The 20-year Vietnamization of Afghanistan, a slo-mo epic, ended in a calamitous rush of mistakes that made America look to all the world like a stumble-bumbling superpower that just can’t – or won’t – learn from its mistakes.
There is just one way to fix that. Washington’s elites must do what they do best – start talking about themselves. But they must do it – for once! – when they are asked what went so horribly wrong.
And that’s the story this reporter had started pursuing when I stumbled across a small jackpot overflowing with just that, in a most unlikely place. It was spilling out of my news screen on an officially godawful Wednesday. The secretary of defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had just marked the horrific end of yet another un-won U.S. war with two poignant speeches and a briefest Q&A before a sadly imprecise, seemingly question-lite Pentagon press corps.
The all-news cable shows had assembled their pundit ponds when suddenly something most unusual started spilling out of my news screen. It was news. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd had tapped into a vein of war-and-peace lessons – just by asking the simplest question of a retired general who had helped run the Afghanistan War.
“What did you get wrong?” Todd asked retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who was a former commander in Afghanistan in 2009-10 and then moved to the Pentagon to advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What did you miscalculate?”