And just to heads up for listeners, there's a number of pretty intense sensitive topics we discuss in this episode just so you know ahead of time.

My interest as a reporter is not just individuals navigating treacherous situations, but social inequality and the sort of larger structural forces that bear down on individuals when they're having to make these choices that lead some people to dirty their hands and others not to or to think of it another way.

Who sleeps well at night and who doesn't.

Hello and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

I've been thinking a lot of people have been thinking around this time about the Warren Afghanistan as this multi-decade project that has now come to an end at least in one phase as Spencer Ackerman warned we can't be shorts the final phase of the war on terror.

And in fact, we can imagine there will be continued airstrikes and drone strikes in Afghanistan.

But as you're thinking about it, one of the things that has been so striking is hearing veterans that served in Afghanistan and then reading some of the journalism that's come out of Afghanistan, including an incredible piece in New Yorker by a non-Gopal, which I can't recommend highly enough, which is about the sort of experience of folks in rural Afghanistan of the war.

And what you realize is how removed the vast majority of Americans have been from this war we've waged.

People were compiling this data to show that the evening news networks had spent more time on Afghanistan in a week than they had on the war in the previous five or ten years or something like that.

And I have to say I have a show myself. I'm guilty of the same.

We did more Afghanistan coverage in the week of the pull out than we had done probably in the previous year that the war had been effectively outsourced to a relatively small group of people that served in it and contractors.

Those include people that were operating drones remotely and people that were actually there and contractors were actually there.

And of course the people that live in Afghanistan, the 50 million folks who have had to deal with the repercussions of our violence, of the violence of the Taliban, of the incredible depredations of the government there.

But you really do get the sense of there was this job that we as a people said had to be done over the course of four administrations that we told the people that signed up for the US Armed Services to do.

And then just kind of wash your hands off.

We just didn't really do a lot about it. We didn't really think about it.

I felt this palpable frustration from veterans about precisely this and some of them have been on with pod about the fact that they come back having been traumatized or sometimes not.

But have had these experiences these incredibly profound experiences, sometimes beautiful moments of camaraderie, sometimes unbearable tragedy, sometimes what we call moral injury, which is the intense guilt that comes from being the person who commits an active violence, that's something we'll talk about a little bit in this hour.

And they come back to a society where it's like, oh Afghanistan, are we still there.

And that dynamic where there are things being done in our name or to our putative benefit by our government or by the institutions of modern American capitalism that essentially produce the goods and services we use.

But our morally treacherous or at least morally fraught brutal to do and not really high status or celebrated that's an entire category of work that happens in society.

And the name of the category that today's guest, Al Pres gives it is dirty work.

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