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This week's show is brought to you by brilliant, a web sight and anapt that teaches you how to think and solve problems with fun, interactive lessons in stem science, technology, engineering and math. We talk about why we were attacked on 9/11 but also what went wrong from there. Craig whitlock has covered the global war on terrorism for the washington post since two thousand one as a foreign correspondent,. pentagon reporter and national security specialist. And he talks about comparison between donald rumsfeld and robert bennet macnamara - both of them kind of got themselves into game traps where they ended up revealing their own lies.

Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Papers is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.