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Oh, I didn't pay. Can you pay here?
[laughs]
[machine whirring]
Oh, my gosh. It took my card.
[laughs]
You might want to go back, dude.
So today I'm getting filmed
about my job at CIA.
I know you-you were, um, studying
about Afghanistan and--
[girl] All the wars.
All the wars, and you, um, were a spy.
[Maddox chuckles]
I worked with spies. It's true.
[indistinct chatter]
I'll never feel like an Afghanistan expert.
The war, it's so complex.
It's almost been cyclical with our U.S. government as well.
[turn signal clicking]
What is the mission? What is the goal there?
[car door closes]
♪ soft music ♪
And I got to know Afghans. I worked with Afghans.
I'm a woman, a mother.
My heart hurts for these people
because I just don't see how this ends.
♪♪♪
After the extraordinary sacrifice
of blood and treasure,
the American people are weary
of the longest war in American history.
This year we will bring America's longest war
to a responsible end.
I want the Afghan people to understand--
America seeks an end to this era of war and suffering.
[George W. Bush] We know from the history
of military conflict in Afghanistan,
it's been one of initial success
followed by long years
of floundering and ultimate failure.
We're not gonna repeat that mistake.
We welcome the distinguished interim leader
of a liberated Afghanistan, Chairman Hamid Karzai.
[applause]
[Bill Clinton] Osama bin Laden publicly vowed
to wage a terrorist war
against America from Afghanistan.
This will be a long ongoing struggle
between freedom and fanaticism.
[George H.W. Bush] Our commitment to the people there
would lead to a peaceful Afghanistan
with no more bloodbaths.
[Reagan] The goal of the United States
remains a genuinely independent Afghanistan,
free from external interference.
Massive Soviet military forces have invaded
the small sovereign nation of Afghanistan.
History teaches that aggression unopposed
becomes a contagious disease.
♪♪♪
I grew up thinking Afghanistan
was the biggest country in the world,
the most beautiful country in the world,
the most developed country in the world,
with a huge passion for my country
because it was very much
the same, uh, thing my father shared.
♪♪♪
In a very romantic way,
my father was always talking about the Afghanistan
that he had experienced.
They would go on the weekends to restaurants.
They would take a walk in the park.
But these were all those, uh, fairy tales to us.
Mm, we never experienced Afghanistan that way.
♪♪♪
One thing in common about many of these fights in my country
is that, unfortunately,
it's our soil that is being used for various wars
between the global powers.
♪♪♪
The world simply cannot stand by
and permit the Soviet Union
to commit this act with impunity.
[gunfire]
The Soviets killed about ten percent of the population.
[camera shutter clicking]
It was a genocide,
and the military was not doing anything about it,
but I heard that, uh, the agency did.
[Bearden] The CIA director says,
"I want you to go out there and win this."
[Coll] I was the Washington Post correspondent
in, uh, South Asia, so the Afghan War
was pretty much the biggest story on my beat.
Pakistan had an immediate refugee flow.
They went to their ally, the United States, and said,
"We've got all these rebels
who are coming into our country as refugees.
They want to liberate their country
from Soviet occupation.
We, the Pakistan government, are inclined to help them,
but we could use your support as well."
And so we were told to get busy
and try to figure out what was happening
with these guys called the mujahideen.
[Sageman] People knew that the CIA
was supporting the Afghans.
They could never know how.
[Schroen] So we then decided we would use the Pakistanis
as our surrogates to support the mujahideen.
[gunfire]
[man] speaking native language
[Reagan] The Soviet presence in Afghanistan
is a major impediment
to improved U.S.-Soviet relations,
and we would like to remove it.
[Schroen] We were putting in a variety of weapons systems
into the hands of the mujahideen.
The United States started to provide
these Stinger antiaircraft missiles
to equip the rebels to fight the Soviets as equals.
They started knocking Soviet aircraft out of the sky
by the hundreds.
[Bergen] That changed the war,
and it showed that the U.S. government was serious
about not just inflicting some damage on the Soviets
but actually getting them to leave Afghanistan,
which is what they did.
[Bearden] And as soon as Boris Gromov rode on that tank
out to the middle of Friendship Bridge
from Afghanistan,
I hit send on a cable that was typed out using Xs
to make a big, "We won."
♪♪♪
I wrote an article and put the name on it,
"Graveyard of Empires."
My point was, it's very easy getting in there,
but getting out is immensely difficult,
and winning is...
very, very questionable.
Whatever winning means,
you usually don't get it in Afghanistan.
♪♪♪
[horns honking]
Kabul has changed a lot in the last several years.
It used to be that you could
kind of walk around the streets
and pick up a cab
and go to a restaurant, have a nice meal.
If you're a foreigner, that's basically all gone.
♪♪♪
The Taliban have done a campaign of attacking
anywhere Westerners gather, and we're in an armored car
because it's regarded as too dangerous now,
which is a pity because Kabul is an amazingly beautiful
and vibrant city.
The city is now brimming with up to six million people,
and it's a very different Kabul than the one I remember
under the Taliban or during the Civil War.
♪♪♪
The United States ended its official presence
in Afghanistan today, two weeks before
Soviet troops are scheduled to complete their pullout.
Our State Department correspondent
Bill Plante reports.
[Plante] A marine guard hauled down the stars and stripes
at the U.S. embassy in Kabul
as the remaining handful of diplomats
prepared to get out of Afghanistan
as soon as weather permits.
The U.S. joins other Western nations
which have temporarily pulled out,
fearing chaos after Soviet troops
end their ten-year occupation.
I first got into, uh, Afghanistan
by crossing the-the frontier
between Pakistan and Afghanistan
with a group of mujahideen in mid-1989,
just as the Soviet Union had, uh, withdrawn.
♪♪♪
I was working with an aid agency,
trying to help both with refugees in Pakistan
and inside Afghanistan.
People were readying themselves for the fight
over who would claim Afghanistan
now that the-the Soviets had got out.
♪♪♪
America made a fatal mistake.
The Afghan thing was almost totally forgotten.
The result was that an Afghanistan
so overloaded with ordnance and awash with money
slipped into its own devices.
[Coll] From a war correspondent's perspective,
by the time I was traveling around
in the war in the early '90s,
it had become a nasty civil war.
[Constable] The thing I remember most
was how lonely it was.
Kabul was like a ghost city.
You could stand in a major intersection,
which now has endless clogged traffic jams,
and see no one and hear nothing but bicycle spokes
and horse carriage bells.
It was very haunting.
[man] yelling in native language
[Constable] There was rape. There was robbery.
Buildings were rocketed and shot all the time.
People were terrified.
[Semple] Out of the fight, street by street in Kabul,
replicated in the sort of districts of the country,
we got the Taliban movement.
I can recall the precise moment
in which I learnt of the Taliban movement.
I was at a garden party, and a posh Englishman
told me about this supposedly Islamic student movement
which had just taken over a swath of territory in Kandahar
and was chasing after these money-grubbing, gun-wielding,
you know, commanders left over from the mujahideen,
hanging them up from trees and posts
and stuffing money in their mouths,
and he told me,
"Michael, this looks like the next big thing,"
um, and he was right.
[Coll] The Taliban advertised themselves
as a kind of purifying force, a cleansing force
that would reunify Afghanistan under the banner of Islam.
[Schroen] That was very attractive to the Pakistanis.
They didn't want Afghanistan to be a threat,
and so the Pakistani government
threw their weight militarily
and financially behind the Taliban,
and by early 1996,
they controlled three-fourths of Afghanistan.
[Coll] They often conquered without firing a shot.
They would just ride into a town
holding Korans in the air
or waving the flags of, uh, their movement or of Islam,
and whole garrisons would just, uh, change sides.
[Constable] The gratitude began to fade
and be replaced with something else
when it became clear that the Taliban wanted
to enforce an extremely restrictive version of Islam.
I went to Afghanistan as a journalist,
I think, five or six times,
and that meant that you had to get a visa
from the Taliban government,
which meant that you were there under very limited
and very strict conditions, and there were many conditions.
Number one, you had to completely cover yourself
except your face.
Number two, you couldn't meet with women.
Number three, you couldn't take pictures of anything.
I had a camera, a small camera,
hidden under my voluminous scarf,
and we stopped at a bakery to buy some bread,
and I saw this boy's face through the window,
and I just ducked into the bakery,
and I got out my camera,
and I just took this one single picture of him,
and then I left.
♪♪♪
There was no music, no-no TV, no phone system to speak of.
Women were locked inside their houses.
Girls were not educated. The economy totally collapsed.
♪♪♪
The deal was, you get the right to life,
and you give up pretty much all other rights.
♪♪♪
[Rahmani] This is the pictures of all the ambassadors
that served here.
As you can see, there are no women.
So here, I would come as a shock factor,
but that's where the change happens.
Starting '92,
I found the country in the worst possible shape.
There was this, uh, ambience
of darkness and fear
and gloom.
♪♪♪
We have to wear burkas.
We never wore burkas in my entire life.
I was a young teenager, and I thought, "Why?
Why should I be like this?"
I told my family that I am going to sew
the two big shawls that we had
so that I will have a very big sheet,
and I would fully cover myself,
but I am not gonna wear a burka.
It symbolized so much oppression to me.
♪♪♪
In 2001,
there were 900,000 students in school,
and the number of girls?
Zero.
We did not want our generations to be illiterate.
So, if somebody knew math,
they would quietly tell
the neighborhood, uh, boys and girls
that, "We will teach you math,"
but that always had to be hidden.
[Schroen] We said, "When you guys are victorious
and the Soviets are gone, we're finished.
We turn the country over to you.
We're not here forever."
♪♪♪
When that happened, we basically walked away.
♪♪♪
When the Taliban took over, most people said,
"There's nothing we can do about it,
so we're not gonna do anything.
We're not even gonna worry about it."
Our interest really was when bin Laden went there,
rather than anything that's gonna change Afghanistan.
♪♪♪
[Saleh] I come from a rural family.
Uh, we were one of the destitute families,
uh, due to war,
and, uh, when I became able enough,
I went back to the valley,
and I joined, uh, the forces fighting the regime.
[woman] At the age of 19,
he was already a seasoned war veteran
in charge of rebuilding villages
bombed in the fighting.
[Saleh] Couple of years later,
I was given intelligence assignment.
So, since '97, I was assigned
to handle the overall relationship
with the, uh--with the CIA.
The strategic aspect of the relationship
was telling them what is terrorism,
what is bin Laden, what is al-Qaeda,
and what type of threat does it pose
to U.S. interest in the wider region
and how we should, uh, cope with it.
Of course, they were not very receptive
of our strategic analysis.
They were showing very little interest
to the hosts of al-Qaeda.
They were showing very, very little interest
to the plight of the Afghan people,
who were suffering under that terrorist regime.
♪♪♪
[Bergen] One thing Afghans don't need a lot of help with
is fighting, uh, and, uh--
but a number of Arabs, like Osama bin Laden, came,
and they were very idealistic.
They weren't very large in number.
They weren't very military effective.
They didn't have any fighting experience.
But they got together,
and he founded al-Qaeda over the course
of a couple of weekends in Pakistan
in August of 1988.
It was a very secretive organization.
[Coll] They really didn't have very many places to go,
and Afghanistan was one place where bin Laden thought
he could establish al-Qaeda's headquarters.
[Bergen] In '96, I read a State Department report
about bin Laden
saying he's financing Islamic extremism.
He's recruited all of these Arabs from around the world,
and he could be a problem.
So I went to my bosses at CNN.
I said, "Let's try and interview this guy."
You know, this is, like, the hostage video.
Yeah. The hostage video.
♪♪♪
There we are. We look almost human.
speaking native language
No one really paid any attention until 1998,
when al-Qaeda blew up two American embassies
within nine minutes of each other.
Two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today
at the U.S. embassies in the East Africa nations
of Kenya and Tanzania.
[woman] U.S. officials say the bombings
have all the fingerprints of Middle East terror.
[Bergen] That is when it became clear
that bin Laden and al-Qaeda
was really a big deal and could--
not only were spouting all this anti-American rhetoric
but trying to kill, you know, large numbers of Americans.
[Bill Clinton] There is convincing information
from our intelligence community
that the bin Laden terrorist network
was responsible for these bombings.
[Grenier] Bin Laden was constantly moving,
and we were using Afghan tribal networks
to report on his travels and his whereabouts.
Our tribal contacts came to us,
and they said, "Look, he's in this location now.
When he leaves, he's gonna have to go through
this particular crossroads,"
and so what they proposed was to bury
a huge cache of explosives underneath those crossroads
so that when his convoy came through,
they could simply blow it up.
And we said, "Absolutely not."
We were risking jail if we didn't tell them that,
because the CIA had a so-called lethal finding
that had been signed by President Clinton
which said that we could engage in
"lethal activity" against bin Laden,
but the purpose of our attack on bin Laden
couldn't be to kill him.
We were being asked to remove this threat
to the United States
essentially with one hand tied behind our backs.
[Martin] I was a fairly junior officer,
and as al-Qaeda grew into a worldwide presence,
we were very sensitive
and very aware of this growing phenomenon.
It's not like they were playing.
The threat was real.
And if President Clinton had taken action
and killed Osama bin Laden,
there wouldn't have been a 9/11.
If there wouldn't have been a 9/11,
there wouldn't have been Afghanistan.
If there wouldn't have been Afghanistan,
there probably wouldn't have been Iraq.
What would the world be like?
♪♪♪
[Maddox] It still gets to me, living in our nation's capital
and every building has significance...
...especially driving by here.
Something I'll never forget, shaped my whole life.
♪♪♪
I had finished my first week at Georgetown.
They have a National Security Studies program there.
I was driving around in the area,
getting used to it after that first week,
and then a bunch of cars stopped in front of me,
and people got out and started screaming and pointing.
The plane had just hit the Pentagon.
♪♪♪
When I came to D.C., I actually didn't think
I would stay,
but counterterrorism developed into an entire field
after that day, and I got swept up in it.
♪♪♪
[Coll] On 9/11, it was clear who the enemy was,
and the Bush administration went straight into Afghanistan,
where al-Qaeda was,
where bin Laden was, and tried to attack them,
both for the purpose of responding to 9/11
but also to try to disrupt any planning
that al-Qaeda might have under way
for a follow-on attack.
[man] The Taliban have now made it clear
that they will not bow to American pressure.
At a chaotic press conference at their embassy in Islamabad,
they threatened holy war if attacked
and rejected President Bush's demand
to surrender Osama bin Laden.
Are you willing to hand Osama bin Laden
to the United States or not?
No, no, no, no.
[Mohseni] Well, for the Taliban,
there was an opportunity for them to distance,
uh, the movement from these groups and individuals,
and we were hoping they wouldn't,
because, uh, for us, it was an opportunity
to actually rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.
And as we expected, they stuck to their guns,
and they did not in any way compromise,
and that was the beginning of the end for them,
at least in that period.
[Schroen] When 9/11 happened, they called me in.
Basically, they said, "Will you take the first team in?
We got to--we want to put a team together."
I said, "Oh, God,
everybody in the United States wants to do this,
and they're giving me the job,
be the first people to hit back at bin Laden?"
I said, "Yeah, better believe it."
[Bernsten] When I entered, you know, I had my orders.
I had an operational directive to execute on the ground.
Number one, destroy the Taliban because they're in the way.
We have to get at al-Qaeda.
Number two, kill every member of al-Qaeda
that you can find on the battlefield.
Number three, find and kill bin Laden.
♪♪♪
[Schroen] Well, when we left,
chief of Counterterrorism Center said--
We met him on the morning we were getting ready to leave,
and he said, "I'm gonna give you your orders now.
Once the Northern Alliance is ready
and they go into Kabul, we want you and your team
to go in with them
and capture bin Laden and his lieutenants.
Then what I want you to do is, when you capture those guys,
I want you to cut their heads off,
and the lieutenants, I want you to put their heads on pikes
and display them and photograph them,
and bin Laden, I want you to take his head
and put it on dry ice in a box and ship it back,
so I'm gonna take it to the president to see."
So I look at the deputy.
He looks at me, and I-I'm saying,
"Is this guy serious?"
I said, "Okay, maybe we could cut off their heads.
Maybe. I don't know."
I said, "I doubt it, but maybe we could."
I said, "And we can certainly make pikes out in the field.
You know, that's not hard."
I said, "But where am I gonna find dry ice
in Afghanistan?"
♪♪♪
[Coll] Vice President Cheney
said fairly soon after the attacks,
"We're gonna go over to the dark side."
And, historically, when presidents have wanted
to go over to the dark side, they've asked the CIA to do it.
[Cheney] A lot of what needs to be done here
will have to be done quietly without any discussion,
using sources and methods, uh,
that are available to our intelligence agencies.
[Gossman] The first trip I took was in 1994,
Human Rights Watch.
The war had continued.
The Soviets had gone, but the war was continuing,
which was sort of-- came to be the story
over the many years I went to Afghanistan.
Despite whatever political changes happened,
the war almost had a life of its own and continued.
The first boots on the ground after 9/11 were the CIA,
and very quickly, they began working with
and bolstering militia groups to work with,
and those groups were designed,
recruited, and trained
to go after leading al-Qaeda or Taliban figures.
[Coll] The CIA was transformed as an institution by 9/11.
Out of that came the, uh, structure
that is now notorious...
the black sites, the enhanced interrogation techniques,
the waterboarding, and the rest.
When I joined the agency in the 1980s,
only the bad guys used those techniques on us.
Unlike the FBI,
the agency really did not have any skill in interrogation,
especially hostile interrogation.
That was something new.
[Martin] I can honestly say
I know what attacks were stopped.
I know how hard the folks worked,
and I also know they weren't emotional.
People weren't having fun waterboarding people.
[Maddox] I would never say
that I am in support of torture
or anything in that regard,
but there was definitely a push technically
and in human intelligence
to get as much information as possible,
and you have to put yourself back
in that particular time in history.
When I think about...
when I think about the kids
and the-and the-and the- and the women and children
and good Americans who are still alive
because of what we did, you know what I say?
I say, "Fuck history.
Fuck history."
As far as that program, I slept good at night.
[Gossman] I did a briefing on it
for all the ambassadors in Kabul,
and I had said
that the torture that had been described
by people who had investigated the secret detentions,
the salt pit, the case of people being left out,
dying of hypothermia, and the rest of it,
these kinds of torture and secret detentions
had been known in the Soviet times.
It was shocking for them to be coming up again
in post-2001 Afghanistan.
The Americans didn't come to the briefing,
but they came immediately afterwards
and wanted to see me.
When I was approached by one of them,
he was so angry, he was shaking.
The very fact I dared compare those abuses
to what had happened with the Soviets
had infuriated him,
and I'm just like-- that's what infuriated him,
not the fact that they happened
but that I had made a comparison with the Soviets.
The way the-that war has been fought,
the counterterrorism war,
it's largely shaped where we are today.
It was always the CIA's war.
It was in the '80s, the '90s, and it was after 2001.
♪♪♪
[Bernsten] We enter Kabul. It's 12 November.
I know bin Laden's fled.
Watch bin Laden move south,
which was down to Tora Bora,
and then pursued right away.
Tora Bora is a very remote mountainous part of Afghanistan
on the border with Pakistan.
It's an area that he knew very well.
He'd been going through that area during the '80s,
fighting the Soviets.
It's an area-- he liked being there.
He, uh--he had, like, a vacation home there,
which wouldn't be my first choice of vacation spot.
[Bernsten] We knew that bin Laden
was moving with a group of about 1,000 people.
Right away they said, "Okay, we're gonna go pursue him."
I said, "Do it. Send them in." We go up.
They get up on top of a promontory mountain piece,
and then down below,
there's bin Laden and his huge element.
Our team had a SOFLAM,
Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Mechanism,
which allowed them to target
and do 56 hours of air strikes
and just hammer them.
We bombed the bejesus out of the place.
[Bernsten] We destroyed most of their gear,
their radios, their vehicles.
They had tanks. They had all sorts of stuff.
They were trying to get up into position.
We wrecked it all on the ground before they could get up there
and killed a bunch of them.
Bin Laden wrote his will at Tora Bora.
He thought he was gonna die.
He thought this was the end.
♪♪♪
But it wasn't.
♪♪♪
[Bernsten] So, after our guys go up, do the bombing,
the initial bombing, that first four guys come out,
and one of those guys had been a former Delta Force guy,
have him brought right back.
He's the one that says to me, "Gary,
we are going to need U.S. forces."
♪♪♪
[Bergen] The CIA requested 800 Rangers,
but that request was turned down by the U.S. Army.
♪♪♪
What Gary Brunson was arguing for, I think,
were very large numbers of troops, uh,
to go into the valleys,
and, frankly, I-I thought that much of what he was advocating
at the time was not gonna be effective.
Gary probably had a little bit more enthusiasm than judgment.
♪♪♪
That's bullshit.
They weren't accustomed to having to make decisions
as rapidly as I was forcing
because I knew the enemy was going to escape.
I didn't have a choice.
♪♪♪
On the 16th of December,
bin Laden and his-his-his guys left the mountains.
♪♪♪
They just walked across into Pakistan.
They got on motorcycles and just headed out,
and it took us all those years later before we found him.
♪♪♪
We were building the country.
We were training the Afghan military.
We were paying for building of facilities
with the U.S. military.
We had turned it over to State Department and say,
"Okay, now you build a new nation.
You teach them democracy, how do they handle elections.
Do all that stuff."
[Rahmani] As things progressed,
it was a dream come true,
and it was hard to believe
that we had got a second chance to live.
♪♪♪
That was when I really explored the country.
That was when I started
not only to travel to every corner of Kabul
but also to over 15 provinces.
It was a utopia.
[Barker] My first trip over to Afghanistan
was in January of 2002.
There's a reason that most of the, like, correspondents
that came up during that time were women.
Men had a very hard time,
particularly in the early days,
doing stories about women,
and women were a fascinating story
and an important story in Afghanistan.
[Waldman] My first stories in Afghanistan
were about what life had been like
for the women under the Taliban
because they were finally able to speak freely.
♪♪♪
There were women who had been forcibly married
to the Taliban.
There were teachers and doctors and young women
who had grown up
during those five years of not being free at all.
[Barker] As people finally had access to the outside world,
the culture was changing before our very eyes.
♪♪♪
[Mohseni] I left Afghanistan when I was 12.
I had not been to the country for a very long time.
But the need to come back, uh,
was very strong for not just me
but for a lot of other Afghans.
I was a banker, and my brother was a lawyer,
and the other brother was a finance person,
and our sister was a marketing person.
And in 2002,
we secured the first private license
for a radio station.
[laughter on radio]
[woman] speaking native language
[laughter]
[indistinct chatter on radio]
♪♪♪
[Mohseni] It was about music. It was about jokes.
It was men and women just having a conversation.
♪♪♪
But it's ironic that...
how many people are enemies of fun.
The conservatives at the time,
they were very suspicious.
We're a bunch of young people in this house, basically,
no security whatsoever,
and people would literally knock on our doors and say,
"We hate you guys."
But so the radio was a success,
and we thought the natural progression
would be to launch a television station.
[man] speaking native language
[Mohseni] We saw the good news on day one,
and we came up with all sorts of programs
that we could produce quickly.
[applause]
And then we started to do really big stuff,
like the Idol format with Afghan Star.
♪ upbeat rock music ♪
singing in native language
speaking native language
[Mohseni] When we first launched,
this whole idea of voting for a winner,
they couldn't believe that we would stick to our principles
in terms of, like, counting people's text messages.
But what was extraordinary
was how quickly people accepted it.
[cheers and applause]
That's what's interesting with the media.
We just give people sort of a glimpse of what's possible.
[woman] This weekend in Afghanistan,
the voice of the people was finally heard.
[woman] Precious ballots from Afghanistan's
only presidential election in 5,000 years
poured into counting centers around the country.
[indistinct chatter]
[Bergen] There hasn't been a presidential election
in the United States since 1900 where 70 percent
of the population able to vote voted.
♪ soft music ♪
[Constable] I went to villages and schools
where people were voting,
and the feeling in those rooms
was one of pride and hope
and belief that things were getting better
and that the system that was being created
would help the country.
[applause]
[Karzai] The Afghan people, by coming out and voting,
have given the last
defeat to terrorism.
[Cheney] The tyranny is gone,
the terrorist enemy is scattered,
and the people of Afghanistan are free.
[Schroen] I thought, "If things keep on like this,
we can win this in a couple of years."
♪♪♪
[McRaven] All the books you see here
are about special operations missions,
and they don't always go well.
Uh, you know, when I think about Desert One,
it didn't go well.
When I think about a lot of these, uh, books
that are here on World War II missions,
they didn't go well.
So I actually drew on a lot of the lessons
because I wanted to make sure whatever plan
that I constructed for the mission took into account,
you know, the successes and why we were successful
and-and, frankly, the failures
and how we avoid those failures.
I was sent overseas to run
the Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan,
and from a military standpoint,
Afghanistan appeared to be kind of in a caretaker status.
Please.
We clearly have moved to a period of stability
and stabilization and reconstruction.
[McRaven] So we shifted our focus in 2003
as we began the invasion of Iraq.
[mortar fires]
- [man] Jesus! - [man 2] Whoo!
[Martin] Big tanks, big toys,
that was the new war,
and our allies became confused at,
what were our real objectives?
We will stay on task until we've achieved our objective,
which is to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
"What?
They haven't hurt you. Saddam hasn't hurt you.
He doesn't like al-Qaeda. There's not al-Qaeda in Iraq."
[man] Whoa!
[Grenier] I was called into a meeting
with the CIA director,
and he told me that he wanted me
to head up the CIA effort in Iraq.
And the most, uh, experienced senior officers
who were in a position, you know, to deal
at a political level, uh,
very quickly left, uh, the Afghan theater.
We're worried about terrorism, and next thing, we wake up,
and-and resources are gone.
♪ dramatic music ♪
[Kilcullen] When I was in the State Department
Counterterrorism Bureau,
the most important resource that was in short supply
was policy-maker attention,
and I said, "We actually have to focus
on local-level governance,
reforming the Afghan corruption system,
and giving the Afghan military
a series of really basic capabilities,"
because by that point, we were so sucked into the war in Iraq
that we just didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it.
[man] yelling in native language
[Kilcullen] And the Taliban in Pakistan
and their cell groups in Afghanistan
began to exploit that.
♪♪♪
I, uh, was involved in some of the early,
early stages of talking with the Taliban
about how to ensure that they didn't join an insurgency.
They actually found some way of reconciling
with the new regime.
I mean, it happened, like, in my sitting room
in, you know, the house in Islamabad, um,
you know, friendly discussions.
[men] speaking native language
[Semple] My ability to talk with Taliban today
is based upon actions which I have taken every day
since I crossed over the border in '89.
They can check my reputation,
work out how discreet I am,
and reckon if I am duplicitous,
and I'm sort of, like, doing the same
when I'm talking with them,
because, um, one w-one way or another,
both sides of the relationship have got to trust each other
to be able to-to go forward.
♪♪♪
In the wake of 9/11,
the Taliban leadership wanted surrender terms
to live respectably in their homes,
recognizing the authority of the new government
which had been imposed by the Americans.
Those terms were available. They were torn up.
Instead we got increasingly stories of Taliban
who'd tried to go home to their villages in Afghanistan
either getting arrested or giving up,
crossing the border,
going over to-to Pakistan
ready for the next chapter.
♪♪♪
The Taliban start to reform the organization, uh,
saying that, "We have been excluded from this new setup.
We're gonna have another go."
[man] Tonight Frontline reports
on the return of the Taliban.
[gunfire]
♪♪♪
There's some, uh, ICOM chatter saying
that the Taliban are looking at us right now.
[alarm blaring]
♪ somber music ♪
♪♪♪
[man] speaking native language
♪♪♪
[Waldman] For Americans,
the original story of this long war
was we were saviors.
♪♪♪
We had gone in and done a good thing...
and people were ecstatic to be free again.
But the reality is, I don't think
it was ever as clean as we wanted to believe.
♪♪♪
[Barker] The first inflection point that I noticed
happened in May 2006
when a U.S. military convoy crashed into a crowd of people,
and they killed about 14 people.
[crowd yelling]
♪♪♪
[gunfire]
speaking native language
♪♪♪
[crowd yelling]
[Constable] People in these crowds
were shouting angry anti-American slogans,
and I went, "What?
What has happened here?"
♪♪♪
That was the first time I realized
that there was as much resentment
against the international presence
as there was gratitude or hope.
♪♪♪
[Barker] There was this building resentment
that Afghans had against corruption
and civilian casualties,
and both of those could be tied directly back to America.
We were pouring in so much money
that corruption was all but inevitable
with no checks and balances,
and then with civilian casualties,
let's just say any civilian casualty in general,
the Taliban would immediately put out
press releases locally saying,
"This is America doing this to you."
They'd make up things, and it was very effective.
[crowd yelling]
[gunfire]
[woman] Well, today's riots showing just how fragile
our relationship is with Afghanistan,
a key player in the War on Terror.
Now, is it just a small group of troublemakers at work here,
or are the Afghan people simply ungrateful?
♪♪♪
[Constable] Afghans have this streak of defiance
against the world because of history.
There was the Russians and the fact
that the Americans had abandoned Afghanistan before.
There's always in the back of the minds of Afghans
that-that suspicion of ulterior motives.
♪♪♪
[Saleh] United States got distracted,
and they wanted to show
that Afghanistan was still this good story working
and it is rosy,
and they were not...
they were not listening to us, you know?
♪♪♪
[Grenier] I had great misgivings
because I felt that the CIA
needed to stay engaged
with key political players inside Afghanistan,
but I could see very quickly
that there was very little appetite, uh, for doing that.
It's not that we didn't know Afghanistan
was going badly after that.
We did, but we couldn't do anything about it,
because by the time Iraq started to go bad,
Afghanistan was also going bad,
and we were caught in a war in two fronts
without the resources to deal with both.
♪♪♪
[George W. Bush] America's men and women in uniform
took away al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan,
and we will not allow them to reestablish it in Iraq.
So I have committed more than 20,000
additional American troops to Iraq.
The agreement lays out a framework
for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq,
a withdrawal that is possible
because of the success of the surge.
[man] yelling in foreign language
[man] While Iraq has dominated the headlines,
the less-publicized fight in Afghanistan
has intensified.
[Obama] My fellow citizens, our nation is at war
against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,
and for those who seek to advance their aims
by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents,
you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
[cheers and applause]
For six years, Afghanistan has been denied
the resources that it demands because of the war in Iraq.
It is in our vital national interest
to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Well, I think that in the last year,
we've made a lot of progress.
[Petraeus] Two thousand ten will be a year
that will see progress
and a reversal of Taliban momentum.
[woman] Well, the financial and human cost
of the War in Afghanistan
has gone up every year over the past five years,
more than 1,600 U.S. troops.
This past year in Afghanistan was the deadliest yet
for American troops.
[Petraeus] Momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan
since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country.
I wish I could tell you that this war was simple,
but that's not the way of counterinsurgencies.
They are fraught with both successes and setbacks,
which can exist in the same space
and in the same time,
and I believe the campaign is on track.
♪♪♪
[Coll] If you ask the question, "Why are we here?"
as President Obama did when he came into office in 2009,
"Why are we fighting in Afghanistan?"
well, his best experts gathered and advised him,
"Sir, we're here because al-Qaeda
is still a threat to the United States.
Bin Laden's still alive. We got to finish the job."
[McRaven] Every year, there was this sense
that if we did X, Y, and Z,
maybe we could finish up the war.
[Obama] Tonight I can report to the American people
and to the world that the United States
has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,
the leader of al-Qaeda.
[McRaven] And this will go down
as one of the great missions
in the history of the intelligence community.
As I was planning the mission, you had to have surprise.
We had surprise. You had to have speed.
We're coming in by helicopters.
And you had to have purpose,
and God knows these-these, uh, SEALs and soldiers had purpose.
They were going after the most wanted man in the world.
It was about who we are as Americans.
This man and his people had attacked New York
and Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.,
and we had an obligation
to spend as long as it took to bring him to justice.
♪♪♪
[Coll] We did get bin Laden.
Al-Qaeda is diminished.
It's scattered. It's under pressure.
We have been killing people with our drones
for a good while now,
so why are we still here?
♪♪♪
[engine whirring]
♪♪♪
As the war in Afghanistan went on and on,
the CIA then got into the secret air war business,
which is really what the drone campaign was.
It was a secret air war
designed to do what the United States
was not prepared to do through conventional means.
The CIA was given charge of that
because it wasn't going to be declared.
It wasn't going to be run by the Air Force
or by the special operations groups at the Pentagon.
It was, uh, covert, and so that added to the sense
that the CIA was-- became an agency at war.
[Bergen] It's a new way of war.
The United States government wouldn't even acknowledge
this was really happening,
and-and when they did acknowledge it,
privately they would say,
"There's no civilian casualties."
Well, that wasn't true.
[man] In Afghanistan,
NATO is investing a U.S. air strike on Thursday
that may have killed a child in Helmand Province.
[Raddatz] Whatever the benefit of the drone strikes,
they have created enormous resentment
among some here in the region
who view the strikes as another sign of American arrogance.
[Bergen] And you can see, this is by administration,
so under George W. Bush,
there were relatively limited strikes
except right at the end of his second term.
Then under Obama, it spikes up hugely.
So it was really President Obama
who hammed it up very dramatically.
You can see the estimated total number of casualties
is up to almost as high as 3,000
on the outer bounds.
Myself and my colleagues at New America
have been doing this for about a decade.
We felt that there was some data out there,
print media stories that we could assemble and sort of say,
"What's going on? Who's being killed?
How many strikes are there?"
And so we-we began to kind of collate all this.
[Martin] When it came to the Predator,
we also had our forces somewhere in the area.
So there would be a shot,
and then people were gonna move in
to do the sensitive site collection,
and then-- so, you know, it was very human
because you knew who were down there.
[Bergen] Afghanistan, I think, was the early laboratory
of what this more paramilitary CIA became,
so a drone program that went from surveillance drones
to actually killing people.
I would say, actually, the principal reason the CIA
is in Afghanistan is, in a way, the drone program,
because after 9/11, al-Qaeda didn't remain in Afghanistan.
They fled into Pakistan, uh,
and the Taliban regrouped there.
[Martin] If I'm trying to deploy six or 12 men
trying to climb up a mountain
and get this guy when I can do this easier
and save our men and women's lives and--
I'll go--I'll take the Predator any day, any day.
♪♪♪
[Constable] In the early years and really even through,
I would say, for the first ten years,
you could travel anywhere.
The capital was lively. The capital felt free.
Girls were going to school.
Girls were going to college.
It certainly felt like a place that was churning with change.
♪♪♪
[Musazai] My father told me about American University,
and he said, "It's the best university in Afghanistan."
He always wanted me to-to get education...
...so I joined the university.
[Sedney] The vision for people here
is not a sixth-century fundamentalist Islamic state.
It's a 21st-century advanced country,
and they want to get there.
♪♪♪
We can play a role in that,
in helping them achieve their dreams.
My father never want me to come to this university
because of the risks involved with the name "American" on it,
and seeing the situation,
how badly the war is going on in Afghanistan,
he never wanted me to come here.
But I told him I have goals in my life,
and I've already did good in my high school,
and I had passion to get an education.
[Musazai] I was not worried about security.
I had heard about explosions on news,
but I had not experienced something like that.
[Constable] As the Taliban insurgency became stronger,
there was this growing pattern of attacks
that began to make everybody realize
that the Taliban really were back
and really were causing trouble and really were starting
to put the brakes on progress of different kinds.
Many evenings, I would go to my favorite bar,
this Lebanese café, and I used to go there
probably at least once a week for many, many years.
When you live and work in a war zone,
you need a place like that.
You need someplace you can go
and really feel yourself, be yourself,
and that's pretty much the only place I felt that way.
And then the Taliban attacked that café,
shot dead everyone in it, including the owner.
[woman] The scenes of this restaurant
are really quite incredible--
people crouched on top of one-one-one another,
underneath tables,
gunned down inside there.
So that seems to have been what has happened.
Anybody who was injured seems to have been likely
to have been outside the restaurant,
potentially in cars waiting outside
or about to enter the restaurant.
Anybody inside seems unlikely to have been able
to escape easily from the gunmen.
That's the moment I sort of thought,
"What's left here, you know? Why are we even here?"
I remember feeling it. I remember thinking that.
♪♪♪
[Maddox] When I had a temporary assignment
in Afghanistan,
I could electrically feel the dangers around me.
There we go.
I've definitely known people that have died.
- You want milk? - No.
[Maddox, voice breaking] The night before I left,
I was sitting with my younger daughter,
and she gave me this bracelet that she made,
and I promised her I'd wear it every day
and every night that I was away, and I did.
[sighs] I never took it off.
And when I would leave the wire or go to the less safe
or secure and fortified areas...
I looked down at that bracelet,
and I would definitely question what I was doing.
"Am I a responsible mom?
Does my work here really make a difference
in this seemingly endless war?"
♪♪♪
I managed analytic teams that covered Afghan politics
and Afghan economics.
At that time, there was a U.S.-military narrative
that things were getting better in the country
and that the Taliban was failing,
and that was leading to the discussions of drawdown.
[Obama] Two thousand fourteen,
we have agreed that this is the year
we will conclude our combat mission in Afghanistan.
But things on the ground were evolving
and telling a little bit of a different story.
The 2015 takeover of Kunduz,
that's the first provincial capital
the Taliban had taken since before 2001.
It was a big deal.
[mortar fires]
[man] The battle for Kunduz
started before dawn,
as Afghan government troops tried in vain
to hold back the advance of the Taliban.
After the West's trillion-dollar war
against the Taliban,
its fighters still pose a potent threat.
[Maddox] They took over the city for about two weeks.
They released a lot of prisoners--
a lot of them were Taliban fighters--
and displaced tens of thousands of people
in the process.
It was a total propaganda win for them.
[translator] God willing, this is our hope,
to build a religious school,
to build a bridge, a road, a sharia-based government.
This is why we came out,
and this is what we fought for--
so that sharia law is enforced here.
Just holding the city-- that's all they needed to do
was just take it and hold it, show of force
to show their fighters and the world
that they were there and still capable--
was quite significant.
♪♪♪
[Gossman] What happened in Kunduz caught people off guard
when the Taliban actually managed
to gain control of the city,
and I think what happened then was a kind of panic.
The psychological blow and the PR repercussions
of having lost a very important northern city
were enormous,
and so then there was a kind of
real scrambling to-to regain control,
and the American military made a really horrific error.
[man] Breaking news overnight--
U.S. warplanes may have killed nine local staffers
at a medical clinic run by Doctors Without Borders.
The attack was in the provincial city of Kunduz.
The U.S. apparently was trying to dislodge Taliban insurgents
who had seized the city on Monday.
[Gossman] An American gunship targeted the hospital
and circled it and hit it repeatedly.
What's concerning, maybe, about how it unfolded
was that the Afghan forces operating there
had raided the hospital some point previously,
looking for wounded Taliban,
and were apparently quite unhappy with the fact
that MSF treated wounded Taliban in the facility,
whereas MSF, like any medical-care provider,
say that they treat anyone,
regardless of political affiliation.
[man] Our staff have reported
that there were no armed combatants
or active fighting in
or from the compound prior to the air strike.
[translator] Doctors were about to take me
to an operating theater when the bomb hit.
There were flames all around me.
I saw patients and doctors burn to death.
♪♪♪
[Gossman] Forty-three people died,
quite a number of them staff and patients...
including patients on the operating table at the time,
including children.
I mean, it was just horrific.
♪♪♪
And some of these forces that have carried out
these raids on medical facilities
are the ones we identified as being backed by,
trained, recruited by the American CIA.
♪♪♪
That hospital bombing after the siege of Kunduz
was pretty devastating.
A lot of innocent civilians were killed,
and war is war, and you can always say that,
but when innocent lives are lost,
it really does make it difficult to continue the work.
I saw a lot of horrific images,
and it's hard to deal with that
and learn how to process that,
but I learned and found a way to...
store those images
and those experiences in my heart without it destroying me.
You wake up in the morning, and you brush it off,
and there's always an emergency and something pressing
that's happening, and you don't have time
to necessarily process during the day,
so you just...you just go 150 miles per hour.
You go until you crash again.
[Sedney] It was seven o'clock at night
when the most number of students and faculty
and staff were here, and it was just
when people were going to their last class of the day.
The attackers loose off a couple of volleys.
One of them goes this way
and heads towards our escape route.
Another one goes in here to our main classroom building.
At that time, this-these doors were open.
We didn't have the-the heavy doors we have on them now.
It was, uh, the month of August
in 2016,
and I was expecting
that it's my last semester.
I was done with my classes,
and I went to offer the evening prayer,
and we were about to leave the mosque.
I heard some people shouting.
My friend immediately closed the door,
and she said-- she-she calls me Bresh--
and she said, "Bresh, why is there gunshots?"
As she said that...
♪♪♪
...the explosion happened,
and everything went dark.
[Qasemi] I saw myself on the ground
after a couple of minutes there,
and I realized that there was a huge,
um, hole in the back of my head.
American University campus in Kabul, Afghanistan,
is under attack as we speak.
At least one university guard is now dead.
Officials say that dozens of students and staff
are still trapped inside, their fate unknown.
[Musazai] Everybody was crying and screaming.
The terrorists said, "Don't scream," you know?
And then they started shooting.
♪♪♪
I felt that somebody's standing behind me,
and when I looked at him, he shot me,
and I pretended to be dead
because I thought this is the only way to...
to save myself.
♪♪♪
[Qasemi] I was bleeding so badly.
I was trying to remember what's happening
at the university,
and I remember what my father told me.
He said I can't come here,
and I regretted, um, to have not accepted what he told me.
♪♪♪
I thought, um, "It's a-it's a dream."
I wanted to wake up,
but then I realized it's not a dream.
It's reality.
[indistinct chatter]
♪♪♪
This university has educated more than 100
top government officials, young people.
Afghanistan is a very young country,
where 75 percent of its population
is below the age of 25,
so the attack against the American University
is an attack against Afghanistan's future.
♪♪♪
We're numb to so many things in Afghanistan.
I mean, someone described PTSD to me,
and I think that as Afghans-as Afghans,
we collectively suffer from it.
♪♪♪
[siren wailing]
[man] Unsafe now are Afghanistan's journalists.
A bus carrying TOLO TV employees was the target.
[Mohseni] We have lost 13 colleagues in three years,
and they were kids that we employed,
and they were members of our family.
♪♪♪
It's not just a question of these young kids
leaving us far too early.
It's also their families.
Sometimes they were the breadwinners
of an entire clan.
♪♪♪
It brings home how serious,
you know, what we do is and...
and how dangerous it is, and, you know,
we've created this culture of telling the truth,
of pushing boundaries,
so there's an element of guilt
that we have exposed these people.
[man] The Taliban said it meant
to target the journalists,
that the channel had accused their fighters of raping women
when they briefly seized the city of Kunduz last year.
You think it through, and then you think, you seriously think,
"Do we need to do this? Is it that important?
If we can save a life,
is it worth having a news outlet?"
♪♪♪
For the Taliban,
their ideology is so important for them,
and the values that we push,
whether it's women's rights and so forth,
goes very much against what they believe in.
But also, I think that we represent the new Afghanistan
because the country has moved on,
and for them, it's difficult to accept that.
[Semple] I take some hope from the fact that now Afghans
on both sides of the conflict,
they're incredibly tired of this war.
They're not baying for blood. They want to see an end to it.
With people I trust amongst the Taliban,
we're involved in a collective effort to make sense
about what's going on inside their own movement,
about what's going on in Kabul and amongst the-the--
you know, the non-Taliban Afghans,
and making sense of what the United States is doing.
speaking native language
United States had a very difficult time,
almost from the beginning of the Afghan War,
deciding whether the Taliban
was an enemy of the United States.
Are they a threat to the United States?
Well, they're a threat to our ally in Afghanistan,
but no Taliban, uh, has declared an intention
to strike the United States,
certainly not in an official way.
In fact, they say the opposite--
"We're only fighting you
because you're here in our country.
If you get out of our country, we'll leave you alone."
[Schroen] Right now the Taliban,
they don't like ISIS any more than we do,
so there's a war going on there
while the Taliban still blow up people in-in Kabul
and around the country.
[Martin] I do think, at this point,
the Taliban may have learned their lesson
about harboring al-Qaeda.
Now, why they're after Americans now?
Because they're in Afghanistan.
We're there.
And for the Taliban and for- for Afghanistan in general,
the way to communicate is, you hurt them till they leave.
They did it to the Russians, you know,
and-and they're doing it to us.
[man] An American soldier is dead tonight
after a Taliban car bomb exploded
in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Ten civilians and a military soldier from Romania
also killed in that attack,
which comes as the U.S. tries to finalize a peace deal.
[Waldman] I'm really interested
in that whole incident,
partly because there was a video someone took
right when it happened,
and there's an Afghan man who--
I think he sees the truck or van
kind of coming on to the sidewalk,
and you can see he knows, and he starts to run,
and then he dies when it blows up.
That video went really viral, and it was such a sad story
'cause it was-- I think he was a shopkeeper,
and he usually sent his assistant to do something
but decided that day to give his assistant a break
and he would go do it.
I can't remember the exact story,
but something about that moment
and people seeing him kind of know what's coming
and try to escape,
I think every Afghan saw themselves in that,
and that's why people just kept watching it
over and over and over,
but that is what life has become, you know?
You're just waiting
or hoping you can outrun whatever's coming.
♪♪♪
[Trump] We're like policemen. We're not fighting a war.
If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it,
I could win that war in a week.
I just don't want to kill ten million people.
Does that make sense to you?
I don't want to kill ten million people.
I have plans on Afghanistan
that if I wanted to win that war,
Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth.
It would be gone.
It would be over in-- literally in ten days,
and I don't want to do-- I don't want to go that route.
United States does not owe us anything.
They can pull out any second they wish,
but what will be the interpretation
of this pullout?
There will be, whether you like it or not,
a domino effect.
This will be celebration for terrorists.
The mightiest power in the globe running away,
leaving the scene to who?
I'm not saying they must stay.
I mean, they-they can leave any moment they wish.
[Maddox] Seeing what we've seen in Afghanistan
and our involvement in it, being our longest-running war,
the theory is kind of panning out.
I don't see how this war can be won.
A bombshell series of investigative reports
in The Washington Post
exposing heartbreaking truths
about the U.S. war in Afghanistan,
which has claimed some 2,400 U.S. lives
and cost nearly a trillion dollars.
[Whitlock] The first thing we did,
the first story was just to show
that disconnect between what they were saying in public
and what they were saying privately,
but then, as you pointed out,
we-we focus on certain themes,
certain core failings of the war.
That's the gist of-of the series.
A new report claims that the American people
were misled about the War in Afghanistan.
A Washington Post investigation looked at nearly 2,000 pages
of internal government documents
and found that senior U.S. officials
did not tell the truth.
[Fallis] "Built to Fail.
Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in nation building,
it has wasted billions doing just that."
Uh, "Consumed by Corruption.
The U.S. flooded the country with money
and then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled."
"Unguarded Nation.
Afghan security forces, despite years of training,
were dogged by incompetence and corruption."
And the last day, uh, "Overwhelmed by Opium.
The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan
has imploded at nearly every turn."
[Whitlock] I think the main headline is that, you know,
for 18 years, U.S. government, generals,
ambassadors, diplomats
were giving rosy pronouncements
about the War in Afghanistan,
even though they knew the war was not going well
or it was failing
or that they had profound doubts about the strategy.
So, in public, they were saying one thing
about how they were making progress
and this was a war worth fighting.
In private,
they admitted they had no idea what they were doing.
[man] "We didn't know what we were doing,"
said now-retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute,
who was the Afghan war czar for Presidents Bush and Obama.
I can't think of another war
where you have the generals in charge of it
admitting that their strategy was fatally flawed,
and to say that in such raw terms,
it's not just news, it's-it's history.
[man] We simply didn't know what we were doing.
It wasn't even mission creep. It was mission fantasy.
How do we ever believe in our military people in the future?
I mean, it's like a spouse who's been cheated on.
How do I ever trust you again?
In a country increasingly divided every day,
it's nice to learn that there's one issue
that brings America's leaders together--
lying about war.
♪ dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪
[Whitlock] I think the American public
has always wanted to support the war.
They wanted to support the troops here.
This is very different from Iraq or other conflicts
around the world, and-- but over time,
it's become clear, I think, to the American people
that this wasn't working out as intended.
It took years and years much longer than they thought,
and they've heard three presidents talk about this.
And they knew it didn't add up.
♪♪♪
[Gossman] Building schools and protecting women's rights
and so on, that's not what this war is about.
Those have always been secondary
to the primary objective,
which has been to hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The secret detentions, the torture,
ceaseless night raids, air strikes, drone attacks,
when I said it's a CIA war, meaning they've sort of set
the priorities for the war,
and for the Afghans, this is a never-ending war,
and many of them have seen nothing but.
♪♪♪
The U.S. and the Taliban have just signed
a landmark agreement that could finally lead
to an end of hostilities in Afghanistan.
After two decades of war, the U.S. and the Afghan Taliban
have just signed a long-awaited deal
aimed at paving the way to peace
and the departure of foreign troops.
[man] Not part of the deal?
Any commitments from the Taliban
to protect the civil rights of people
they so brutally repressed
when last in power, particularly women.
[Saleh] Afghanistan has suffered for 40 years,
so it's very hard to see how this country
is going to be able to pull together.
The coming days and months are going to decide
whether peace in Afghanistan is going to move
from a signed document to reality on the ground.
I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show
that we're not all wasting time.
If bad things happen, we'll go back.
♪♪♪
[Maddox] Meeting with Afghans, you can tell
they've lost faith in their American counterparts
because of the historical flip-flopping
and pulling back and pushing back into areas,
and you can see in their eyes
the weariness and frustration,
'cause it's their country.
It's their families, and it's their people,
and we come and go...
and that hurts.
After the attack, I went to the United States.
My medical treatment was sponsored
by a hospital in Dallas.
I spent six months in the hospital,
and many people told me to stay there in the U.S.,
but I really wanted to graduate,
and also, I wanted to come back to Afghanistan.
I don't know, but I wanted to come back.
[Qasemi] I don't hate those people
who attacked my university,
because one day, with the education I receive,
I want to bring a change that will affect their children.
[Musazai] Educated people are leaving the country
because of insecurity, but if everybody leaves,
who will do something for the country?
[applause]
We cannot just depend
on the United States for peace.
So I think I have the responsibility to work for it,
because this is the time.
The country is in need.
[Mohseni] Afghanistan is the youngest country
outside of Africa, median age of 18.
I think 60 percent of the population
is under the age of 20,
so there's certainly this appetite,
this capacity to embrace change.
[indistinct chatter]
♪♪♪
You know, in life, you get one shot
at doing something that is impactful.
Whether we're successful or not is another story,
but we-we've tried.
♪♪♪
buwee' ted
♪♪