Hey everybody, thank you for being here with me.

I want to have a conversation today about Afghanistan with a guest who has a lot to tell us.

She wrote an article called The Eyes of August that sort of been blowing up on the internet

and for a good reason.

Her name is Sarah Chase and she is a former reporter for NPR.

She covered the fall of the Taliban and ran a soap factory in downtown Kandahar.

She served as a special advisor to two commanders of the International Forces and Kabul and

then to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullin.

She was a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Pieces Democracy Conflict

and Governance Program.

Before I bring Sarah out, I just want to say that we are all aware that a debacle occurred

here.

But it's so important that we start learning whatever it is we need to learn so that the

United States can stop repeating these disasters.

There are a lot of simplistic things that we can say, the genitals lie to us, the government

lie to us, but there are so many different layers of this.

It's like a crime story.

It's like the more you read, you start asking yourself, well who were the good guys and

who were the bad guys when I was growing up.

My father used to tell us about the Byzantine rule.

Everything is ever quite the way you think it is.

Why is it that America's longest war was actually never declared by Congress in contradiction

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