Saturday, January 15, 2022

The Afghanistan Papers, with Craig Whitlock - on Midrats

 

Five presidents from both political parties oversaw the two decade debacle in Afghanistan that ended in the national humiliation at the end of August 2021 at the airport in Kabul where we retreated under fire following a negotiated surrender - leaving up to a thousand Americans behind and untold thousands of Afghan nationals who fought with us to their fate as the Taliban returned to the power we took from them in 2001.

People in the executive branch, Department of Defense, Department of State, Congress, media, and the well credentialed chatterati said they were "shocked," "surprised," and otherwise unprepared for what unfolded. Should they have been, or was this the inevitable outcome warned of in official government lessons learned and historical interviews dating from the beginning of the conflict?

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will be Craig Whitlock, and we will be using his book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War” (Simon & Schuster, 2021) as a starting point for our conversation.

Craig has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1998. He is assigned to the Investigative Desk, where he specializes in national security.

At The Post, he's covered the Pentagon beat for the National Desk from 2010 until 2016. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent and served as the Berlin bureau chief for six years. While overseas, his primary assignment was investigative reporting into terrorism networks and counterterrorism policy in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He has reported from more than 60 countries.

Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.

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