?
[interviewer] So how is that different
from counterterrorism?
Counterterrorism is more tactical.
It's about preventing attacks,
it's about killing or capturing
or arresting the bad guys,
just generally making it difficult
for terrorists to operate,
and hardening the potential targets
that terrorists might strike at.
Counterinsurgency is something different.
It's not only the prevention of terrorism
or prevention of attacks,
but it's the recalibration of societies
so that the ideology that gives birth
to the desire to join extremist movements,
to carry out these acts of violence,
is somehow channeled
in a different direction, or changed.
Basically you're trying
to re-makeover society
so that the thought processes
that give rise to terrorist recruitment
and radicalization are somehow tamped out,
or somehow eliminated
by these profound changes
that bring better governance,
education, greater literacy,
and a higher socioeconomic
standard of living.
[dramatic music plays]
[Chandrasekaran] This then
commences a deeply deliberative process
for the president
and members of his war cabinet.
They convene
in the White House Situation Room.
The table is filled
with Obama's top advisers.
On his side is vice president
at the time, Joe Biden,
Defense Secretary Bob Gates is there,
Hillary Clinton,
Secretary of State is around the table.
The CIA director is there.
And it's a pretty healthy back and forth,
with military leaders arguing
that a significant troop
commitment is necessary.
[Hoffman]
Biden and others suggested an alternative,
much more narrowly focused on al-Qaeda.
[ominous music plays]
It was a much more narrow objective.
[Chandrasekaran] Things could
get a little tense at moments.
There was really not
a whole lot of love lost
between the generals
and Vice President Biden.
And the president's decision
is to split the difference
between what his generals want
and what Vice President Biden
is counseling him to do.
But he tells the military two things.
One. That their mission has
to be narrowly focused.
The second is that he's only gonna
surge forces for about 18 months,
and then those troops
have to start coming home.
So he puts a clock on it.
[reporter] The president also sent
a high-powered salesforce to Capitol Hill,
where they were on the defensive
over the president's controversial order
to start pulling troops out by July 2011.
[McCain] It's the wrong impression
to give our friends and enemies.
It's the wrong impression
to give the men and women
who wanna go over there and win.
[McMaster] War is a contest of wills.
We gave the enemy the timeline
for our withdrawal.
We told the enemy years in advance
exactly the number of troops we'd have,
what the troops would and wouldn't do.
I mean, it's as if we wrote out
the script of the war
as we would like it to be,
and then gave it to our enemy
in the hopes that
they would adhere to the script.
Professionals
military officers like me
salute and execute.
And that's what we did.
[LaPorta] I didn't read the news.
I didn't know anything about politics.
I just knew we were attacked
and I didn't even know by who.
I didn't even understand
the political environment
around 9/11, you know?
It was just sort of the call to serve,
wanting to serve my country.
So, ten days
after I graduated high school,
I got into the Marine Corps.
Shipped off to Afghanistan.
[helicopter propellers beating]
The speech we got from our
batallion commander,
which was, you know, "The eyes
of the world are sort of upon you."
[commander] It's time
to change the game in Afghanistan,
to force the Taliban to react to us
instead of us reacting to them.
[LaPorta] He was trying to instill upon us
the gravity of the moment,
that this is an historic moment.
That this is going to be
a significant event in the Afghan War.
- [interviewer] You are part of history.
- And that I'm a part of history.
I'm sorry.
It would be the largest helicopter
insertion since the Vietnam War.
It's my first day of combat.
I remember every moment
of that helicopter ride.
You're packed in like sardines, you know,
everybody is sort of almost sitting
on top of each other.
You smell the diesel fuel.
You can't even hear yourself think.
In the back of our minds
were the speeches.
People telling us, you know, like
"Look around."
"Some of the people that you're
standing next to might not be here."
So, we knew
we were walking into a gunfight.
By 2009, the Taliban are ascendant.
They are on the march.
[man speaking indistinctly]
[Petraeus] We had these maps that
would show who controls what districts
within the different provinces
of Afghanistan.
And the districts are gradually starting
to turn the color that we coded it
for the Taliban,
or the other insurgent groups.
[gunfire]
The civil military campaign
on which we have embarked in Afghanistan
will unfold over the next 18 months.
And as many of us have observed,
the going is likely to get harder
before it gets easier.
[helicopter propellers beating]
[indistinct shouting]
[LaPorta] July 2nd, 2009.
It's quiet for the first 20 or 30 minutes
and then we started taking fire.
[soldier] Hey, keep moving!
Keep moving! We can't We can't stop.
Let's go! Keep going!
Keep going! Keep going!
[LaPorta]
They were engaging us at such a distance
that I couldn't even see
where I was getting shot from.
[soldier] Let's go!
They're in the top of that building.
[LaPorta] It sounds like firecrackers,
except they're very close to you.
[gunfire]
We don't know who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys.
The Taliban, they don't wear uniforms.
They blend in with the local populace.
- [man 1] Where are they shooting from?
- [man 2] They're shooting at us.
- [man 3] They're good at ghosting.
- [man 4] You can't see 'em.
[man 3] Can't see where they are.
[LaPorta] We get the call
that the PJs are coming in.
Which is pararescuemen.
If they were coming in
that meant that someone had been shot.
- [machine-gun fire]
- [men shouting]
- [soldier 1] Now!
- [soldier 2] I got him! I got him!
- [gunfire continues]
- [screaming, shouting]
[LaPorta] The person that
had gotten shot was Lance Corporal
I'm sorry.
It was Lance Corporal Charles Seth Sharp
of Adairsville, Georgia.
- [soldier 1] Come on, Sharp!
- [soldier 2] What's the ETA on that bird?
Let's go! Come on, Sharp! Come on, baby.
Sharp! Sharp!
His squad members are calling out his name
saying, "Sharp, wake up. Wake up, Sharp."
And he's not waking up.
Blood's pouring onto the dirt.
- [soldier 1] We gotta go. Come on. Go.
- [soldier 2] Sharp.
[LaPorta] Finally they pick him up
and these Marines run him down the road.
They push into a building.
The corpsmen start working on him.
Sharp bleeds out.
So he doesn't make it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[LaPorta] "What am I doing here?"
We had no idea what we were doing.
We didn't know what the objective was.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[LsaPorta] I didn't fire
a single round until July 31st of 2009.
[dog barks]
This guy steps out
from behind cover with an AK-47.
And it was clear as day.
So I aimed down on him low
and I literally walked my rounds onto him.
I've thought about that day a lot,
July 31st.
The person that I shot
didn't look any older than 15.
And I've thought
about what put us there in that moment.
Who was this person?
Were they really Taliban,
or were they forced to fight?
What if someone was invading my country?
Would I take a shot at them?
[Hekmatyar, in Pashto]
What's the difference between
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
and the American occupation?
Is there any difference?
Can we call that one an occupation
but not this one?
Afghans are fighting
the US presence in Afghanistan
with the same motivation
that they did the Soviets.
There's no difference
between the two jihads.
There's no difference
between the two occupations.
There is no difference
between the two resistances
against the occupations.
Yesterday,
they called us freedom fighters.
But when we do the same thing today,
they call us their enemies,
and they call us terrorists.
[explosion]
- [soldier] Is anybody hit?
- [distant explosion]
[man] The IED threat was so large
that on every tour, there were multiple
double, triple and quadruple amputees.
[reporter] Officials say
a US service member died Tuesday
from injuries he received
in an IED attack in Western Afghanistan.
His death comes
after seven other US service members
were killed in Afghanistan,
in three separate attacks on Monday.
[Anderson] Most of Helmand is mud,
and it's very easy to bury an IED,
which is basically a water jug
full of explosive powder,
and then a detonating cap,
and then something to ignite it.
Very simple to make.
The Taliban were claiming they could
bury them within three or four minutes.
They would cover the IED in earth,
pour water on top of it,
and 'cause the sun was so hot,
within five or ten minutes,
I could literally say
there's an IED right in front of you,
and there were no indicators whatsoever,
no signs that there was an IED there.
So every single step you took,
you were worried that
you might be stepping on an IED.
They were in doorways,
alleyways, ditches, they were everywhere.
[explosion]
You imagine so vividly
stepping on one of these things
and just having everything
blown apart and shredded.
It was a horrible feeling.
Because they had to be
so careful about IEDs,
it would take them hours
to travel two or three miles.
And the Taliban could
see them coming a mile off.
[explosion]
[indistinct chatter]
US Marines had
a whole assortment of explosives,
including a thing called a MICLIC,
which was like a 30-foot-long sock
with a hand grenade every couple of feet.
[explosion]
[soldier] That was pretty cool.
[Anderson] And that cleared
a short path for them to take.
[explosion]
That's how they were moving
through villages in Sangin.
Regularly destroying Afghan's property
just so they knew they could walk
another 30 or 40 feet safely.
[soldier]
It's definitely a hole, though.
Nice hole. Proud of myself.
[Anderson] That's why so many Afghans,
especially in Sangin, said to me,
"The Taliban don't do this."
"You guys have been
promising security for so long,
but it's getting worse."
And it was getting worse.
[Whitlock] I'm an investigative reporter
for The Washington Post.
I got a tip that Michael Flynn
had given an interview
to the inspector general
for Afghanistan about the war.
So we thought, "That's newsworthy.
I'd like to see what Flynn said."
Flynn had a reputation
for being very blunt and forthright.
We file a lawsuit in federal court.
This takes a while to wind its way
through, and they gave us the interview.
[Flynn] You know,
every measurable activity is failing.
Afghanistan is really better
today than it was?
You know, the Taliban
has completely retaken Marjah,
they're about to retake Lashkar Gah.
[Whitlock] He's withering in his criticism
of how things were really going,
and how the people in charge of the war
weren't being realistic
about how things were going.
[Flynn] And I'm telling you,
this is from 2002 until today.
Everybody did a great job,
we're all doing a great job.
Really?
So if we're doing such a great job,
why does it feel like we're losing?
[Whitlock] He's totally contradicting
what US officials
have been saying in public for years.
There was one story in public delivered
to the American people year after year
that things were going well.
[interviewer]
Is the US winning the war in Afghanistan?
[McChrystal] Well, I think in the last
year we've made a lot of progress.
[Gates] We have had a great deal
of success in achieving the mission.
[Obama]
We are on track to achieve our goals.
Even though these people knew all along
there were all these major problems
that were gonna prevent us from winning.
Then we find out the inspector general
had interviewed hundreds of other people
for the same program,
called "Lessons Learned."
We got into a long, drawn-out fight
over three years
with the inspector general.
But in the end, we pried loose notes
from more than 400 interviews,
a lot of transcripts of audio recordings
with all these people who'd been involved
at some level in the war.
[Dobbins] You know, we don't invade
poor countries to make them rich.
We don't invade authoritarian countries
to make them democratic.
We invade violent countries
to make them peaceful.
And we clearly failed in Afghanistan.
[explosion]
[Whitlock] There was a general
from Britain, General David Richards.
He was the NATO commander
of US NATO forces
in Afghanistan, 2006, 2007.
His interview said,
"We did not have a strategy."
"We did not have a proper strategy."
"We had a lot of tactics.
We didn't have a strategy."
He's the war commander
saying they didn't have a strategy.
Next general who replaces him,
General Dan McNeill,
US Army, four-star general.
"We didn't have a strategy."
"I tried to get people to tell me
to define winning before I went over."
He's talking about people
at the White House or at NATO.
And nobody could.
"We didn't have a strategy, we didn't have
a definition of what winning meant."
These are the generals
in charge of the war.
That's astounding to read those comments.
That is not what the American people
were being told year after year.
Complete opposite.
This is Chris Kolenda.
He's talking about corruption.
He says, "By 2006,
the Afghan government
had self-organized into a kleptocracy."
Kolenda says,
"I'd like to use a cancer analogy."
"Petty corruption is like skin cancer."
"There are ways to deal with it,
and you'll probably be just fine."
"Corruption within the ministry's
higher level is like colon cancer."
"It's worse, but if you catch it in time,
you're probably okay."
"Kleptocracy, however,
is like brain cancer. It's fatal."
And he's saying in 2006,
it was a kleptocracy.
It was at a fatal case of brain cancer.
[man shouting]
[Chandrasekaran] The American
exit strategy from Afghanistan
has been predicated upon
the development of Afghanistan's army.
All this sounds good on paper.
Let's help build them an army,
sort of on the model of our army
because that's what we know.
Problem is that it just didn't work
in Afghanistan.
[indistinct chatter]
[man] The very low level of literacy
in the Afghan population
meant that we undertook
in recruit training,
boot camp if you will, for the Afghans
training of the Afghan forces to be able
to read and count at a first-grade level.
That's how basic this was.
So we're undertaking
just the creation of a minimum of literacy
amongst the Afghan forces,
while we're continuing
to train those forces,
while we're continuing to push them
into the lead for combat operations.
[man speaking indistinctly]
[Anderson] I mean, they were smoking
joints in the middle of battles.
They weren't wearing protective equipment.
They were committing crimes regularly.
They were selling fuel, weapons,
and vehicles they'd been supplied with.
I went with them on visits to checkpoints,
where guys were so high on heroin
that they couldn't stand up.
Literally nodding out.
It was extremely common,
especially in the south and the east,
but all over the country,
for the Afghan army in some cases,
but certainly the Afghan police
to have chai boys, tea boys.
[dramatic music plays]
So US Marines would visit bases
and have meetings,
and these boys would literally
be serving them tea.
And these boys
were always 11, 12, 13 years old.
Often very pretty looking,
and it was absolutely known by everyone
that these boys were not only servants
during the day, but sex slaves at night.
They were young boys that'd been abducted
by the local police or national police
specifically for that purpose.
The narrative at the time was,
Taliban are the bad guys,
Afghan police and army and government
are the good guys, and we're winning.
But you speak to Afghans
and that's just not the case at all.
[man] We spent too much money, too fast,
in too small a country,
with too little oversight.
SIGAR is an office of inspector generals.
And our job is to oversee how the money
for reconstruction, only reconstruction,
in Afghanistan is spent.
So we investigate fraud, waste, and abuse.
We've been there
for 18 years in Afghanistan
and have spent more money
on reconstruction
than we did on the Marshall Plan
to rebuild all of Europe.
When I came in there,
most of the money had gone out the door
with very little oversight.
Out of that $140 billion,
about 80% has gone to security.
Paying the salaries of police,
hiring the police,
paying for uniforms, their bullets,
their guns, their hospitalization.
The local politicians,
the local warlords got all the contracts.
The average Afghan realizes
that the power brokers
are the ones who are being paid
by the US government, paid by the allies,
who are making a lot of money.
We found many contracts that didn't work
that were total disasters.
I think one of the biggest ones
was the purchase of a military
support airplane for the Afghans.
It's called the G-triple-two.
It's a small cargo airplane.
We spent about $400 million on the plane.
And we bought these
out of a boneyard in Italy.
The Italians offered it up.
They basically couldn't fly.
It was just a total disaster.
Basically, all of the airplanes
were turned into scrap.
Another example,
and this is an example of MilCon,
military construction,
was what we call "64K."
Sixty-four thousand square-foot building.
It was a headquarters building
built in Camp Leatherneck.
And the Marine Corps general
who was in charge of the surge
down in the south, told the military,
"I don't want it. I won't use it."
"I won't be here when it's finished.
Don't build it."
But the military did anyway. And I believe
that was a $36-million disaster.
- [interviewer] That never got used?
- Never got used.
[interviewer] There was an effort to
invest in Afghanistan's cashmere industry.
- [laughs] Yes.
- [interviewer] What's that all about?
[Sopko]
One of their concepts was to fly over
rare Italian white-colored goats
to breed with the host goats
and create, um happy goats.
Uh, and could improve
the cashmere industry.
They wanted a fast turnaround.
The person who was hired to run this,
who actually knew something
about breeding of goats
and the cashmere industry,
quit in disgust because she said
you can't do in a year or two years
what takes ten. As far as we could tell,
a lot of the goats had to be culled
because of illness.
Because either the way they were kept
or the environment, they couldn't survive.
Some were eaten.
And a year afterwards,
we couldn't find any of the goats.
[crowd singing]
We, being the US military,
decided to provide camouflage uniforms
to the Afghan army.
We allowed the general
in charge of the Afghan military
to pick the design
of the camouflage uniform.
He liked a design which is called,
I think, forest green.
Problem is, less than four percent
of Afghanistan is forest.
Secondly, he picked a design out of a book
that the US military
doesn't own the pattern.
We have to pay extra
to somebody else for the pattern.
So we bought and paid for,
I think 30, 40% above
what a normal uniform would cost,
we bought the wrong uniform
at higher cost for the Afghan military.
I would keep getting asked,
"So, how much money have we wasted?"
We had a group of individuals look at it
and say, "Well, was this waste?
"Was this fraud? Was this just stupidity?"
We only looked at,
I think, 70 billion or 60 billion.
And we came up with a figure of about 30%
of the money that we looked at,
we could actually identify
as having been lost
to fraud, waste, and abuse.
[Filkins] Karzai was the president
of the country for 13 years.
That's a long time.
It's too long.
Karzai came in, this very mild-mannered,
very kind of soft-spoken,
local leader from Kandahar.
And when he leaves 13 years later,
he's this kind of immensely powerful,
very arrogant, kind of potentate,
and presiding over
this spectacularly corrupt
kind of criminal enterprise which is,
you know, the Afghan government.
The Americans had a name for it.
You know, the military
has an acronym for everything.
And the acronym
for the Afghan government was VICE.
V-I-C-E, and that stood for "Vertically
Integrated Criminal Enterprise."
Karzai was, you know, no more or less
corrupt than the rest of them,
but he presided over this thing
and he kind of protected it.
We came to believe,
I think incorrectly, we the Americans,
that he was indispensable
and so we can't upset him.
We must give him what he wants,
give him what he needs, and so we did.
We created this monstrous kind of beast
that preyed on ordinary Afghans,
and basically drove them to the Taliban.
[McMaster]
We with our aid and our contracts,
empowered some of the biggest predators
in Afghan society.
Predators who had been responsible
for the breakdown of law and order
and security that led
to the rise of the Taliban.
[ominous music plays]
[Linehan] My brigade got tapped
for RC South, Kandahar.
And the closer we were getting,
the more real it got.
We met guys who were coming out
of the area that we were going into.
And I was talking to one of them
and he was just, like, super gaunt.
Face was, like, real ruddy.
And he said, "You guys are gonna
You're gonna lose people over there."
"Like, they're gonna
Some of you are gonna get killed."
And they were like, "If y'all are
looking to get in some shit,
you can get in some shit down here."
We get down to this little,
tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere.
The most rural place
that I've ever seen in my life.
It looked like a children's picture Bible.
Mud dwellings,
poppy fields, and grape rows.
The guys that we replaced
had gone off the reservation.
The cut-off sleeves, beards.
They, like, were operating
under very little supervision.
[reporter] If the charges are proven,
this was the platoon from hell.
Five American soldiers
accused of murdering Afghan civilians
just because they could.
Seven more involved in the cover-up.
Plus, mutilating corpses,
taking potshots at Afghan civilians,
smoking hash, and beating up
a private who blew the whistle.
[Linehan] They were the same guys
that had been killing civilians.
Killing them, and they were
mutilating their bodies.
And the locals knew.
And then it became, like,
an international news story.
We were going into, like, a situation
where Americans weren't very popular.
You know, it was never really explained
to us exactly what the mission was.
[dramatic music plays]
A few months into our deployment
we went into this village
that we were told was, like,
where the Taliban movement started.
On our way back, a suicide bomber walked
into our formation and just detonated.
[explosion]
He was dressed
like a normal local farmer guy
in a robe carrying a bunch of logs,
and he decimated
the middle part of our formation.
That was a big wake-up call for all of us.
It was, like, the moment
when everything got real.
He killed five people.
Three Americans and two Afghan soldiers.
It completely changed our whole approach
to soldiering in Afghanistan,
it changed our relationship
with the locals,
and it also killed any,
whatever idealistic idea we had
about, like, what was
being achieved in our deployment.
Now if civilians, like, walk to us,
even if they're saying hi,
point your gun at them.
Not gonna win hearts and minds that way.
I was taught as a teenager
that we're the best country in the world,
and the reason people would attack us
is because they're jealous of us,
because they hate us for our freedoms.
I commissioned as an officer in 2011.
When I was stationed in Afghanistan,
I really believed that we were there
to help the Afghan people.
But you can't take an institution
that's designed for violence
and use it to build up
healthy and safe communities.
I once saw
an infantry company commander cry.
And that's rare in the Army.
He was given the mission
"You need to build relationships
with folks in the area."
So he did.
He built all this trust for that year,
and had all these intense experiences.
And then he was ordered
to destroy everything that they had built.
[voice breaking] And he broke down
in his office because he knew
like I did, what a betrayal
that was to the Afghan people
that we were supposedly there
to help and to serve.
[man] Can you talk to her and let her know
I don't want the children to be scared?
You know what I mean?
Just let them know what we're gonna do.
[Linehan] Maybe at the start
of our deployment, we had a chance.
But certainly by the end
of the deployment, they did not like us.
They figured out that we didn't
really care about Afghanistan that much.
That's why you have this phrase
that was really embraced
by the post-9/11 generation of soldiers,
which is, "I do it for the guys
to my left and right."
"We're a band of brothers."
Oh, so that's your purpose.
You're fighting literally to just not die.
In that suicide bombing incident,
one of the youngest guys in our platoon
was among the soldiers who were killed.
[machine-gun fire]
Being a medic, 30 minutes
before when we were getting shot at,
this soldier said to me, like,
"Doc, I don't wanna die."
I mean, he was this really tough kid,
and it was like,
"Listen to me."
Like, "I don't want to die."
Thirty minutes later,
when I came upon his body,
it felt as if he had been saying,
"Don't let me die. Don't let me die."
[gunfire]
In the absence of any kind of
coherent narrative around these wars
it's easy for soldiers
to assume responsibility
for things that aren't their fault.
And to shrink the war down
to their own small, horrific experiences.
And it just became, like, my war.
And in my war, like, I was the bad guy.
And the narrative
that my brain ultimately settled on
was this story of a medic
who didn't save his friend.
[LaPorta] Our platoon sergeant,
he gathers the platoon and he says,
"You're about to go through
the hardest part, which is going home."
[laughs] And we're like, "What are you?"
All of us were like,
"What are you talking about?"
"The hardest part, like, is over."
You know, but he was, like, "The hardest
part is coming up, and it's gonna"
Jesus.
Um
"It's gonna be the going home."
And none of us knew
what the hell he meant when he said it.
And he was absolutely right.
He was absolutely right.
[dramatic music plays]
I didn't see it until later,
how much I had changed.
There are, to this day
there is a part of me
that died in Afghanistan
that I'll never get back.
[Linehan] I remember specifically,
like, one night in a guard tower
in Afghanistan,
realizing what it was, American freedom.
What did we mean
by "freedom" in this country?
And it was the freedom to pretend.
We feel entitled to our fictions.
[soldier 1] They're shooting
from the left side of that wall!
[soldier 2] I see 'em.
[Linehan] And when you go to Afghanistan,
all of it,
it's like the curtain comes down.
[explosion]
[machine-gun fire]
[soldier 3] We're gonna get
Kill that fucking gun!
[soldier 4] Get back! Go!
[slug shatters rock]
[soldier 5] Fuck!
- [man 1] Help!
- [man 2] Help me!
[soldier 6]
I finally got to make a phone call today
expecting it to be like,
"Oh, I miss you so much."
And all kinds of stuff.
No. I call home
and it's, "Yeah.
Everything's fine. I'm partying."
"I'm having a good life down here."
Doesn't even ask me how I'm doing.
So, that's when I realized
that people don't give a shit
about what we're doing here.
Like
no one even, like,
really mentions 9/11 anymore
and to me that's the whole reason
that I'm over here.
[man] This is the longest war
in American history.
And that's where we are.
Nobody can figure a way out.
During the early period
of the war in Afghanistan,
there was an opportunity
where bin Laden might have been located
in the Tora Bora region.
Once that opportunity was missed,
we never again came anywhere close
to achieving
that level of specific resolution
on where he might be located,
and how an operation might be conducted
to bring him to justice.
The CIA comes to the White House
around Labor Day in 2010,
and informs the president
that there is a compound of interest.
Questions are buzzing
around people's minds.
Might be, could be, Osama bin Laden.
[ominous music plays]
[reporter 1] Today, US soldiers raised
the American flag over Kandahar.
And it was not just any flag.
This flag was flown
over Ground Zero in New York City,
and was signed by relatives
of some of the victims
of the World Trade Center attacks.
[reporter 2] Meanwhile, on the streets
of a southern Afghan city,
life appears to be returning to normal
following the fall
of the hard-line Islamic regime.
[Chandrasekaran]
After Kandahar is liberated,
it's clear to the remnants
of the Taliban leadership
that's still in Afghanistan,
as well as the fragments
of al-Qaeda's leadership
that's still there,
that it's game over for them
in Afghanistan.
[man speaking Pashto] If Taliban
could have responded to America's demands
and had handed over bin Laden,
and if they had destroyed
al-Qaeda's military bases
inside Afghanistan,
and had not let them in the country,
it's obvious that the Americans
would have not entered Afghanistan.
[man 2, in Pashto]
Their defeat was inevitable.
We told the Taliban
that they would not be able to resist
against this invasion in the cities.
That they'd be forced
to abandon the cities.
That they should review their strategy.
That their military centers
were not capable of putting up a defense.
And that they would be easily crushed.
[in English] Most people assumed
the war was over at that point.
[Soufan] Unfortunately,
taking down al-Qaeda,
and taking down the Taliban regime,
and taking down Afghanistan,
and destroying the terrorist cells
around the world was just a step
for some people in Washington
to go to another war.
And it's in Iraq.
We start pulling resources away
from that legitimate battle that we had.
The battle to retaliate against 9/11.
To go to a country
that had nothing to do with 9/11.
[fighter jet flying]
[Bush] On my orders,
coalition forces have begun striking
selected targets of military importance
to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability
to wage war.
[dramatic music plays]
[man] In Afghanistan,
the end of 2001 was a period of optimism
and a period of potential,
where Afghanistan,
coming out of the dark years
from roughly 1996 until 2001.
And it's as though the screens were open,
the sunlight came in,
and Afghan people saw an opportunity.
[reporter]
For the first time, the sound of music,
banned during the Taliban regime,
was blaring again on the streets.
Long lines as men waited
to shave their beards,
mandatory under Taliban rule.
[in Pashto] A new hope was found
for the people of Afghanistan,
especially when
the international community came.
[reporter, in English] With the Taliban
gone, Kabul's people return.
Those who could not tolerate
the Taliban's intolerance
come home to make a life
in the capital again.
[woman] After the fall of Taliban,
we came to Kabul.
So I brought that burka to wear in Kabul,
but when I came to Kabul,
many women were not wearing burka
because Kabul was not controlled
by Taliban anymore.
I could go back in the streets
without the fear of being whipped
by Taliban,
and the sense was that
at least I can breathe as a human being.
[artillery fire]
[Chandrasekaran] The United States
military does a great job
at fighting wars, at vanquishing enemies.
It's not always so good
at figuring out what comes next.
And once the Taliban had been pushed
out of Kabul and Kandahar
and then out of the country writ large
the US military didn't really have a plan
for, "What then?"
How do you help this country
find some stability?
How do you help provide basic services?
How do you help bring this country
into the modern world?
[man] It was not clear, directionally,
what we wanted to do
and when we wanted to do it.
What we did know is we wanted
to be damn sure that,
whatever developed in Afghanistan,
it could never again serve as a base
for an attack beyond Afghanistan's borders
into our own homeland.
And that's where the disagreement started.
I felt that, uh
Well, you gotta get into nation-building
if you want that guarantee.
You gotta have communications lines
roads, good roads so you can move forces
around as you need to,
that farmers can get produce to market,
and so forth and so on.
Then you had the minimalist line saying,
"We don't care about any of this."
Uh, "Let's just not do any
Let's just get out."
This was the Rumsfeld doctrine.
Knock off a regime
that you really don't like
with the minimum force possible,
and get out.
Don't worry about the rest of it.
If we need to come back in a decade,
we'll come back in a decade.
[Whitlock]
In December of 2001, General Tommy Franks,
who's the war commander for Afghanistan,
is summoned by Rumsfeld, who says,
"We need to go see President Bush
at his ranch in Crawford, Texas."
"You need to give him
the options on Iraq."
This is while the battle of Tora Bora
had just ended.
Still looking for bin Laden.
They're mopping up in Afghanistan.
Right away, same general is ordered,
"We need to escalate planning in Iraq."
[reporter]
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
met with NATO leaders to discuss ways
to fight the war on terrorism.
[Rumsfeld] The only way to deal
with the terrorist network that's global
is to go after it, where it is.
[Bush] Evidence from intelligence sources,
secret communications,
and statements by people now in custody
reveal that Saddam Hussein aids
and protects terrorists
including members of al-Qaeda.
We said very boldly, there is no
al-Qaeda relationships in Iraq.
And a lot of people said,
"Yeah. They are. They're all over Iraq."
"We might as well take care of them
while taking care of Afghanistan."
Flawed. Very flawed.
[Whitlock]
A lot of these neo-conservative,
conservative hawks
in the Bush administration
thought that in the first Gulf War
it was a mistake
to leave Saddam Hussein in power,
that the United States
should've taken him out ten years earlier
and had a chance to and missed it.
And so, they saw this as an opportunity
to do something about it.
[Soufan] We tried to convince
the whole world in the UN
that Saddam and bin Laden
are working on developing WMDs.
That was the speech of Colin Powell.
[Powell]
What I wanna bring to your attention today
is the potentially
much more sinister nexus
between Iraq
and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
A nexus that combines
classic terrorist organizations
and modern methods of murder.
[Soufan]
We knew at the time that this is baloney.
But then we thought to ourselves,
"Maybe they have intelligence
that we don't have."
And later on we knew
where the intelligence was coming from.
It was coming from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.
When he got caught, he was tortured
and tortured and tortured
to admit that bin Laden and Saddam
were working together to develop WMDs.
Secretary Powell said
that the information came
from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.
[Powell] I can trace the story
of a senior terrorist operative
telling how Iraq provided training
in these weapons to al-Qaeda.
Fortunately,
this operative is now detained.
And he has told his story.
[reporter]
Sixty-five thousand American troops
are now poised in the Persian Gulf.
If President Bush gives the order,
that number would explode
to 250,000 within three to four weeks.
[Cheney]
The United States made our position clear.
We could not accept the grave danger
of Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies
turning weapons of mass destruction
against us or our friends and allies.
[Bush] The policy of my government,
our government, this administration,
is regime change.
We will not allow
the world's worst leaders
to threaten us
with the world's worst weapons.
[Powell] We will not shrink from war.
[Cheney]
Inspections are not an end in themselves.
[Bush] A liberated Iraq could show
the power of freedom
to transform the Middle East,
by bringing hope and progress
to the lives of millions.
[reporter]
From San Francisco to Oregon to Tampa,
protesters rallied against war.
[woman] I really think
the war against Iraq is wrong.
[Whitlock]
There was almost unanimous public support
to take military action
in Afghanistan after 9/11.
Iraq was a very different situation.
We had not been attacked by Iraq.
There was a really impassioned,
even bitter, at times,
public debate over what to do
about Iraq, if anything.
[reporter] Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said flatly today
that however much the Iraqis may deny it,
they do have weapons of mass destruction.
[Perle] Weapons of mass destruction
in the hands of Saddam Hussein,
plus his known contact with terrorists,
including al-Qaeda terrorists,
is simply a threat too large
to continue to tolerate.
[Whitlock] There's no question at all
that journalists should've been
more skeptical
of the Bush administration's sales job
on the idea that there were
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
and that Saddam Hussein
was prepared to use them.
[Miller]
The US intelligence community believes
that Saddam Hussein has deadly stocks
of anthrax, of botulinum toxin,
which is one of the most virulent poisons
known to man.
[reporter] He has contacts outside
in Sudan and Afghanistan with terrorists.
They did, indeed, have a contact
between Atta and an Iraqi diplomat.
[Rumsfeld] We do have solid evidence
of the presence, in Iraq,
of al-Qaeda members.
[Cheney] Simply stated, there is no doubt
that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction.
[Bush] Well, the reason I keep insisting
that there was a relationship
between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda,
because there was a relationship
between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
[dramatic music plays]
[reporter]
Chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix,
has issued his final report.
He says UN inspectors found no evidence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
When we went to Iraq and we realize
all these things were baloney
all of it was false
they went back to Ibn Sheikh, said,
"Why'd you lie?"
He said, "Well, you were torturing me.
I gave you what you want."
[Whitlock] In May of 2003,
Rumsfeld goes to Kabul and declares
that major combat operations are over.
And this was the same day that Bush
went on the aircraft carrier off San Diego
to announce
"Mission Accomplished in Iraq."
So it was this orchestrated moment
for the Bush administration
to declare on the same day
that the wars were over, in effect.
And, of course, they were wrong.
[reporter] Crew in Iraq have been busy
washing the blood off the streets
after bombers killed three American
soldiers and nearly two dozen Iraqis.
The main reason we went
into Iraq at the time
was we thought he had
weapons of mass destruction,
It turns out he didn't.
It appears that there were not
weapons of mass destruction there.
[man] You said you knew where they were.
I did not. I said I knew
where suspect sites were, and we were
[man] You said you knew where they were,
near Tikrit, near Baghdad,
and north, east, south and west of there.
Those are your words.
[Whitlock]
The reason we went to Iraq, ostensibly,
was 'cause of Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction.
And that clearly turned out
to be completely false.
[reporter] The number of US military
deaths has surpassed 2,000.
[Whitlock]
Not only was it going badly in Iraq,
but the whole reason behind it was wrong.
Turned out to be not true.
[interviewer] It turns out,
none of the reasons stated or given
about going to Iraq turned out to be true.
I think that's a little bit
of a hyperbole.
There There It
It wasn't only
about weapons of mass destruction.
Um, yeah That
That wasn't the only reason.
[Bush] Saddam Hussein
is a homicidal dictator
who is addicted
to weapons of mass destruction.
[Powell] If he understood the crisis
that he has brought down
upon himself and his people
as a result of his developing
these weapons of mass destruction
[Cheney] He could decide secretly
to provide weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists for use against us.
[Card] They violated
the UN resolutions 16 times,
16 different UN resolutions.
They did not comply.
They didn't let weapons inspectors
So, there was a non-compliance
with at least 16 different resolutions
from the United Nations.
And President Bush felt
there should be a consequence to that.
[man] Strategic narcissism is the tendency
to define the world
only in relation to us,
and to assume that what we do
will be decisive
to achieving a favorable outcome.
And I think
while people oftentimes debate,
"Should we have invaded Iraq in 2003?"
I think it would be
more fruitful to debate,
"Who the heck thought it would be easy?
And why did they think it would be easy?"
Many of the policy decisions
that were made in that year,
from 2003 to 2004,
made what was already going to be
a very difficult situation much worse.
[Bush] I wish the intelligence
had been different, I guess.
[interviewer]
If the intelligence had been right,
would there have been an Iraq War?
[Bush] If he had
weapons of mass destruction,
would there have been a war?
- Absolutely.
- No. If you had known he didn't.
[Bush] I see what you're saying. Uh
You know, that's an interesting question.
That is a do-over that I can't do.
It's hard for me to speculate.
[crowd chanting]
[Hoffman] Looking back
on the past two decades,
I think it's hard to ignore that
the invasion of Iraq was, in some ways,
the move that began
to unravel the success we're having
in the war on terrorism.
It wasn't only the invasion
that played into bin Laden's narrative
that the West, led by the United States,
was waging war against Islam
and was going to serially invade
Muslim lands and occupy them
but I think even more so,
the images that were flashed
over TV screens
throughout the world of Abu Ghraib,
gave a material dimension to that,
that underscored US claims
that they were liberating Iraq.
[reporter] The military has described
these pictures of American soldiers
abusing Iraqi prisoners
as the misdeeds of a few,
but how many people knew what was going on
at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad?
[Hoffman]
The fact that we ended up invading Iraq
has, I think, been heralded by many people
as one of the most significant
foreign policy errors in American history.
[crowd shouting]
[Filkins] If you look back
and you ask yourself what went wrong,
to me, really, the biggest turning point
was the war in Iraq.
I mean, in 2001 and 2002,
Afghanistan was like
It was alive,
it was hopeful, it was happy.
I mean really, it was amazing.
But then what happened
was all the resources, all the attention,
a lot of troops,
particularly the Special Forces,
everything got moved out.
A couple years after that begins
the really powerful Taliban resurgence.
And those two events are not unconnected.
[artillery fire]
Allahu akbar!
Now you've got two bad wars
going on at once,
and the administration struggling
to cope with both at the same time.
And for the remainder
of the Bush administration,
Iraq was the focus
and Afghanistan was the afterthought.
[woman 1]
They didn't talk English at all around us.
[woman 2]
Your next-door neighbor could be anything.
Allahu akbar.
[Rauf] I was born in 1948.
I had a vision that said,
"Feisal, you're gonna go to America."
"You will live the rest
of your life there."
"And your role will be
to introduce Islam and its spirituality
in the American vernacular."
America at its ideal
is something very precious.
This idea of the equality
of all human beings
is something which is
a very profound truth
and something which actually expresses
the universal value
of all religions in the world.
[crowd shouting]
After 9/11, I discovered
it's at these moments of crisis
that we, who are seen as spokespeople
or leaders of our faith communities,
need to engage, to explain.
And I had a vision of establishing
an Islamic community center
that would be the Muslim version
of a YMCA.
With programs like sports,
lectures, talks, panel discussions
to bring people
from these various faith communities
to play together,
to get to know each other,
to have fun together, et cetera.
And from that comes a sense of community.
[reporter 1] There's a massive turnout
expected today at a rally protesting
the controversial Islamic center
that was recently approved to be built
just steps from Ground Zero.
[reporter 2] This battle
over the mosque at Ground Zero
[reporter 3] The mosque at Ground Zero
- [reporter 4] Ground Zero mosque.
- [reporter 5] Mosque on 9/11
[reporter 6] So-called Ground Zero mosque.
[announcer] The Ground Zero mosque.
[Rauf] Fox News knew
that calling us the "Ground Zero mosque"
would arouse the kind of passion
that they wanted to arouse.
Their arguments were not really coherent.
[reporter 1] There is some indication
that the building of this mosque
is actually
a Muslim Brotherhood operation.
[reporter 2] We're calling it
a 9/11 Sharia recruiting center,
because that's what he's doing.
[man 1] If they put a mosque up right here
in the shadow of the World Trade Center
before we've finished building it back up,
what's next?
[man 2]. No mosque.
Not here, not now, not ever.
[crowd] No mosque!
[woman] The mosque is inappropriate
for the suffering and the sensitivities
of the 9/11 families.
[crowd] USA! USA!
[Giuliani] All this is doing
is creating more division,
more anger, more hatred.
[man] It's a spit in our face.
Go build it uptown somewhere.
[woman] We should not be building
a mosque to reward the terrorists.
[wistful music plays]
[Rauf] I basically was forced
to give up that project.
[sighs] It was painful.
It was painful.
Because I also knew that
it would've been an enormous success
and it would have been a model
of how to build communities
across differences
celebrating our differences,
and yet creating a sense of a community.
Imagine if we can solve
this problem in America.
How much good would result out of it?
[jets roaring]
[Obama] We've spent over $600 billion
so far, soon to be a trillion.
We have lost over 4,000 lives,
we have seen 30,000 wounded,
and most importantly,
from a strategic
national security perspective,
al-Qaeda is resurgent,
stronger now than at any time since 2001.
We took our eye off the ball.
[Chandrasekaran] When Barack Obama
was campaigning for the presidency,
this young charismatic figure
who had never served in the military,
who had already been clear
and on the record
that the Iraq War was a mistake,
and intended, if elected,
to withdraw troops from Iraq.
He couldn't be seen
to be against both wars.
So for him, Iraq was the bad war
and Afghanistan was the good war.
[Obama] The people of Afghanistan
seek the promise of a better future.
Yet once again,
we've seen the hope of a new day
darkened by violence and uncertainty.
[Chandrasekaran]
He embraced the Afghan War
as the war that he'd get right.
[Obama] After eight years, some of those
years in which we did not have,
I think, either the resources
or the strategy to get the job done
it is my intention to finish the job.
[Chandrasekaran] But then what happens?
A few months after Obama is inaugurated,
the calculus in Afghanistan
shifts for him.
Stan McChrystal is sent out to Kabul,
and he's given orders
to assess the situation on the ground
and report back.
"What do you need
to turn the tide in Afghanistan?"
[McChrystal] It's very difficult,
and sometimes it requires patience,
and sometimes you have to be willing
to accept more risks to do it.
[Chandrasekaran]
He writes a highly confidential assessment
that includes a recommendation
for troop increases.
There's a high-end asking
for 80,000 to 90,000 additional troops.
And there's a mid-level
that's in the 30,000 range.
And it puts Obama in a box
because the president is on the record
as saying Afghanistan is the good war.
Afghanistan is the war
that he's going to turn around.
And now the top American general
says he doesn't just need 10,000 troops,
he needs tens of thousands of troops.
The additional 40,000 would take us
to 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan.
This is a huge commitment of resources
in the time when the economy
is struggling or even failing.
The new approach was largely centered
on the principles of counterinsurgency,
or COIN, if you will.
Terrible acronym, C-O-I-N.
[speaking indistinctly]
[man] Hello. How are you?
[interviewer] So how is that different
from counterterrorism?
Counterterrorism is more tactical.
It's about preventing attacks,
it's about killing or capturing
or arresting the bad guys,
just generally making it difficult
for terrorists to operate,
and hardening the potential targets
that terrorists might strike at.
Counterinsurgency is something different.
It's not only the prevention of terrorism
or prevention of attacks,
but it's the recalibration of societies
so that the ideology that gives birth
to the desire to join extremist movements,
to carry out these acts of violence,
is somehow channeled
in a different direction, or changed.
Basically you're trying
to re-makeover society
so that the thought processes
that give rise to terrorist recruitment
and radicalization are somehow tamped out,
or somehow eliminated
by these profound changes
that bring better governance,
education, greater literacy,
and a higher socioeconomic
standard of living.
[dramatic music plays]
[Chandrasekaran] This then
commences a deeply deliberative process
for the president
and members of his war cabinet.
They convene
in the White House Situation Room.
The table is filled
with Obama's top advisers.
On his side is vice president
at the time, Joe Biden,
Defense Secretary Bob Gates is there,
Hillary Clinton,
Secretary of State is around the table.
The CIA director is there.
And it's a pretty healthy back and forth,
with military leaders arguing
that a significant troop
commitment is necessary.
[Hoffman]
Biden and others suggested an alternative,
much more narrowly focused on al-Qaeda.
[ominous music plays]
It was a much more narrow objective.
[Chandrasekaran] Things could
get a little tense at moments.
There was really not
a whole lot of love lost
between the generals
and Vice President Biden.
And the president's decision
is to split the difference
between what his generals want
and what Vice President Biden
is counseling him to do.
But he tells the military two things.
One. That their mission has
to be narrowly focused.
The second is that he's only gonna
surge forces for about 18 months,
and then those troops
have to start coming home.
So he puts a clock on it.
[reporter] The president also sent
a high-powered salesforce to Capitol Hill,
where they were on the defensive
over the president's controversial order
to start pulling troops out by July 2011.
[McCain] It's the wrong impression
to give our friends and enemies.
It's the wrong impression
to give the men and women
who wanna go over there and win.
[McMaster] War is a contest of wills.
We gave the enemy the timeline
for our withdrawal.
We told the enemy years in advance
exactly the number of troops we'd have,
what the troops would and wouldn't do.
I mean, it's as if we wrote out
the script of the war
as we would like it to be,
and then gave it to our enemy
in the hopes that
they would adhere to the script.
Professionals
military officers like me
salute and execute.
And that's what we did.
[LaPorta] I didn't read the news.
I didn't know anything about politics.
I just knew we were attacked
and I didn't even know by who.
I didn't even understand
the political environment
around 9/11, you know?
It was just sort of the call to serve,
wanting to serve my country.
So, ten days
after I graduated high school,
I got into the Marine Corps.
Shipped off to Afghanistan.
[helicopter propellers beating]
The speech we got from our
batallion commander,
which was, you know, "The eyes
of the world are sort of upon you."
[commander] It's time
to change the game in Afghanistan,
to force the Taliban to react to us
instead of us reacting to them.
[LaPorta] He was trying to instill upon us
the gravity of the moment,
that this is an historic moment.
That this is going to be
a significant event in the Afghan War.
- [interviewer] You are part of history.
- And that I'm a part of history.
I'm sorry.
It would be the largest helicopter
insertion since the Vietnam War.
It's my first day of combat.
I remember every moment
of that helicopter ride.
You're packed in like sardines, you know,
everybody is sort of almost sitting
on top of each other.
You smell the diesel fuel.
You can't even hear yourself think.
In the back of our minds
were the speeches.
People telling us, you know, like
"Look around."
"Some of the people that you're
standing next to might not be here."
So, we knew
we were walking into a gunfight.
By 2009, the Taliban are ascendant.
They are on the march.
[man speaking indistinctly]
[Petraeus] We had these maps that
would show who controls what districts
within the different provinces
of Afghanistan.
And the districts are gradually starting
to turn the color that we coded it
for the Taliban,
or the other insurgent groups.
[gunfire]
The civil military campaign
on which we have embarked in Afghanistan
will unfold over the next 18 months.
And as many of us have observed,
the going is likely to get harder
before it gets easier.
[helicopter propellers beating]
[indistinct shouting]
[LaPorta] July 2nd, 2009.
It's quiet for the first 20 or 30 minutes
and then we started taking fire.
[soldier] Hey, keep moving!
Keep moving! We can't We can't stop.
Let's go! Keep going!
Keep going! Keep going!
[LaPorta]
They were engaging us at such a distance
that I couldn't even see
where I was getting shot from.
[soldier] Let's go!
They're in the top of that building.
[LaPorta] It sounds like firecrackers,
except they're very close to you.
[gunfire]
We don't know who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys.
The Taliban, they don't wear uniforms.
They blend in with the local populace.
- [man 1] Where are they shooting from?
- [man 2] They're shooting at us.
- [man 3] They're good at ghosting.
- [man 4] You can't see 'em.
[man 3] Can't see where they are.
[LaPorta] We get the call
that the PJs are coming in.
Which is pararescuemen.
If they were coming in
that meant that someone had been shot.
- [machine-gun fire]
- [men shouting]
- [soldier 1] Now!
- [soldier 2] I got him! I got him!
- [gunfire continues]
- [screaming, shouting]
[LaPorta] The person that
had gotten shot was Lance Corporal
I'm sorry.
It was Lance Corporal Charles Seth Sharp
of Adairsville, Georgia.
- [soldier 1] Come on, Sharp!
- [soldier 2] What's the ETA on that bird?
Let's go! Come on, Sharp! Come on, baby.
Sharp! Sharp!
His squad members are calling out his name
saying, "Sharp, wake up. Wake up, Sharp."
And he's not waking up.
Blood's pouring onto the dirt.
- [soldier 1] We gotta go. Come on. Go.
- [soldier 2] Sharp.
[LaPorta] Finally they pick him up
and these Marines run him down the road.
They push into a building.
The corpsmen start working on him.
Sharp bleeds out.
So he doesn't make it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[LaPorta] "What am I doing here?"
We had no idea what we were doing.
We didn't know what the objective was.
[indistinct radio chatter]
[LsaPorta] I didn't fire
a single round until July 31st of 2009.
[dog barks]
This guy steps out
from behind cover with an AK-47.
And it was clear as day.
So I aimed down on him low
and I literally walked my rounds onto him.
I've thought about that day a lot,
July 31st.
The person that I shot
didn't look any older than 15.
And I've thought
about what put us there in that moment.
Who was this person?
Were they really Taliban,
or were they forced to fight?
What if someone was invading my country?
Would I take a shot at them?
[Hekmatyar, in Pashto]
What's the difference between
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
and the American occupation?
Is there any difference?
Can we call that one an occupation
but not this one?
Afghans are fighting
the US presence in Afghanistan
with the same motivation
that they did the Soviets.
There's no difference
between the two jihads.
There's no difference
between the two occupations.
There is no difference
between the two resistances
against the occupations.
Yesterday,
they called us freedom fighters.
But when we do the same thing today,
they call us their enemies,
and they call us terrorists.
[explosion]
- [soldier] Is anybody hit?
- [distant explosion]
[man] The IED threat was so large
that on every tour, there were multiple
double, triple and quadruple amputees.
[reporter] Officials say
a US service member died Tuesday
from injuries he received
in an IED attack in Western Afghanistan.
His death comes
after seven other US service members
were killed in Afghanistan,
in three separate attacks on Monday.
[Anderson] Most of Helmand is mud,
and it's very easy to bury an IED,
which is basically a water jug
full of explosive powder,
and then a detonating cap,
and then something to ignite it.
Very simple to make.
The Taliban were claiming they could
bury them within three or four minutes.
They would cover the IED in earth,
pour water on top of it,
and 'cause the sun was so hot,
within five or ten minutes,
I could literally say
there's an IED right in front of you,
and there were no indicators whatsoever,
no signs that there was an IED there.
So every single step you took,
you were worried that
you might be stepping on an IED.
They were in doorways,
alleyways, ditches, they were everywhere.
[explosion]
You imagine so vividly
stepping on one of these things
and just having everything
blown apart and shredded.
It was a horrible feeling.
Because they had to be
so careful about IEDs,
it would take them hours
to travel two or three miles.
And the Taliban could
see them coming a mile off.
[explosion]
[indistinct chatter]
US Marines had
a whole assortment of explosives,
including a thing called a MICLIC,
which was like a 30-foot-long sock
with a hand grenade every couple of feet.
[explosion]
[soldier] That was pretty cool.
[Anderson] And that cleared
a short path for them to take.
[explosion]
That's how they were moving
through villages in Sangin.
Regularly destroying Afghan's property
just so they knew they could walk
another 30 or 40 feet safely.
[soldier]
It's definitely a hole, though.
Nice hole. Proud of myself.
[Anderson] That's why so many Afghans,
especially in Sangin, said to me,
"The Taliban don't do this."
"You guys have been
promising security for so long,
but it's getting worse."
And it was getting worse.
[Whitlock] I'm an investigative reporter
for The Washington Post.
I got a tip that Michael Flynn
had given an interview
to the inspector general
for Afghanistan about the war.
So we thought, "That's newsworthy.
I'd like to see what Flynn said."
Flynn had a reputation
for being very blunt and forthright.
We file a lawsuit in federal court.
This takes a while to wind its way
through, and they gave us the interview.
[Flynn] You know,
every measurable activity is failing.
Afghanistan is really better
today than it was?
You know, the Taliban
has completely retaken Marjah,
they're about to retake Lashkar Gah.
[Whitlock] He's withering in his criticism
of how things were really going,
and how the people in charge of the war
weren't being realistic
about how things were going.
[Flynn] And I'm telling you,
this is from 2002 until today.
Everybody did a great job,
we're all doing a great job.
Really?
So if we're doing such a great job,
why does it feel like we're losing?
[Whitlock] He's totally contradicting
what US officials
have been saying in public for years.
There was one story in public delivered
to the American people year after year
that things were going well.
[interviewer]
Is the US winning the war in Afghanistan?
[McChrystal] Well, I think in the last
year we've made a lot of progress.
[Gates] We have had a great deal
of success in achieving the mission.
[Obama]
We are on track to achieve our goals.
Even though these people knew all along
there were all these major problems
that were gonna prevent us from winning.
Then we find out the inspector general
had interviewed hundreds of other people
for the same program,
called "Lessons Learned."
We got into a long, drawn-out fight
over three years
with the inspector general.
But in the end, we pried loose notes
from more than 400 interviews,
a lot of transcripts of audio recordings
with all these people who'd been involved
at some level in the war.
[Dobbins] You know, we don't invade
poor countries to make them rich.
We don't invade authoritarian countries
to make them democratic.
We invade violent countries
to make them peaceful.
And we clearly failed in Afghanistan.
[explosion]
[Whitlock] There was a general
from Britain, General David Richards.
He was the NATO commander
of US NATO forces
in Afghanistan, 2006, 2007.
His interview said,
"We did not have a strategy."
"We did not have a proper strategy."
"We had a lot of tactics.
We didn't have a strategy."
He's the war commander
saying they didn't have a strategy.
Next general who replaces him,
General Dan McNeill,
US Army, four-star general.
"We didn't have a strategy."
"I tried to get people to tell me
to define winning before I went over."
He's talking about people
at the White House or at NATO.
And nobody could.
"We didn't have a strategy, we didn't have
a definition of what winning meant."
These are the generals
in charge of the war.
That's astounding to read those comments.
That is not what the American people
were being told year after year.
Complete opposite.
This is Chris Kolenda.
He's talking about corruption.
He says, "By 2006,
the Afghan government
had self-organized into a kleptocracy."
Kolenda says,
"I'd like to use a cancer analogy."
"Petty corruption is like skin cancer."
"There are ways to deal with it,
and you'll probably be just fine."
"Corruption within the ministry's
higher level is like colon cancer."
"It's worse, but if you catch it in time,
you're probably okay."
"Kleptocracy, however,
is like brain cancer. It's fatal."
And he's saying in 2006,
it was a kleptocracy.
It was at a fatal case of brain cancer.
[man shouting]
[Chandrasekaran] The American
exit strategy from Afghanistan
has been predicated upon
the development of Afghanistan's army.
All this sounds good on paper.
Let's help build them an army,
sort of on the model of our army
because that's what we know.
Problem is that it just didn't work
in Afghanistan.
[indistinct chatter]
[man] The very low level of literacy
in the Afghan population
meant that we undertook
in recruit training,
boot camp if you will, for the Afghans
training of the Afghan forces to be able
to read and count at a first-grade level.
That's how basic this was.
So we're undertaking
just the creation of a minimum of literacy
amongst the Afghan forces,
while we're continuing
to train those forces,
while we're continuing to push them
into the lead for combat operations.
[man speaking indistinctly]
[Anderson] I mean, they were smoking
joints in the middle of battles.
They weren't wearing protective equipment.
They were committing crimes regularly.
They were selling fuel, weapons,
and vehicles they'd been supplied with.
I went with them on visits to checkpoints,
where guys were so high on heroin
that they couldn't stand up.
Literally nodding out.
It was extremely common,
especially in the south and the east,
but all over the country,
for the Afghan army in some cases,
but certainly the Afghan police
to have chai boys, tea boys.
[dramatic music plays]
So US Marines would visit bases
and have meetings,
and these boys would literally
be serving them tea.
And these boys
were always 11, 12, 13 years old.
Often very pretty looking,
and it was absolutely known by everyone
that these boys were not only servants
during the day, but sex slaves at night.
They were young boys that'd been abducted
by the local police or national police
specifically for that purpose.
The narrative at the time was,
Taliban are the bad guys,
Afghan police and army and government
are the good guys, and we're winning.
But you speak to Afghans
and that's just not the case at all.
[man] We spent too much money, too fast,
in too small a country,
with too little oversight.
SIGAR is an office of inspector generals.
And our job is to oversee how the money
for reconstruction, only reconstruction,
in Afghanistan is spent.
So we investigate fraud, waste, and abuse.
We've been there
for 18 years in Afghanistan
and have spent more money
on reconstruction
than we did on the Marshall Plan
to rebuild all of Europe.
When I came in there,
most of the money had gone out the door
with very little oversight.
Out of that $140 billion,
about 80% has gone to security.
Paying the salaries of police,
hiring the police,
paying for uniforms, their bullets,
their guns, their hospitalization.
The local politicians,
the local warlords got all the contracts.
The average Afghan realizes
that the power brokers
are the ones who are being paid
by the US government, paid by the allies,
who are making a lot of money.
We found many contracts that didn't work
that were total disasters.
I think one of the biggest ones
was the purchase of a military
support airplane for the Afghans.
It's called the G-triple-two.
It's a small cargo airplane.
We spent about $400 million on the plane.
And we bought these
out of a boneyard in Italy.
The Italians offered it up.
They basically couldn't fly.
It was just a total disaster.
Basically, all of the airplanes
were turned into scrap.
Another example,
and this is an example of MilCon,
military construction,
was what we call "64K."
Sixty-four thousand square-foot building.
It was a headquarters building
built in Camp Leatherneck.
And the Marine Corps general
who was in charge of the surge
down in the south, told the military,
"I don't want it. I won't use it."
"I won't be here when it's finished.
Don't build it."
But the military did anyway. And I believe
that was a $36-million disaster.
- [interviewer] That never got used?
- Never got used.
[interviewer] There was an effort to
invest in Afghanistan's cashmere industry.
- [laughs] Yes.
- [interviewer] What's that all about?
[Sopko]
One of their concepts was to fly over
rare Italian white-colored goats
to breed with the host goats
and create, um happy goats.
Uh, and could improve
the cashmere industry.
They wanted a fast turnaround.
The person who was hired to run this,
who actually knew something
about breeding of goats
and the cashmere industry,
quit in disgust because she said
you can't do in a year or two years
what takes ten. As far as we could tell,
a lot of the goats had to be culled
because of illness.
Because either the way they were kept
or the environment, they couldn't survive.
Some were eaten.
And a year afterwards,
we couldn't find any of the goats.
[crowd singing]
We, being the US military,
decided to provide camouflage uniforms
to the Afghan army.
We allowed the general
in charge of the Afghan military
to pick the design
of the camouflage uniform.
He liked a design which is called,
I think, forest green.
Problem is, less than four percent
of Afghanistan is forest.
Secondly, he picked a design out of a book
that the US military
doesn't own the pattern.
We have to pay extra
to somebody else for the pattern.
So we bought and paid for,
I think 30, 40% above
what a normal uniform would cost,
we bought the wrong uniform
at higher cost for the Afghan military.
I would keep getting asked,
"So, how much money have we wasted?"
We had a group of individuals look at it
and say, "Well, was this waste?
"Was this fraud? Was this just stupidity?"
We only looked at,
I think, 70 billion or 60 billion.
And we came up with a figure of about 30%
of the money that we looked at,
we could actually identify
as having been lost
to fraud, waste, and abuse.
[Filkins] Karzai was the president
of the country for 13 years.
That's a long time.
It's too long.
Karzai came in, this very mild-mannered,
very kind of soft-spoken,
local leader from Kandahar.
And when he leaves 13 years later,
he's this kind of immensely powerful,
very arrogant, kind of potentate,
and presiding over
this spectacularly corrupt
kind of criminal enterprise which is,
you know, the Afghan government.
The Americans had a name for it.
You know, the military
has an acronym for everything.
And the acronym
for the Afghan government was VICE.
V-I-C-E, and that stood for "Vertically
Integrated Criminal Enterprise."
Karzai was, you know, no more or less
corrupt than the rest of them,
but he presided over this thing
and he kind of protected it.
We came to believe,
I think incorrectly, we the Americans,
that he was indispensable
and so we can't upset him.
We must give him what he wants,
give him what he needs, and so we did.
We created this monstrous kind of beast
that preyed on ordinary Afghans,
and basically drove them to the Taliban.
[McMaster]
We with our aid and our contracts,
empowered some of the biggest predators
in Afghan society.
Predators who had been responsible
for the breakdown of law and order
and security that led
to the rise of the Taliban.
[ominous music plays]
[Linehan] My brigade got tapped
for RC South, Kandahar.
And the closer we were getting,
the more real it got.
We met guys who were coming out
of the area that we were going into.
And I was talking to one of them
and he was just, like, super gaunt.
Face was, like, real ruddy.
And he said, "You guys are gonna
You're gonna lose people over there."
"Like, they're gonna
Some of you are gonna get killed."
And they were like, "If y'all are
looking to get in some shit,
you can get in some shit down here."
We get down to this little,
tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere.
The most rural place
that I've ever seen in my life.
It looked like a children's picture Bible.
Mud dwellings,
poppy fields, and grape rows.
The guys that we replaced
had gone off the reservation.
The cut-off sleeves, beards.
They, like, were operating
under very little supervision.
[reporter] If the charges are proven,
this was the platoon from hell.
Five American soldiers
accused of murdering Afghan civilians
just because they could.
Seven more involved in the cover-up.
Plus, mutilating corpses,
taking potshots at Afghan civilians,
smoking hash, and beating up
a private who blew the whistle.
[Linehan] They were the same guys
that had been killing civilians.
Killing them, and they were
mutilating their bodies.
And the locals knew.
And then it became, like,
an international news story.
We were going into, like, a situation
where Americans weren't very popular.
You know, it was never really explained
to us exactly what the mission was.
[dramatic music plays]
A few months into our deployment
we went into this village
that we were told was, like,
where the Taliban movement started.
On our way back, a suicide bomber walked
into our formation and just detonated.
[explosion]
He was dressed
like a normal local farmer guy
in a robe carrying a bunch of logs,
and he decimated
the middle part of our formation.
That was a big wake-up call for all of us.
It was, like, the moment
when everything got real.
He killed five people.
Three Americans and two Afghan soldiers.
It completely changed our whole approach
to soldiering in Afghanistan,
it changed our relationship
with the locals,
and it also killed any,
whatever idealistic idea we had
about, like, what was
being achieved in our deployment.
Now if civilians, like, walk to us,
even if they're saying hi,
point your gun at them.
Not gonna win hearts and minds that way.
I was taught as a teenager
that we're the best country in the world,
and the reason people would attack us
is because they're jealous of us,
because they hate us for our freedoms.
I commissioned as an officer in 2011.
When I was stationed in Afghanistan,
I really believed that we were there
to help the Afghan people.
But you can't take an institution
that's designed for violence
and use it to build up
healthy and safe communities.
I once saw
an infantry company commander cry.
And that's rare in the Army.
He was given the mission
"You need to build relationships
with folks in the area."
So he did.
He built all this trust for that year,
and had all these intense experiences.
And then he was ordered
to destroy everything that they had built.
[voice breaking] And he broke down
in his office because he knew
like I did, what a betrayal
that was to the Afghan people
that we were supposedly there
to help and to serve.
[man] Can you talk to her and let her know
I don't want the children to be scared?
You know what I mean?
Just let them know what we're gonna do.
[Linehan] Maybe at the start
of our deployment, we had a chance.
But certainly by the end
of the deployment, they did not like us.
They figured out that we didn't
really care about Afghanistan that much.
That's why you have this phrase
that was really embraced
by the post-9/11 generation of soldiers,
which is, "I do it for the guys
to my left and right."
"We're a band of brothers."
Oh, so that's your purpose.
You're fighting literally to just not die.
In that suicide bombing incident,
one of the youngest guys in our platoon
was among the soldiers who were killed.
[machine-gun fire]
Being a medic, 30 minutes
before when we were getting shot at,
this soldier said to me, like,
"Doc, I don't wanna die."
I mean, he was this really tough kid,
and it was like,
"Listen to me."
Like, "I don't want to die."
Thirty minutes later,
when I came upon his body,
it felt as if he had been saying,
"Don't let me die. Don't let me die."
[gunfire]
In the absence of any kind of
coherent narrative around these wars
it's easy for soldiers
to assume responsibility
for things that aren't their fault.
And to shrink the war down
to their own small, horrific experiences.
And it just became, like, my war.
And in my war, like, I was the bad guy.
And the narrative
that my brain ultimately settled on
was this story of a medic
who didn't save his friend.
[LaPorta] Our platoon sergeant,
he gathers the platoon and he says,
"You're about to go through
the hardest part, which is going home."
[laughs] And we're like, "What are you?"
All of us were like,
"What are you talking about?"
"The hardest part, like, is over."
You know, but he was, like, "The hardest
part is coming up, and it's gonna"
Jesus.
Um
"It's gonna be the going home."
And none of us knew
what the hell he meant when he said it.
And he was absolutely right.
He was absolutely right.
[dramatic music plays]
I didn't see it until later,
how much I had changed.
There are, to this day
there is a part of me
that died in Afghanistan
that I'll never get back.
[Linehan] I remember specifically,
like, one night in a guard tower
in Afghanistan,
realizing what it was, American freedom.
What did we mean
by "freedom" in this country?
And it was the freedom to pretend.
We feel entitled to our fictions.
[soldier 1] They're shooting
from the left side of that wall!
[soldier 2] I see 'em.
[Linehan] And when you go to Afghanistan,
all of it,
it's like the curtain comes down.
[explosion]
[machine-gun fire]
[soldier 3] We're gonna get
Kill that fucking gun!
[soldier 4] Get back! Go!
[slug shatters rock]
[soldier 5] Fuck!
- [man 1] Help!
- [man 2] Help me!
[soldier 6]
I finally got to make a phone call today
expecting it to be like,
"Oh, I miss you so much."
And all kinds of stuff.
No. I call home
and it's, "Yeah.
Everything's fine. I'm partying."
"I'm having a good life down here."
Doesn't even ask me how I'm doing.
So, that's when I realized
that people don't give a shit
about what we're doing here.
Like
no one even, like,
really mentions 9/11 anymore
and to me that's the whole reason
that I'm over here.
[man] This is the longest war
in American history.
And that's where we are.
Nobody can figure a way out.
During the early period
of the war in Afghanistan,
there was an opportunity
where bin Laden might have been located
in the Tora Bora region.
Once that opportunity was missed,
we never again came anywhere close
to achieving
that level of specific resolution
on where he might be located,
and how an operation might be conducted
to bring him to justice.
The CIA comes to the White House
around Labor Day in 2010,
and informs the president
that there is a compound of interest.
Questions are buzzing
around people's minds.
Might be, could be, Osama bin Laden.
[ominous music plays]