that in afghanistan. there hasn t been an american combat death there for 18 months. we need to keep this in perspective. yes, there s an open-ended war in afghanistan but the united states had pretty much taken a step back from it and established a presence. i think where the benefits and the gains outweighed the direct and indirect costs of it. and we have to be careful not to learn the wrong lessons. yes, we overreached in afghanistan and iraq i get it. but history shows that underreached creates doubts about your credibility. we re the cat that got on the stove once, now we re running away from it completely. but i think at this phase of history we may be entering the danger is the united states does too little and the world won t organize itself.
we re going to be talking about the 20 year anniversary of 9/11 and what we learned, the mistakes we ve made, can you explain how the united states military has gotten to a point we can have these smaller footprints of 3,000, 4,000 elite troops that can do extraordinary things, hold a country together with a minimum of cost and a minimum of casualties? joe, you ve put it exactly right. i have a short list of phrases i hate. and when of these is these forever wars. what this was was an open-ended presence. we it took us a long time to get it right. i think, again, we aimed too high in afghanistan for a while, just like iraq now in iraq we have settled on a situation where a few thousand american troops working with the government can provide something of a foundation. i believe we ve come close to
organize his troops for battle. he lit them on fire and hoped they would run into enemy lines. the chocolate damage to our society, norms, and institutions means nothing to him. so joe, this is not a broad support of joe biden s policy positions. this is a support by michael gerson anyway of a resetting of political norms in the era of joe biden. right. it s interesting. and he was talking about sanity and temperament for the most part. but george conway was having a conversation with fellow conservatives, life-long republicans who left the party since donald trump and we were bemoaning the fact that our choice is between a party that right now is pushing policies that we have, obviously, problems with. whether you re talking about the speedy withdrawal from afghanistan or bernie sanders $3.5 trillion budget bill that s going to be a reconciliation
troops there. this is for some reason, and i don t know why, this was never framed like we framed sending troops to germany after world war ii or sending troops to south korea after the korean war. this was a very small footprint. about as small of a footprint as you can possibly have. can you explain why the united states can t say we re tired of this we re going to leave iraq. we re tired of this, we re just going to leave afghanistan. we ve done enough. if they lose, tough luck. can you explain if people haven t been paying attention in the past two decades what happens when the united states says we re bored, we re going home? yeah, let s start with the high potential in my view that the taliban come back, go back to being international pyorrhea and permit al qaeda to come back
a lot of loyalties are to this or that ethnic group or tribe. and when things go back they fall back on the associations they feel more confident in. that s exactly what s happening here. so the national mentality has clearly given way to something much more local. we re likely to see the collapse of a central authority and a return to the afghanistan that is dominated by the taliban but not 100% controlled by it and we see all sorts of pockets of fighting between this and that tribal groups, particularly those in the north and the taliban. you just briefly touched on pakistan i was hoping you should flesh that out, in terms of what you think could happen with them and what role they re playing. but also the neighbor to the west, iran, how you see them reacting to what is happening there and how they perhaps could use it to their advantage in their already contentious