BUCK: We’re gonna have to talk about Afghanistan as well because it’s collapsing even faster —

CLAY: Before we officially leave, Buck! We’re not even getting out of the country and we may have lost the whole thing to the Taliban before we even leave.

BUCK: They’re telling everybody in the U.S. embassy, “Americans, get out.” We’re at the… this is starting to look like, “Run for the exits. this is gonna get ugly and we can’t guarantee any American’s safety that’s still left in the country.” That’s what this is looking like right now. They just seized Kandahar or at least they’ve made it to Martyr’s Square which is kind of like the Times Square of Kandahar, if you will.

They’ve gotten into the center of the city and they’re still fighting maybe over who’s in full control, but they’ve already gotten Kandahar, they’ve taken more than a half dozen provincial capitals, they control more than half the country, they just seized Ghazni, which is just to the south of Kabul and is close enough on Kabul’s periphery that it starts to become a access choke point to the capital city.

So the boa constrictor of the Taliban, if you will — the coils — are getting tighter around the throats of the Afghan people are every passing hour. it’s just stunning that, Clay, we’ve been training the Afghan military and Air Force, and we’ve spent almost a trillion dollars in this country, and it’s not gonna last a summer after we’ve said, ‘we’re not gonna hold this thing together anymore which is amazing.”

Now the argument for people seems to be for people who still make this argument — and there are some people I like in media who still say this stuff — well, obviously we shouldn’t have left because we could have held it together with 3,000 troops forever. Other people look at this and say, “This is as much as we could accomplish in terms of stability operations after 20 years?”

CLAY: I don’t know what the right answer is in Afghanistan. I think I’m somewhere in the middle where it’s almost like there’s a lot of people out there who penned getting married to people that they shouldn’t have been married to because they dated for a long time. I feel like if you say we have to stay in Afghanistan, you’re kinda like those people.

‘Cause even though you are gonna get divorced eventually and you should have never gotten married but you said, “Well, we spent all this time together, it’s kind of a logical next step and it’s a marriage that you know is doomed to fail at some point. I feel like that’s what’s going on with Afghanistan where even the people who are arguing we should stay there are primarily arguing we should stay there because we’ve stayed there as long as we have and because we’ve invested so much time and money in it.

It at the moment that you leave, it immediately collapses, it proves that basically we wasted a trillion dollars there. A trillion dollars! We talk a lot about the infrastructure bill and everything else. We could have spent a trillion dollars a lot better ways in the United States than what we ended up spending in Afghanistan.

BUCK: You can go back… there was a book that I remember, I was actually told to read even before, Clay, I joined the CIA by Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris. This was published back in, what, 2004. And what he was just saying if you look at the history of Afghanistan, all the attempts in the past to do exactly what the U.S. had decided by 2004 was the mission set, the chance of this succeeding, if you believe that history matters, was almost year.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: But we had four-star general after four-star general, diplomat after diplomat, people who were special envoys and at the very top. And I saw this up close and in person when I was there. If you want to get promoted and you want to get the book deal, you want to be on the board of Raytheon, you want to get invited to the Aspen Ideas Festival, you had to be a person in the Afghanistan context who is going to say, “Oh, we figured it out now.

“We figured it out in 2008. We figured it out in 2011.” They would keep on saying, “Now we have the winning formula,’ because, Clay, the person who comes back from being in charge of Afghanistan the last 20 years or so telling everybody, “This is a society that in term of infrastructure, cohesiveness, development, and history, has almost no chance of being a coherent and durable state…”

That person, , when you have the whole military-industrial complex focused in on Afghanistan, they don’t get promoted, they don’t get elevated, they’re not treated like a hero. And so I think that the echo chamber effect was very role. By the way, one or more point on this was just that Obama when he came in… I was in the CIA in 2008 and in the transition in 2009 when Obama took office.

Clay, there was a seismic shift even in the intelligence community from, “Okay, well, Iraq was the bad Bush war. Afghanistan is the good Obama war,” and no one ever stopped to think, “Well, hold on a second. Why is that true, and what does that even really mean for right now and for the mission set that we’re facing?” Domestic politics was driving it.

CLAY: I think the only way we could have gotten out of Afghanistan and declared victory is if we had done it immediately after killing Osama Bin Laden. Right? Because ultimately, he was the reason to go into Afghanistan. That’s at least for people out there, whether you buy it or not — and I know he wasn’t in Afghanistan, but he was being protected by Pakistan in Abbottabad. but that would have at least been, I think, narratively a way to declare victory and leave right?

BUCK: They would have the exact same circumstances that you have.

CLAY: The exact same thing would have happened. Now we’re leaving and we don’t even have the illusion of being able to declare victory. At least then you could have sold the idea of we accomplished our mission.

BUCK: You could your “mission accomplished” banner and the whole thing. Right now, what we see is that it’s just the American people. The problem with this is — or I should say the problem, but the reality of it is — that Trump wanted us to get out. Trump voters; I was one of them. I advocated for us leaving when Trump was in office.

I thought that we should draw down. So we can’t forget what we thought was a better strategy for America, for an America First foreign policy a year ago or two years ago just because Joe Biden is president now, and that all said, though, the people who are advocating for withdrawal all thought this was probably gonna happen.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It wasn’t like, “Oh, withdraw. It’s gonna be fine.” It was, “We tried; it’s up to the Afghan people.”

CLAY: The rapidity has surprised some people, but the end result has not. Is that fair to say?

BUCK: The IC — and, by the way, for every IC assessment that gets reported on to the press whether it’s open source or someone’s kind of leaking the executive summary or something. For every one intelligence community paper, Clay, that assesses these things, there’s hundreds of others. People think that it speaks with one voice. I think there are even 17 intel agencies now. It was 16 when I was in. They’re expanding them; they’re all fighting with each other all the time. It’s a mess. They thought, though, that you had at least once we drew down, six months. That was kind of the consensus.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: We’re not even at the drawdown, and it’s looking like we’re gonna be air lifting people with helicopters off the rooftop of the embassy in Kabul is kind of what it feels like right now.

CLAY: It’s gonna look just like what happened when Vietnam collapsed. There’s going to be that element. And that’s why I say, narratively you’re correct that the end result was gonna be the same no matter what. But I think Americans, if we had said, “We got bin Laden. Let’s leave,” at least then there is an idea that we might have had some success.

BUCK: So I think the Obama administration in that case was also in a more difficult spot to do that because, remember, Obama surged over a hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You’re gonna surge, and then you’re gonna pull out precipitously?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Remember, he announced — and this goes right to the Afghanistan good war, Iraq bad war concept that the Democrats were all invested in including, by the way, Joe Biden. He was a big Iraq bad, Afghanistan good. Joe Biden also wanted to cut Iraq into three separate countries. And then people who knew Iraq had to explain to him the lines that you would draw go through Kirkuk and Mosul and oil fields.

CLAY: All the different tribal areas. Right.

BUCK: It’s not just like you sit there, you draw a line on the map, and everyone’s gonna be okay with this. But you had the Obama administration surge troops there and also you had had the withdrawal from Iraq turning into the ISIS and ISIS was JV and you start to look it all these things together. The biggest and most obvious failure of the Obama administration…

Okay. I can’t say that because everyone’s gonna get on me and say, “Oh, there’s a difference.” Okay. One of the biggest and most obvious failures of Obama administration, top to bottom, was on the foreign policy front where every challenge that they faced starting in 2009 they made worse. Every area where there was violence and conflict deteriorated, essentially, over the course of Obama’s presidency, most notably Syria and Libya but also Iraq and Afghanistan and name a place. Wow, we actually did do Afghanistan right now.