Dexter Filkins on the Fall of Afghanistan
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dexter Filkins covered the American invasion of Afghanistan when he was a reporter for the New York Times, and has continued to report on conflicts in the region for The New Yorker. Filkins’s best-seller from 2008 carried the resonant title “The Forever War.” Thirteen years after the book’s publication, the forever war is over, but its end has been the chaotic worst-case scenario that many feared. Filkins talks with David Remnick about whether it had to go this way, and whether twenty years of war changed America more than it did Afghanistan.
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| 1:10.7 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:15.6 | Staff writer Dexter Filkins has covered the war in Afghanistan for a very long time, |
| 1:20.6 | first when he was a reporter for the New York Times and then more recently for the New Yorker. |
| 1:25.0 | His 2008 bestseller carried the resonant title, The Forever War. |
| 1:29.9 | And now with the American withdrawal and the return to power of the Taliban, the forever war seems |
| 1:35.1 | to be coming to a chaotic and ominous end. I spoke with Dexter Filkins last week. |
| 1:41.5 | Now, Dexter, we are watching the Taliban retake complete control of Afghanistan |
| 1:46.7 | after 20 years of American presence and occupation. As someone who started reporting on this |
| 1:52.7 | country late in the 1990s, and you were there even before I know, how did this happen? |
| 2:00.3 | Wow. I mean, I have to say I never, I never quite imagined it that the day would actually come. I always thought they'd kick the can down the road, you know, another decade. I think fundamentally, from the very beginning, there were two contradictions, fatal contradictions in the American |
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