Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment.

For today's episode, I'm joined by New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson, author of a new book, To Lose War, The Fall and Rise of the Taliban.

The book is a collection of John's reporting in Afghanistan before, during and after, the fall of the Taliban over the course of America's 20-year war in the country.

Beyond this conversation airing near the anniversary of our full withdrawal from Kabul in 2021, motivation for airing this episode

is Trump's summit with Putin in Alaska this last week and his meeting with Zelensky

at the White House this week as part of his effort to negotiate an end to the Russian-Ukrainian war. Looking at the

possible deals on the table, one of the principal questions is the definition of victory

versus a loss. Does Ukraine have to take back all of its territory to win, or is victory

maintaining a sovereign Ukrainian state oriented towards the West, even at the cost of Crimea

and eastern breakaway provinces. My position, as I said previously on the podcast and discuss

during this episode, is that no one expected Ukraine to last more than a week. A nuclear-powered

superpower with Putin's decades-long post-1990's rebuilding of their military was expected

to quickly win. Imagine a world where the United States shared a border with Iraq back in 2003,

and we then proceeded to invade. If after three years and hundreds of thousands of casualties,

we were only capable of capturing 20% of the country, who do you think would be considered the victor of that war?

I'd say Iraq.

So as we negotiate with Russia, I think everyone should keep this reality in mind.

Moving back to Afghanistan and Reading John's book,

the dynamic between determining victory and defeat is clear in our own 20-year experience in Afghanistan.

We overthrew the Taliban in 2001, eliminated Osama bin Laden in 2011, and as of now, our goal

of preventing the country from serving as a safe haven for terrorist groups is still accomplished.

Yet, in John's telling and in the broad consensus, because we defined victory as a stable, democratic

...