[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]