Hey everybody. We have a midweek mini podcast for a change. And I mean that. This is a departure. The White House announced earlier this week that President Biden has decided that we will be pulling our remaining troops out of Afghanistan by September

11th, the 20th anniversary of the attack by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

and what we believe would have been the Capitol if those brave souls on United Flight 93 had not taken on the hijackers.

That attack was planned from Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been giving safe haven to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.

Peter Bergen produced the first TV interview of bin Laden by Western media back in 1997.

I interviewed Peter for this podcast last January, about a month before Trump and his administration had reached an agreement with

the Taliban to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan by May 1st of this year.

The decision announced earlier this week is an incredibly difficult one, as Bergen said in our wide-ranging interview.

There are no good decisions here.

I say wide-ranging interview because Bergen and I spoke about a lot of subjects that day

encompassed by his book, Trump and his generals.

And we're playing just about eight or nine minutes about Afghanistan and bin Laden.

And I think you'll find it very interesting.

I know I did.

I've been to Afghanistan five times on four U.S. O tours and once as a U.S. senator in 2010, I traveled with Carl Levin,

chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee at that time. And I have to say my experience was that I learned a lot more about both wars, Iraq and

Afghanistan, on my U.S. O tours. Senator Levin and I stayed at the embassy in Kabul. We had dinner

with the ambassador and members of the Afghan government,

with cabinet members.

We met with President Karzai.

We spent quite a bit of time with General McChrystal.

We went to a forward operating base,

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