Hello out there and happy holidays. As you wrap up your year and hopefully take some time to relax or be with your loved ones, we wanted to resurface our best work of 2021. Maybe you have a long car trip ahead of you or just some extra time to listen. It might be a great chance to hear or hear for a second time our series on Biden and Afghanistan. We'll republish that here over the next few days.

And after that, we'll be back with fresh episodes in the new year.

See you in 2022.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the first U.S. strikes on Afghanistan.

There have been so many questions about why President Biden ultimately made the calls he did

to bring the forever war to an end.

But a question we keep thinking about is what role did Biden have in starting the war?

What we've discovered is that Biden has been making decisions about Afghanistan

ever since his days as an idealistic junior senator from Delaware.

I'm going to be a good little boy.

I learn how the game is played down there.

I've always dreamed about this.

Biden's long history in the U.S. government

turns out to have played a big part in what we've seen unfold

over the last couple of months in Afghanistan.

Afghans are thronging to Kabul's airport, desperate to get on planes and leave the country at any cost.

But anyone trying to get to the airport has to pass through Taliban checkpoints.

There has been a suicide bombing at Kabul airport in Afghanistan where crowds were gathered in the hope of getting onto one of the last

flights to escape Taliban rule. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not

extending a forever exit. I'm Alison Michaels. And over the next three episodes of the show, I'm teaming up with my

can-he-do-that colleague, producer Arjun Singh. We're taking an in-depth look at how President

Biden's foreign policy career intertwines with the trajectory of the war in Afghanistan.

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