Original subtitles

Oh, I didn't pay. Can you pay here?

Oh, my gosh. It took my card.

You might want to go back, dude.

So today I'm getting filmed

about my job at CIA.

I know you-you were, um, studying

about Afghanistan and...

All the wars.

All the wars, and you, um, were a spy.

I worked with spies. It's true.

I'll never feel like an Afghanistan expert.

The war, it's so complex.

It's almost been cyclical with our U.S. government as well.

What is the mission? What is the goal there?

♪ Soft music ♪

And I got to know Afghans. I worked with Afghans.

I'm a woman, a mother.

My heart hurts for these people

because I just don't see how this ends.

♪♪♪

After the extraordinary sacrifice

of blood and treasure,

the American people are weary

of the longest war in American history.

This year we will bring America's longest war

to a responsible end.

I want the Afghan people to understand...

America seeks an end to this era of war and suffering.

We know from the history

of military conflict in Afghanistan,

it's been one of initial success

followed by long years

of floundering and ultimate failure.

We're not gonna repeat that mistake.

We welcome the distinguished interim leader

of a liberated Afghanistan, Chairman Hamid Karzai.

Osama bin Laden publicly vowed

to wage a terrorist war

against America from Afghanistan.

This will be a long ongoing struggle

between freedom and fanaticism.

Our commitment to the people there

would lead to a peaceful Afghanistan

with no more bloodbaths.

The goal of the United States

remains a genuinely independent Afghanistan,

free from external interference.

Massive Soviet military forces have invaded

the small sovereign nation of Afghanistan.

History teaches that aggression unopposed

becomes a contagious disease.

♪♪♪

I grew up thinking Afghanistan

was the biggest country in the world,

the most beautiful country in the world,

the most developed country in the world,

with a huge passion for my country

because it was very much

the same, uh, thing my father shared.

♪♪♪

In a very romantic way,

my father was always talking about the Afghanistan

that he had experienced.

They would go on the weekends to restaurants.

They would take a walk in the park.

But these were all those, uh, fairy tales to us.

Mm, we never experienced Afghanistan that way.

♪♪♪

One thing in common about many of these fights in my country

is that, unfortunately,

it's our soil that is being used for various wars

between the global powers.

♪♪♪

The world simply cannot stand by

and permit the Soviet Union

to commit this act with impunity.

The Soviets killed about ten percent of the population.

It was a genocide,

and the military was not doing anything about it,

but I heard that, uh, the agency did.

The CIA director says,

"I want you to go out there and win this."

I was the Washington Post correspondent

in, uh, South Asia, so the Afghan War

was pretty much the biggest story on my beat.

Pakistan had an immediate refugee flow.

They went to their ally, the United States, and said,

"We've got all these rebels

who are coming into our country as refugees.

They want to liberate their country

from Soviet occupation.

We, the Pakistan government, are inclined to help them,

but we could use your support as well."

And so we were told to get busy

and try to figure out what was happening

with these guys called the mujahideen.

People knew that the CIA

was supporting the Afghans.

They could never know how.

So we then decided we would use the Pakistanis

as our surrogates to support the mujahideen.

Speaking native language

The Soviet presence in Afghanistan

is a major impediment

to improved U.S.-Soviet relations,

and we would like to remove it.

We were putting in a variety of weapons systems

into the hands of the mujahideen.

The United States started to provide

these Stinger antiaircraft missiles

to equip the rebels to fight the Soviets as equals.

They started knocking Soviet aircraft out of the sky

by the hundreds.

That changed the war,

and it showed that the U.S. government was serious

about not just inflicting some damage on the Soviets

but actually getting them to leave Afghanistan,

which is what they did.

And as soon as Boris Gromov rode on that tank

out to the middle of Friendship Bridge

from Afghanistan,

I hit send on a cable that was typed out using Xs

to make a big, "We won."

♪♪♪

I wrote an article and put the name on it,

"Graveyard of Empires."

My point was, it's very easy getting in there,

but getting out is immensely difficult,

and winning is...

very, very questionable.

Whatever winning means,

you usually don't get it in Afghanistan.

♪♪♪

Kabul has changed a lot in the last several years.

It used to be that you could

kind of walk around the streets

and pick up a cab

and go to a restaurant, have a nice meal.

If you're a foreigner, that's basically all gone.

♪♪♪

The Taliban have done a campaign of attacking

anywhere Westerners gather, and we're in an armored car

because it's regarded as too dangerous now,

which is a pity because Kabul is an amazingly beautiful

and vibrant city.

The city is now brimming with up to six million people,

and it's a very different Kabul than the one I remember

under the Taliban or during the Civil War.

♪♪♪

The United States ended its official presence

in Afghanistan today, two weeks before

Soviet troops are scheduled to complete their pullout.

Our State Department correspondent

Bill Plante reports.

A marine guard hauled down the stars and stripes

at the U.S. embassy in Kabul

as the remaining handful of diplomats

prepared to get out of Afghanistan

as soon as weather permits.

The U.S. joins other Western nations

which have temporarily pulled out,

fearing chaos after Soviet troops

end their ten-year occupation.

I first got into, uh, Afghanistan

by crossing the-the frontier

between Pakistan and Afghanistan

with a group of mujahideen in mid-1989,

just as the Soviet Union had, uh, withdrawn.

♪♪♪

I was working with an aid agency,

trying to help both with refugees in Pakistan

and inside Afghanistan.

People were readying themselves for the fight

over who would claim Afghanistan

now that the-the Soviets had got out.

♪♪♪

America made a fatal mistake.

The Afghan thing was almost totally forgotten.

The result was that an Afghanistan

so overloaded with ordnance and awash with money

slipped into its own devices.

From a war correspondent's perspective,

by the time I was traveling around

in the war in the early '90s,

it had become a nasty civil war.

The thing I remember most

was how lonely it was.

Kabul was like a ghost city.

You could stand in a major intersection,

which now has endless clogged traffic jams,

and see no one and hear nothing but bicycle spokes

and horse carriage bells.

It was very haunting.

Yelling in native language

There was rape. There was robbery.

Buildings were rocketed and shot all the time.

People were terrified.

Out of the fight, street by street in Kabul,

replicated in the sort of districts of the country,

we got the Taliban movement.

I can recall the precise moment

in which I learnt of the Taliban movement.

I was at a garden party, and a posh Englishman

told me about this supposedly Islamic student movement

which had just taken over a swath of territory in Kandahar

and was chasing after these money-grubbing, gun-wielding,

you know, commanders left over from the mujahideen,

hanging them up from trees and posts

and stuffing money in their mouths,

and he told me,

"Michael, this looks like the next big thing,"

um, and he was right.

The Taliban advertised themselves

as a kind of purifying force, a cleansing force

that would reunify Afghanistan under the banner of Islam.

That was very attractive to the Pakistanis.

They didn't want Afghanistan to be a threat,

and so the Pakistani government

threw their weight militarily

and financially behind the Taliban,

and by early 1996,

they controlled three-fourths of Afghanistan.

They often conquered without firing a shot.

They would just ride into a town

holding Korans in the air

or waving the flags of, uh, their movement or of Islam,

and whole garrisons would just, uh, change sides.

The gratitude began to fade

and be replaced with something else

when it became clear that the Taliban wanted

to enforce an extremely restrictive version of Islam.

I went to Afghanistan as a journalist,

I think, five or six times,

and that meant that you had to get a visa

from the Taliban government,

which meant that you were there under very limited

and very strict conditions, and there were many conditions.

Number one, you had to completely cover yourself

except your face.

Number two, you couldn't meet with women.

Number three, you couldn't take pictures of anything.

I had a camera, a small camera,

hidden under my voluminous scarf,

and we stopped at a bakery to buy some bread,

and I saw this boy's face through the window,

and I just ducked into the bakery,

and I got out my camera,

and I just took this one single picture of him,

and then I left.

♪♪♪

There was no music, no-no TV, no phone system to speak of.

Women were locked inside their houses.

Girls were not educated. The economy totally collapsed.

♪♪♪

The deal was, you get the right to life,

and you give up pretty much all other rights.

♪♪♪

This is the pictures of all the ambassadors

that served here.

As you can see, there are no women.

So here, I would come as a shock factor,

but that's where the change happens.

Starting '92,

I found the country in the worst possible shape.

There was this, uh, ambience

of darkness and fear

and gloom.

♪♪♪

We have to wear burkas.

We never wore burkas in my entire life.

I was a young teenager, and I thought, "Why?

Why should I be like this?"

I told my family that I am going to sew

the two big shawls that we had

so that I will have a very big sheet,

and I would fully cover myself,

but I am not gonna wear a burka.

It symbolized so much oppression to me.

♪♪♪

In 2001,

there were 900,000 students in school,

and the number of girls?

Zero.

We did not want our generations to be illiterate.

So, if somebody knew math,

they would quietly tell

the neighborhood, uh, boys and girls

that, "We will teach you math,"

but that always had to be hidden.

We said, "When you guys are victorious

and the Soviets are gone, we're finished.

We turn the country over to you.

We're not here forever."

♪♪♪

When that happened, we basically walked away.

♪♪♪

When the Taliban took over, most people said,

"There's nothing we can do about it,

so we're not gonna do anything.

We're not even gonna worry about it."

Our interest really was when bin Laden went there,

rather than anything that's gonna change Afghanistan.

♪♪♪

I come from a rural family.

Uh, we were one of the destitute families,

uh, due to war,

and, uh, when I became able enough,

I went back to the valley,

and I joined, uh, the forces fighting the regime.

At the age of 19,

he was already a seasoned war veteran

in charge of rebuilding villages

bombed in the fighting.

Couple of years later,

I was given intelligence assignment.

So, since '97, I was assigned

to handle the overall relationship

with the, uh... with the CIA.

The strategic aspect of the relationship

was telling them what is terrorism,

what is bin Laden, what is al-Qaeda,

and what type of threat does it pose

to U.S. interest in the wider region

and how we should, uh, cope with it.

Of course, they were not very receptive

of our strategic analysis.

They were showing very little interest

to the hosts of al-Qaeda.

They were showing very, very little interest

to the plight of the Afghan people,

who were suffering under that terrorist regime.

♪♪♪

One thing Afghans don't need a lot of help with

is fighting, uh, and, uh...

But a number of Arabs, like Osama bin Laden, came,

and they were very idealistic.

They weren't very large in number.

They weren't very military effective.

They didn't have any fighting experience.

But they got together,

and he founded al-Qaeda over the course

of a couple of weekends in Pakistan

in August of 1988.

It was a very secretive organization.

They really didn't have very many places to go,

and Afghanistan was one place where bin Laden thought

he could establish al-Qaeda's headquarters.

In '96, I read a State Department report

about bin Laden

saying he's financing Islamic extremism.

He's recruited all of these Arabs from around the world,

and he could be a problem.

So I went to my bosses at CNN.

I said, "Let's try and interview this guy."

You know, this is, like, the hostage video.

Yeah. The hostage video.

♪♪♪

There we are. We look almost human.

Speaking native language

No one really paid any attention until 1998,

when al-Qaeda blew up two American embassies

within nine minutes of each other.

Two bombs exploded almost simultaneously today

at the U.S. embassies in the East Africa nations

of Kenya and Tanzania.

U.S. officials say the bombings

have all the fingerprints of Middle East terror.

That is when it became clear

that bin Laden and al-Qaeda

was really a big deal and could...

Not only were spouting all this anti-American rhetoric

but trying to kill, you know, large numbers of Americans.

There is convincing information

from our intelligence community

that the bin Laden terrorist network

was responsible for these bombings.

Bin Laden was constantly moving,

and we were using Afghan tribal networks

to report on his travels and his whereabouts.

Our tribal contacts came to us,

and they said, "Look, he's in this location now.

When he leaves, he's gonna have to go through

this particular crossroads,"

and so what they proposed was to bury

a huge cache of explosives underneath those crossroads

so that when his convoy came through,

they could simply blow it up.

And we said, "Absolutely not."

We were risking jail if we didn't tell them that,

because the CIA had a so-called lethal finding

that had been signed by President Clinton

which said that we could engage in

"lethal activity" against bin Laden,

but the purpose of our attack on bin Laden

couldn't be to kill him.

We were being asked to remove this threat

to the United States

essentially with one hand tied behind our backs.

I was a fairly junior officer,

and as al-Qaeda grew into a worldwide presence,

we were very sensitive

and very aware of this growing phenomenon.

It's not like they were playing.

The threat was real.

And if President Clinton had taken action

and killed Osama bin Laden,

there wouldn't have been a 9/11.

If there wouldn't have been a 9/11,

there wouldn't have been Afghanistan.

If there wouldn't have been Afghanistan,

there probably wouldn't have been Iraq.

What would the world be like?

♪♪♪

It still gets to me, living in our nation's capital

and every building has significance...

especially driving by here.

Something I'll never forget, shaped my whole life.

♪♪♪

I had finished my first week at Georgetown.

They have a National Security Studies program there.

I was driving around in the area,

getting used to it after that first week,

and then a bunch of cars stopped in front of me,

and people got out and started screaming and pointing.

The plane had just hit the Pentagon.

♪♪♪

When I came to D.C., I actually didn't think

I would stay,

but counterterrorism developed into an entire field

after that day, and I got swept up in it.

♪♪♪

On 9/11, it was clear who the enemy was,

and the Bush administration went straight into Afghanistan,

where al-Qaeda was,

where bin Laden was, and tried to attack them,

both for the purpose of responding to 9/11

but also to try to disrupt any planning

that al-Qaeda might have under way

for a follow-on attack.

The Taliban have now made it clear

that they will not bow to American pressure.

At a chaotic press conference at their embassy in Islamabad,

they threatened holy war if attacked

and rejected President Bush's demand

to surrender Osama bin Laden.

Are you willing to hand Osama bin Laden

to the United States or not?

No, no, no, no.

Well, for the Taliban,

there was an opportunity for them to distance,

uh, the movement from these groups and individuals,

and we were hoping they wouldn't,

because, uh, for us, it was an opportunity

to actually rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.

And as we expected, they stuck to their guns,

and they did not in any way compromise,

and that was the beginning of the end for them,

at least in that period.

When 9/11 happened, they called me in.

Basically, they said, "Will you take the first team in?

We got to... we want to put a team together."

I said, "Oh, God,

everybody in the United States wants to do this,

and they're giving me the job,

be the first people to hit back at bin Laden?"

I said, "Yeah, better believe it."

When I entered, you know, I had my orders.

I had an operational directive to execute on the ground.

Number one, destroy the Taliban because they're in the way.

We have to get at al-Qaeda.

Number two, kill every member of al-Qaeda

that you can find on the battlefield.

Number three, find and kill bin Laden.

♪♪♪

Well, when we left,

chief of Counterterrorism Center said...

We met him on the morning we were getting ready to leave,

and he said, "I'm gonna give you your orders now.

Once the Northern Alliance is ready

and they go into Kabul, we want you and your team

to go in with them

and capture bin Laden and his lieutenants.

Then what I want you to do is, when you capture those guys,

I want you to cut their heads off,

and the lieutenants, I want you to put their heads on pikes

and display them and photograph them,

and bin Laden, I want you to take his head

and put it on dry ice in a box and ship it back,

so I'm gonna take it to the president to see."

So I look at the deputy.

He looks at me, and I-I'm saying,

"Is this guy serious?"

I said, "Okay, maybe we could cut off their heads.

Maybe. I don't know."

I said, "I doubt it, but maybe we could."

I said, "And we can certainly make pikes out in the field.

You know, that's not hard."

I said, "But where am I gonna find dry ice

in Afghanistan?"

♪♪♪

Vice President Cheney

said fairly soon after the attacks,

"We're gonna go over to the dark side."

And, historically, when presidents have wanted

to go over to the dark side, they've asked the CIA to do it.

A lot of what needs to be done here

will have to be done quietly without any discussion,

using sources and methods, uh,

that are available to our intelligence agencies.

The first trip I took was in 1994,

Human Rights Watch.

The war had continued.

The Soviets had gone, but the war was continuing,

which was sort of... Came to be the story

over the many years I went to Afghanistan.

Despite whatever political changes happened,

the war almost had a life of its own and continued.

The first boots on the ground after 9/11 were the CIA,

and very quickly, they began working with

and bolstering militia groups to work with,

and those groups were designed,

recruited, and trained

to go after leading al-Qaeda or Taliban figures.

The CIA was transformed as an institution by 9/11.

Out of that came the, uh, structure

that is now notorious...

the black sites, the enhanced interrogation techniques,

the waterboarding, and the rest.

When I joined the agency in the 1980s,

only the bad guys used those techniques on us.

Unlike the FBI,

the agency really did not have any skill in interrogation,

especially hostile interrogation.

That was something new.

I can honestly say

I know what attacks were stopped.

I know how hard the folks worked,

and I also know they weren't emotional.

People weren't having fun waterboarding people.

I would never say

that I am in support of torture

or anything in that regard,

but there was definitely a push technically

and in human intelligence

to get as much information as possible,

and you have to put yourself back

in that particular time in history.

When I think about...

when I think about the kids

and the-and the-and the- and the women and children

and good Americans who are still alive

because of what we did, you know what I say?

I say, "Fuck history.

Fuck history."

As far as that program, I slept good at night.

I did a briefing on it

for all the ambassadors in Kabul,

and I had said

that the torture that had been described

by people who had investigated the secret detentions,

the salt pit, the case of people being left out,

dying of hypothermia, and the rest of it,

these kinds of torture and secret detentions

had been known in the Soviet times.

It was shocking for them to be coming up again

in post-2001 Afghanistan.

The Americans didn't come to the briefing,

but they came immediately afterwards

and wanted to see me.

When I was approached by one of them,

he was so angry, he was shaking.

The very fact I dared compare those abuses

to what had happened with the Soviets

had infuriated him,

and I'm just like... That's what infuriated him,

not the fact that they happened

but that I had made a comparison with the Soviets.

The way the-that war has been fought,

the counterterrorism war,

it's largely shaped where we are today.

It was always the CIA's war.

It was in the '80s, the '90s, and it was after 2001.

♪♪♪

We enter Kabul. It's 12 November.

I know bin Laden's fled.

Watch bin Laden move south,

which was down to Tora Bora,

and then pursued right away.

Tora Bora is a very remote mountainous part of Afghanistan

on the border with Pakistan.

It's an area that he knew very well.

He'd been going through that area during the '80s,

fighting the Soviets.

It's an area... He liked being there.

He, uh... he had, like, a vacation home there,

which wouldn't be my first choice of vacation spot.

We knew that bin Laden

was moving with a group of about 1,000 people.

Right away they said, "Okay, we're gonna go pursue him."

I said, "Do it. Send them in." We go up.

They get up on top of a promontory mountain piece,

and then down below,

there's bin Laden and his huge element.

Our team had a SOFLAM,

Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Mechanism,

which allowed them to target

and do 56 hours of air strikes

and just hammer them.

We bombed the bejesus out of the place.

We destroyed most of their gear,

their radios, their vehicles.

They had tanks. They had all sorts of stuff.

They were trying to get up into position.

We wrecked it all on the ground before they could get up there

and killed a bunch of them.

Bin Laden wrote his will at Tora Bora.

He thought he was gonna die.

He thought this was the end.

♪♪♪

But it wasn't.

♪♪♪

So, after our guys go up, do the bombing,

the initial bombing, that first four guys come out,

and one of those guys had been a former Delta Force guy,

have him brought right back.

He's the one that says to me, "Gary,

we are going to need U.S. forces."

♪♪♪

The CIA requested 800 Rangers,

but that request was turned down by the U.S. Army.

♪♪♪

What Gary Brunson was arguing for, I think,

were very large numbers of troops, uh,

to go into the valleys,

and, frankly, I-I thought that much of what he was advocating

at the time was not gonna be effective.

Gary probably had a little bit more enthusiasm than judgment.

♪♪♪

That's bullshit.

They weren't accustomed to having to make decisions

as rapidly as I was forcing

because I knew the enemy was going to escape.

I didn't have a choice.

♪♪♪

On the 16th of December,

bin Laden and his-his-his guys left the mountains.

♪♪♪

They just walked across into Pakistan.

They got on motorcycles and just headed out,

and it took us all those years later before we found him.

♪♪♪

We were building the country.

We were training the Afghan military.

We were paying for building of facilities

with the U.S. military.

We had turned it over to State Department and say,

"Okay, now you build a new nation.

You teach them democracy, how do they handle elections.

Do all that stuff."

As things progressed,

it was a dream come true,

and it was hard to believe

that we had got a second chance to live.

♪♪♪

That was when I really explored the country.

That was when I started

not only to travel to every corner of Kabul

but also to over 15 provinces.

It was a utopia.

My first trip over to Afghanistan

was in January of 2002.

There's a reason that most of the, like, correspondents

that came up during that time were women.

Men had a very hard time,

particularly in the early days,

doing stories about women,

and women were a fascinating story

and an important story in Afghanistan.

My first stories in Afghanistan

were about what life had been like

for the women under the Taliban

because they were finally able to speak freely.

♪♪♪

There were women who had been forcibly married

to the Taliban.

There were teachers and doctors and young women

who had grown up

during those five years of not being free at all.

As people finally had access to the outside world,

the culture was changing before our very eyes.

♪♪♪

I left Afghanistan when I was 12.

I had not been to the country for a very long time.

But the need to come back, uh,

was very strong for not just me

but for a lot of other Afghans.

I was a banker, and my brother was a lawyer,

and the other brother was a finance person,

and our sister was a marketing person.

And in 2002,

we secured the first private license

for a radio station.

Speaking native language

♪♪♪

It was about music. It was about jokes.

It was men and women just having a conversation.

♪♪♪

But it's ironic that...

how many people are enemies of fun.

The conservatives at the time,

they were very suspicious.

We're a bunch of young people in this house, basically,

no security whatsoever,

and people would literally knock on our doors and say,

"We hate you guys."

But so the radio was a success,

and we thought the natural progression

would be to launch a television station.

Speaking native language

speaking native language

We saw the good news on day one,

and we came up with all sorts of programs

that we could produce quickly.

And then we started to do really big stuff,

like the Idol format with Afghan Star.

♪ Upbeat rock music ♪

singing in native language

speaking native language

When we first launched,

this whole idea of voting for a winner,

they couldn't believe that we would stick to our principles

in terms of, like, counting people's text messages.

But what was extraordinary

was how quickly people accepted it.

That's what's interesting with the media.

We just give people sort of a glimpse of what's possible.

This weekend in Afghanistan,

the voice of the people was finally heard.

Precious ballots from Afghanistan's

only presidential election in 5,000 years

poured into counting centers around the country.

There hasn't been a presidential election

in the United States since 1900 where 70 percent

of the population able to vote voted.

♪ Soft music ♪

I went to villages and schools

where people were voting,

and the feeling in those rooms

was one of pride and hope

and belief that things were getting better

and that the system that was being created

would help the country.

The Afghan people, by coming out and voting,

have given the last

defeat to terrorism.

The tyranny is gone,

the terrorist enemy is scattered,

and the people of Afghanistan are free.

I thought, "If things keep on like this,

we can win this in a couple of years."

♪♪♪

All the books you see here

are about special operations missions,

and they don't always go well.

Uh, you know, when I think about Desert One,

it didn't go well.

When I think about a lot of these, uh, books

that are here on World War II missions,

they didn't go well.

So I actually drew on a lot of the lessons

because I wanted to make sure whatever plan

that I constructed for the mission took into account,

you know, the successes and why we were successful

and-and, frankly, the failures

and how we avoid those failures.

I was sent overseas to run

the Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan,

and from a military standpoint,

Afghanistan appeared to be kind of in a caretaker status.

Please.

We clearly have moved to a period of stability

and stabilization and reconstruction.

So we shifted our focus in 2003

as we began the invasion of Iraq.

- Jesus! - Whoo!

Big tanks, big toys,

that was the new war,

and our allies became confused at,

what were our real objectives?

We will stay on task until we've achieved our objective,

which is to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

"What?

They haven't hurt you. Saddam hasn't hurt you.

He doesn't like al-Qaeda. There's not al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Whoa!

I was called into a meeting

with the CIA director,

and he told me that he wanted me

to head up the CIA effort in Iraq.

And the most, uh, experienced senior officers

who were in a position, you know, to deal

at a political level, uh,

very quickly left, uh, the Afghan theater.

We're worried about terrorism, and next thing, we wake up,

and-and resources are gone.

♪ Dramatic music ♪

When I was in the State Department

Counterterrorism Bureau,

the most important resource that was in short supply

was policy-maker attention,

and I said, "We actually have to focus

on local-level governance,

reforming the Afghan corruption system,

and giving the Afghan military

a series of really basic capabilities,"

because by that point, we were so sucked into the war in Iraq

that we just didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it.

Yelling in native language

And the Taliban in Pakistan

and their cell groups in Afghanistan

began to exploit that.

♪♪♪

I, uh, was involved in some of the early,

early stages of talking with the Taliban

about how to ensure that they didn't join an insurgency.

They actually found some way of reconciling

with the new regime.

I mean, it happened, like, in my sitting room

in, you know, the house in Islamabad, um,

you know, friendly discussions.

Speaking native language

My ability to talk with Taliban today

is based upon actions which I have taken every day

since I crossed over the border in '89.

They can check my reputation,

work out how discreet I am,

and reckon if I am duplicitous,

and I'm sort of, like, doing the same

when I'm talking with them,

because, um, one w-one way or another,

both sides of the relationship have got to trust each other

to be able to-to go forward.

♪♪♪

In the wake of 9/11,

the Taliban leadership wanted surrender terms

to live respectably in their homes,

recognizing the authority of the new government

which had been imposed by the Americans.

Those terms were available. They were torn up.

Instead we got increasingly stories of Taliban

who'd tried to go home to their villages in Afghanistan

either getting arrested or giving up,

crossing the border,

going over to-to Pakistan

ready for the next chapter.

♪♪♪

The Taliban start to reform the organization, uh,

saying that, "We have been excluded from this new setup.

We're gonna have another go."

Tonight Frontline reports

on the return of the Taliban.

♪♪♪

There's some, uh, ICOM chatter saying

that the Taliban are looking at us right now.

♪ Somber music ♪

♪♪♪

speaking native language

speaking native language

♪♪♪

For Americans,

the original story of this long war

was we were saviors.

♪♪♪

We had gone in and done a good thing...

and people were ecstatic to be free again.

But the reality is, I don't think

it was ever as clean as we wanted to believe.

♪♪♪

The first inflection point that I noticed

happened in May 2006

when a U.S. military convoy crashed into a crowd of people,

and they killed about 14 people.

♪♪♪

Speaking native language

♪♪♪

People in these crowds

were shouting angry anti-American slogans,

and I went, "What?

What has happened here?"

♪♪♪

That was the first time I realized

that there was as much resentment

against the international presence

as there was gratitude or hope.

♪♪♪

There was this building resentment

that Afghans had against corruption

and civilian casualties,

and both of those could be tied directly back to America.

We were pouring in so much money

that corruption was all but inevitable

with no checks and balances,

and then with civilian casualties,

let's just say any civilian casualty in general,

the Taliban would immediately put out

press releases locally saying,

"This is America doing this to you."

They'd make up things, and it was very effective.

Well, today's riots showing just how fragile

our relationship is with Afghanistan,

a key player in the War on Terror.

Now, is it just a small group of troublemakers at work here,

or are the Afghan people simply ungrateful?

♪♪♪

Afghans have this streak of defiance

against the world because of history.

There was the Russians and the fact

that the Americans had abandoned Afghanistan before.

There's always in the back of the minds of Afghans

that-that suspicion of ulterior motives.

♪♪♪

United States got distracted,

and they wanted to show

that Afghanistan was still this good story working

and it is rosy,

and they were not...

they were not listening to us, you know?

♪♪♪

I had great misgivings

because I felt that the CIA

needed to stay engaged

with key political players inside Afghanistan,

but I could see very quickly

that there was very little appetite, uh, for doing that.

It's not that we didn't know Afghanistan

was going badly after that.

We did, but we couldn't do anything about it,

because by the time Iraq started to go bad,

Afghanistan was also going bad,

and we were caught in a war in two fronts

without the resources to deal with both.

♪♪♪

America's men and women in uniform

took away al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan,

and we will not allow them to reestablish it in Iraq.

So I have committed more than 20,000

additional American troops to Iraq.

The agreement lays out a framework

for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq,

a withdrawal that is possible

because of the success of the surge.

Yelling in foreign language

While Iraq has dominated the headlines,

the less-publicized fight in Afghanistan

has intensified.

My fellow citizens, our nation is at war

against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,

and for those who seek to advance their aims

by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents,

you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For six years, Afghanistan has been denied

the resources that it demands because of the war in Iraq.

It is in our vital national interest

to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Well, I think that in the last year,

we've made a lot of progress.

Two thousand ten will be a year

that will see progress

and a reversal of Taliban momentum.

Well, the financial and human cost

of the War in Afghanistan

has gone up every year over the past five years,

more than 1,600 U.S. troops.

This past year in Afghanistan was the deadliest yet

for American troops.

Momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan

since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country.

I wish I could tell you that this war was simple,

but that's not the way of counterinsurgencies.

They are fraught with both successes and setbacks,

which can exist in the same space

and in the same time,

and I believe the campaign is on track.

♪♪♪

If you ask the question, "Why are we here?"

as President Obama did when he came into office in 2009,

"Why are we fighting in Afghanistan?"

well, his best experts gathered and advised him,

"Sir, we're here because al-Qaeda

is still a threat to the United States.

Bin Laden's still alive. We got to finish the job."

Every year, there was this sense

that if we did X, Y, and Z,

maybe we could finish up the war.

Tonight I can report to the American people

and to the world that the United States

has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,

the leader of al-Qaeda.

And this will go down

as one of the great missions

in the history of the intelligence community.

As I was planning the mission, you had to have surprise.

We had surprise. You had to have speed.

We're coming in by helicopters.

And you had to have purpose,

and God knows these-these, uh, SEALs and soldiers had purpose.

They were going after the most wanted man in the world.

It was about who we are as Americans.

This man and his people had attacked New York

and Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.,

and we had an obligation

to spend as long as it took to bring him to justice.

♪♪♪

We did get bin Laden.

Al-Qaeda is diminished.

It's scattered. It's under pressure.

We have been killing people with our drones

for a good while now,

so why are we still here?

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

As the war in Afghanistan went on and on,

the CIA then got into the secret air war business,

which is really what the drone campaign was.

It was a secret air war

designed to do what the United States

was not prepared to do through conventional means.

The CIA was given charge of that

because it wasn't going to be declared.

It wasn't going to be run by the Air Force

or by the special operations groups at the Pentagon.

It was, uh, covert, and so that added to the sense

that the CIA was... Became an agency at war.

It's a new way of war.

The United States government wouldn't even acknowledge

this was really happening,

and-and when they did acknowledge it,

privately they would say,

"There's no civilian casualties."

Well, that wasn't true.

In Afghanistan,

NATO is investing a U.S. air strike on Thursday

that may have killed a child in Helmand Province.

Whatever the benefit of the drone strikes,

they have created enormous resentment

among some here in the region

who view the strikes as another sign of American arrogance.

And you can see, this is by administration,

so under George W. Bush,

there were relatively limited strikes

except right at the end of his second term.

Then under Obama, it spikes up hugely.

So it was really President Obama

who hammed it up very dramatically.

You can see the estimated total number of casualties

is up to almost as high as 3,000

on the outer bounds.

Myself and my colleagues at New America

have been doing this for about a decade.

We felt that there was some data out there,

print media stories that we could assemble and sort of say,

"What's going on? Who's being killed?

How many strikes are there?"

And so we-we began to kind of collate all this.

When it came to the Predator,

we also had our forces somewhere in the area.

So there would be a shot,

and then people were gonna move in

to do the sensitive site collection,

and then... So, you know, it was very human

because you knew who were down there.

Afghanistan, I think, was the early laboratory

of what this more paramilitary CIA became,

so a drone program that went from surveillance drones

to actually killing people.

I would say, actually, the principal reason the CIA

is in Afghanistan is, in a way, the drone program,

because after 9/11, al-Qaeda didn't remain in Afghanistan.

They fled into Pakistan, uh,

and the Taliban regrouped there.

If I'm trying to deploy six or 12 men

trying to climb up a mountain

and get this guy when I can do this easier

and save our men and women's lives and...

I'll go... I'll take the Predator any day, any day.

♪♪♪

In the early years and really even through,

I would say, for the first ten years,

you could travel anywhere.

The capital was lively. The capital felt free.

Girls were going to school.

Girls were going to college.

It certainly felt like a place that was churning with change.

♪♪♪

My father told me about American University,

and he said, "It's the best university in Afghanistan."

He always wanted me to-to get education...

so I joined the university.

The vision for people here

is not a sixth-century fundamentalist Islamic state.

It's a 21st-century advanced country,

and they want to get there.

♪♪♪

We can play a role in that,

in helping them achieve their dreams.

My father never want me to come to this university

because of the risks involved with the name "American" on it,

and seeing the situation,

how badly the war is going on in Afghanistan,

he never wanted me to come here.

But I told him I have goals in my life,

and I've already did good in my high school,

and I had passion to get an education.

I was not worried about security.

I had heard about explosions on news,

but I had not experienced something like that.

As the Taliban insurgency became stronger,

there was this growing pattern of attacks

that began to make everybody realize

that the Taliban really were back

and really were causing trouble and really were starting

to put the brakes on progress of different kinds.

Many evenings, I would go to my favorite bar,

this Lebanese café, and I used to go there

probably at least once a week for many, many years.

When you live and work in a war zone,

you need a place like that.

You need someplace you can go

and really feel yourself, be yourself,

and that's pretty much the only place I felt that way.

And then the Taliban attacked that café,

shot dead everyone in it, including the owner.

The scenes of this restaurant

are really quite incredible...

People crouched on top of one-one-one another,

underneath tables,

gunned down inside there.

So that seems to have been what has happened.

Anybody who was injured seems to have been likely

to have been outside the restaurant,

potentially in cars waiting outside

or about to enter the restaurant.

Anybody inside seems unlikely to have been able

to escape easily from the gunmen.

That's the moment I sort of thought,

"What's left here, you know? Why are we even here?"

I remember feeling it. I remember thinking that.

♪♪♪

When I had a temporary assignment

in Afghanistan,

I could electrically feel the dangers around me.

There we go.

I've definitely known people that have died.

- You want milk? - No.

The night before I left,

I was sitting with my younger daughter,

and she gave me this bracelet that she made,

and I promised her I'd wear it every day

and every night that I was away, and I did.

I never took it off.

And when I would leave the wire or go to the less safe

or secure and fortified areas...

I looked down at that bracelet,

and I would definitely question what I was doing.

"Am I a responsible mom?

Does my work here really make a difference

in this seemingly endless war?"

♪♪♪

I managed analytic teams that covered Afghan politics

and Afghan economics.

At that time, there was a U.S.-military narrative

that things were getting better in the country

and that the Taliban was failing,

and that was leading to the discussions of drawdown.

Two thousand fourteen,

we have agreed that this is the year

we will conclude our combat mission in Afghanistan.

But things on the ground were evolving

and telling a little bit of a different story.

The 2015 takeover of Kunduz,

that's the first provincial capital

the Taliban had taken since before 2001.

It was a big deal.

The battle for Kunduz

started before dawn,

as Afghan government troops tried in vain

to hold back the advance of the Taliban.

After the West's trillion-dollar war

against the Taliban,

its fighters still pose a potent threat.

They took over the city for about two weeks.

They released a lot of prisoners...

A lot of them were Taliban fighters...

And displaced tens of thousands of people

in the process.

It was a total propaganda win for them.

God willing, this is our hope,

to build a religious school,

to build a bridge, a road, a sharia-based government.

This is why we came out,

and this is what we fought for...

So that sharia law is enforced here.

Just holding the city... That's all they needed to do

was just take it and hold it, show of force

to show their fighters and the world

that they were there and still capable...

Was quite significant.

♪♪♪

What happened in Kunduz caught people off guard

when the Taliban actually managed

to gain control of the city,

and I think what happened then was a kind of panic.

The psychological blow and the PR repercussions

of having lost a very important northern city

were enormous,

and so then there was a kind of

real scrambling to-to regain control,

and the American military made a really horrific error.

Breaking news overnight...

U.S. warplanes may have killed nine local staffers

at a medical clinic run by Doctors Without Borders.

The attack was in the provincial city of Kunduz.

The U.S. apparently was trying to dislodge Taliban insurgents

who had seized the city on Monday.

An American gunship targeted the hospital

and circled it and hit it repeatedly.

What's concerning, maybe, about how it unfolded

was that the Afghan forces operating there

had raided the hospital some point previously,

looking for wounded Taliban,

and were apparently quite unhappy with the fact

that MSF treated wounded Taliban in the facility,

whereas MSF, like any medical-care provider,

say that they treat anyone,

regardless of political affiliation.

Our staff have reported

that there were no armed combatants

or active fighting in

or from the compound prior to the air strike.

Doctors were about to take me

to an operating theater when the bomb hit.

There were flames all around me.

I saw patients and doctors burn to death.

♪♪♪

Forty-three people died,

quite a number of them staff and patients...

including patients on the operating table at the time,

including children.

I mean, it was just horrific.

♪♪♪

And some of these forces that have carried out

these raids on medical facilities

are the ones we identified as being backed by,

trained, recruited by the American CIA.

♪♪♪

That hospital bombing after the siege of Kunduz

was pretty devastating.

A lot of innocent civilians were killed,

and war is war, and you can always say that,

but when innocent lives are lost,

it really does make it difficult to continue the work.

I saw a lot of horrific images,

and it's hard to deal with that

and learn how to process that,

but I learned and found a way to...

store those images

and those experiences in my heart without it destroying me.

You wake up in the morning, and you brush it off,

and there's always an emergency and something pressing

that's happening, and you don't have time

to necessarily process during the day,

so you just... you just go 150 miles per hour.

You go until you crash again.

It was seven o'clock at night

when the most number of students and faculty

and staff were here, and it was just

when people were going to their last class of the day.

The attackers loose off a couple of volleys.

One of them goes this way

and heads towards our escape route.

Another one goes in here to our main classroom building.

At that time, this-these doors were open.

We didn't have the-the heavy doors we have on them now.

It was, uh, the month of August

in 2016,

and I was expecting

that it's my last semester.

I was done with my classes,

and I went to offer the evening prayer,

and we were about to leave the mosque.

I heard some people shouting.

My friend immediately closed the door,

and she said... She-she calls me Bresh...

And she said, "Bresh, why is there gunshots?"

As she said that...

♪♪♪

the explosion happened,

and everything went dark.

I saw myself on the ground

after a couple of minutes there,

and I realized that there was a huge,

um, hole in the back of my head.

American University campus in Kabul, Afghanistan,

is under attack as we speak.

At least one university guard is now dead.

Officials say that dozens of students and staff

are still trapped inside, their fate unknown.

Everybody was crying and screaming.

The terrorists said, "Don't scream," you know?

And then they started shooting.

♪♪♪

I felt that somebody's standing behind me,

and when I looked at him, he shot me,

and I pretended to be dead

because I thought this is the only way to...

to save myself.

♪♪♪

I was bleeding so badly.

I was trying to remember what's happening

at the university,

and I remember what my father told me.

He said I can't come here,

and I regretted, um, to have not accepted what he told me.

♪♪♪

I thought, um, "It's a-it's a dream."

I wanted to wake up,

but then I realized it's not a dream.

It's reality.

♪♪♪

This university has educated more than 100

top government officials, young people.

Afghanistan is a very young country,

where 75 percent of its population

is below the age of 25,

so the attack against the American University

is an attack against Afghanistan's future.

♪♪♪

We're numb to so many things in Afghanistan.

I mean, someone described PTSD to me,

and I think that as Afghans-as Afghans,

we collectively suffer from it.

♪♪♪

Unsafe now are Afghanistan's journalists.

A bus carrying TOLO TV employees was the target.

We have lost 13 colleagues in three years,

and they were kids that we employed,

and they were members of our family.

♪♪♪

It's not just a question of these young kids

leaving us far too early.

It's also their families.

Sometimes they were the breadwinners

of an entire clan.

♪♪♪

It brings home how serious,

you know, what we do is and...

and how dangerous it is, and, you know,

we've created this culture of telling the truth,

of pushing boundaries,

so there's an element of guilt

that we have exposed these people.

The Taliban said it meant

to target the journalists,

that the channel had accused their fighters of raping women

when they briefly seized the city of Kunduz last year.

You think it through, and then you think, you seriously think,

"Do we need to do this? Is it that important?

If we can save a life,

is it worth having a news outlet?"

♪♪♪

For the Taliban,

their ideology is so important for them,

and the values that we push,

whether it's women's rights and so forth,

goes very much against what they believe in.

But also, I think that we represent the new Afghanistan

because the country has moved on,

and for them, it's difficult to accept that.

I take some hope from the fact that now Afghans

on both sides of the conflict,

they're incredibly tired of this war.

They're not baying for blood. They want to see an end to it.

With people I trust amongst the Taliban,

we're involved in a collective effort to make sense

about what's going on inside their own movement,

about what's going on in Kabul and amongst the-the...

You know, the non-Taliban Afghans,

and making sense of what the United States is doing.

Speaking native language

United States had a very difficult time,

almost from the beginning of the Afghan War,

deciding whether the Taliban

was an enemy of the United States.

Are they a threat to the United States?

Well, they're a threat to our ally in Afghanistan,

but no Taliban, uh, has declared an intention

to strike the United States,

certainly not in an official way.

In fact, they say the opposite...

"We're only fighting you

because you're here in our country.

If you get out of our country, we'll leave you alone."

Right now the Taliban,

they don't like ISIS any more than we do,

so there's a war going on there

while the Taliban still blow up people in-in Kabul

and around the country.

I do think, at this point,

the Taliban may have learned their lesson

about harboring al-Qaeda.

Now, why they're after Americans now?

Because they're in Afghanistan.

We're there.

And for the Taliban and for- for Afghanistan in general,

the way to communicate is, you hurt them till they leave.

They did it to the Russians, you know,

and-and they're doing it to us.

An American soldier is dead tonight

after a Taliban car bomb exploded

in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Ten civilians and a military soldier from Romania

also killed in that attack,

which comes as the U.S. tries to finalize a peace deal.

I'm really interested

in that whole incident,

partly because there was a video someone took

right when it happened,

and there's an Afghan man who...

I think he sees the truck or van

kind of coming on to the sidewalk,

and you can see he knows, and he starts to run,

and then he dies when it blows up.

That video went really viral, and it was such a sad story

'cause it was... I think he was a shopkeeper,

and he usually sent his assistant to do something

but decided that day to give his assistant a break

and he would go do it.

I can't remember the exact story,

but something about that moment

and people seeing him kind of know what's coming

and try to escape,

I think every Afghan saw themselves in that,

and that's why people just kept watching it

over and over and over,

but that is what life has become, you know?

You're just waiting

or hoping you can outrun whatever's coming.

♪♪♪

We're like policemen. We're not fighting a war.

If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it,

I could win that war in a week.

I just don't want to kill ten million people.

Does that make sense to you?

I don't want to kill ten million people.

I have plans on Afghanistan

that if I wanted to win that war,

Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth.

It would be gone.

It would be over in... Literally in ten days,

and I don't want to do... I don't want to go that route.

United States does not owe us anything.

They can pull out any second they wish,

but what will be the interpretation

of this pullout?

There will be, whether you like it or not,

a domino effect.

This will be celebration for terrorists.

The mightiest power in the globe running away,

leaving the scene to who?

I'm not saying they must stay.

I mean, they-they can leave any moment they wish.

Seeing what we've seen in Afghanistan

and our involvement in it, being our longest-running war,

the theory is kind of panning out.

I don't see how this war can be won.

A bombshell series of investigative reports

in The Washington Post

exposing heartbreaking truths

about the U.S. war in Afghanistan,

which has claimed some 2,400 U.S. lives

and cost nearly a trillion dollars.

The first thing we did,

the first story was just to show

that disconnect between what they were saying in public

and what they were saying privately,

but then, as you pointed out,

we-we focus on certain themes,

certain core failings of the war.

That's the gist of-of the series.

A new report claims that the American people

were misled about the War in Afghanistan.

A Washington Post investigation looked at nearly 2,000 pages

of internal government documents

and found that senior U.S. officials

did not tell the truth.

"Built to Fail.

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in nation building,

it has wasted billions doing just that."

Uh, "Consumed by Corruption.

The U.S. flooded the country with money

and then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled."

"Unguarded Nation.

Afghan security forces, despite years of training,

were dogged by incompetence and corruption."

And the last day, uh, "Overwhelmed by Opium.

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan

has imploded at nearly every turn."

I think the main headline is that, you know,

for 18 years, U.S. government, generals,

ambassadors, diplomats

were giving rosy pronouncements

about the War in Afghanistan,

even though they knew the war was not going well

or it was failing

or that they had profound doubts about the strategy.

So, in public, they were saying one thing

about how they were making progress

and this was a war worth fighting.

In private,

they admitted they had no idea what they were doing.

"We didn't know what we were doing,"

said now-retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute,

who was the Afghan war czar for Presidents Bush and Obama.

I can't think of another war

where you have the generals in charge of it

admitting that their strategy was fatally flawed,

and to say that in such raw terms,

it's not just news, it's-it's history.

We simply didn't know what we were doing.

It wasn't even mission creep. It was mission fantasy.

How do we ever believe in our military people in the future?

I mean, it's like a spouse who's been cheated on.

How do I ever trust you again?

In a country increasingly divided every day,

it's nice to learn that there's one issue

that brings America's leaders together...

Lying about war.

♪ Dramatic music ♪

♪♪♪

I think the American public

has always wanted to support the war.

They wanted to support the troops here.

This is very different from Iraq or other conflicts

around the world, and... But over time,

it's become clear, I think, to the American people

that this wasn't working out as intended.

It took years and years much longer than they thought,

and they've heard three presidents talk about this.

And they knew it didn't add up.

♪♪♪

Building schools and protecting women's rights

and so on, that's not what this war is about.

Those have always been secondary

to the primary objective,

which has been to hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The secret detentions, the torture,

ceaseless night raids, air strikes, drone attacks,

when I said it's a CIA war, meaning they've sort of set

the priorities for the war,

and for the Afghans, this is a never-ending war,

and many of them have seen nothing but.

♪♪♪

The U.S. and the Taliban have just signed

a landmark agreement that could finally lead

to an end of hostilities in Afghanistan.

After two decades of war, the U.S. and the Afghan Taliban

have just signed a long-awaited deal

aimed at paving the way to peace

and the departure of foreign troops.

Not part of the deal?

Any commitments from the Taliban

to protect the civil rights of people

they so brutally repressed

when last in power, particularly women.

Afghanistan has suffered for 40 years,

so it's very hard to see how this country

is going to be able to pull together.

The coming days and months are going to decide

whether peace in Afghanistan is going to move

from a signed document to reality on the ground.

I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show

that we're not all wasting time.

If bad things happen, we'll go back.

♪♪♪

Meeting with Afghans, you can tell

they've lost faith in their American counterparts

because of the historical flip-flopping

and pulling back and pushing back into areas,

and you can see in their eyes

the weariness and frustration,

'cause it's their country.

It's their families, and it's their people,

and we come and go...

and that hurts.

After the attack, I went to the United States.

My medical treatment was sponsored

by a hospital in Dallas.

I spent six months in the hospital,

and many people told me to stay there in the U.S.,

but I really wanted to graduate,

and also, I wanted to come back to Afghanistan.

I don't know, but I wanted to come back.

I don't hate those people

who attacked my university,

because one day, with the education I receive,

I want to bring a change that will affect their children.

Educated people are leaving the country

because of insecurity, but if everybody leaves,

who will do something for the country?

We cannot just depend

on the United States for peace.

So I think I have the responsibility to work for it,

because this is the time.

The country is in need.

Afghanistan is the youngest country

outside of Africa, median age of 18.

I think 60 percent of the population

is under the age of 20,

so there's certainly this appetite,

this capacity to embrace change.

♪♪♪

You know, in life, you get one shot

at doing something that is impactful.

Whether we're successful or not is another story,

but we-we've tried.

♪♪♪

buwee' ted

♪♪