If it's any consolation, there are a few voices that understand it. Here's a little of the transcript from an interview Rachael Maddow had last night with John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction since 2012 about his report "What we need to learn: Lessons from 20 years of Afghanistan reconstruction".Neckbeard wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 5:20 pmWhat is sad is that the main takeaway isn't to learn from this or from history, but that whoever is president or in a position of leadership failed. It was failed from the time we deployed our soldiers over there.Lester The Nightfly wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:46 pmNope, it's the nature of the beast and it would have happened regardless of who made the call.
"(Now,) we didn`t predict when they were going to collapse. I think we were all a bit surprised by that. But no one should be surprised by that. But no one should be surprised by this.
Now, now`s not the time really for finger pointing. I think now`s the time to obviously get all the Americans out, and get out any Afghan who wants to get out out, but I think at some point and we need to look at these lessons learned reports that we created and particularly this last one and try to make things better.
The bottom line of our report, as you highlighted so succinctly, more succinct than I can, is that we were totally unprepared for this. And we haven`t learned the lessons of Vietnam. If anything, after Vietnam, we said we`re never going to do it, and we cut all of the capabilities to do these type of reconstruction events or activities in a war zone.
And lo and be hold, we said we`re never going to do it again, we did it in Iraq. We did it in Afghanistan. We`ve done it three times in the last 50 years, and all three times it`s been pretty poorly handled.
And we`re doing something similar to this, but at a smaller scale, but as our report says, it`s a slippery slope before a small scale becomes a big scale. We`re doing it in a number of countries in Africa, and I have heard people talking about sending troops and sending massive aid similarly to a war torn or not safe country of Haiti. That may deserve it, but if we do it in Haiti or these other countries, without learning the lessons, we are going to repeat the same mistakes.
And that`s what this report is all about. It`s trying to look forward to improve how we do things like this."
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/trans ... 1-n1277240
