SummitCast #18 Afghanistan: How did we get into this mess? And where do we go from here?

What is happening right now in Afghanistan is a complete disaster. And it was very predictable. Beyond that, what's the big picture? How did we get here?

Henry Kriegel has been closely studying Afghanistan there since the Reagan years, when he was the executive director of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. He worked with key Afghan leaders at that time as well as leaders in Washington D.C., including briefing the President on what US policy should be in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal.

The problems of Afghanistan didn't grow overnight, and the mess we find today is partly the result of US policy mistakes over the last 30 years. What can we learn from all this? And where might Afghanistan go from here?

Washington Post: The Afghanistan Papers
Documentation that the American political and military leaders continually lied about what was really happening in Afghanistan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphi...

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
A fictional account, but true to history, of life in Afghanistan in the years of the Soviet invasion and subsequent rise of the Taliban.

Charlie Wilson's War
Quite an accurate account of US involvement in Afghanistan during the 1980s
https://youtu.be/NLGT-zvHVxY

Title image: US Air Force C-17 transporting 640 Afghan citizens from Kabul, August 15, 2021. (Air Mobility Command Public Affairs)

Music for titles: Excerpt from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) CC-BY 3.0