 My name is Dr. Walter Ladman, I'm a senior lecturer in international relations here in the Department of War Studies and it gives me great pleasure to welcome and introduce David Lloyd. David Lloyd is a senior visiting research fellow here. Come on in, come on in. In the Department of War Studies, he is of course much better known for what he did in, we might say, his previous life where for nearly four decades he was an award-winning foreign correspondent. David has covered conflict and development issues in the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe, and of course in South Asia and he is most closely associated with the country of Afghanistan where he was, am I correct in thinking he was the only Western correspondent who was embedded with the Taliban when they took Kabul the first time in the 1990s? He subsequently visited Afghanistan every year since then, has written several books on the subject and I think really adorably, particularly from a scholarly standpoint, didn't just observe and write about the country but as at times rolled up his sleeves and actually got involved so spent more than a year as a strategic communications advisor to the president of Afghanistan. And today he's going to talk to us about his latest book which is The Long War, American Afghanistan Since 9-Eleven which the San Francisco Book Review has called a powerful work of history that will engender high regard in the years to come. So David's going to talk for about 45 minutes and then we'll have an ample opportunity for Q&A and discussion. David. Thank you very much, thank you very much for coming and I appreciate as well to serve on this, on this wet night. I want to go right back to the beginning of the war and look at right at the end of the war because I mean we can all agree the beginning and the end were really bad. The end was certainly very bad, the way that the international community just scuttled and abandoned Afghanistan last summer. So just to go back right back to the very beginning of the Afghan war in 2001 what America came in with was a plan that they would only have a light footprint of forces they wouldn't put in large heavy forces into Afghanistan and I think that in my view was one of the war's very first mistakes from the American military point of view the only American boots on the ground were groups like this special forces detachment who were alongside President Karzai you can see there wrapped in a blanket or later became President Karzai and Hamid Karzai quite bravely he'd been a Pashtun, the Taliban at one point asked him to be an ambassador for them but he never really worked alongside them. He was always really opposed to the Taliban but he was seen as very much a uniting figure and he quite bravely came into the south of Afghanistan while the Taliban were still there initially just on a motorbike. There's a wonderful book by Betta Dan, a Dutch journalist called Two Men on a Motorbike which tells the story of Hamid Karzai's first arrival and how he came in. The Taliban found out where he was, things became very hot for him he had a sat phone that the Americans had given him and they came in and got him out before the Taliban got to him and then he went back in with this detachment commanded by Jason Amri the guy in the light beanie hat there and this is the only photograph that existed of them because a couple of days after this picture was taken on the 5th of December and I think you can actually chart many of the problems that happened over the 20 years in Afghanistan to what happened on one day in December back in 2001 on the 5th of December the first thing that happened was a misdirected American bomb hit the position where two of the soldiers in that picture were killed one of the soldiers not in that picture also killed American soldiers more than 20 of Hamid Karzai's soldiers killed, he was slightly injured and so from the very beginning he knew that smart bombs didn't necessarily always go where they were supposed to he had a real lesson in how precision warfare is not really quite precision warfare in terms of these smart bombs and come in, come in the second thing that happened that morning very soon after the bomb in fact was he gets a phone call from the hastily convened bomb conference and is named as the interim leader of Afghanistan remember the whole country has not yet fallen to the Taliban Kabul has already fallen, the North has already fallen there was major aerial bombardment but very few American troops on the ground so it was all an air war the Taliban were bombed out by airplane, air power and Karzai was then named interim leader of the country by this conference in Bomb the third thing that happened that morning was a group of Taliban came deputed by Muramad their leader to offer surrender terms to Karzai and they wanted to negotiate a very in fact their terms were very light they didn't necessarily demand very much they wanted to be able to return to their farms of course they didn't want to face any trials they wanted some impunity for their commanders and there was talk of handing over all of their weapons caches and of course they would sever their links with al-Qaeda and it was the following day that Donald Rumsfeld of the Pentagon press conference made it very clear that there was going to be no surrender so from the very beginning the Americans wanted a military defeat of the Taliban and anyone who spends five minutes studying insurgency Walter's written a book about it will know that on the whole insurgencies are not defeated by major powers you don't win in an insurgency nobody actually wins they're conflicts that tend to finish in different ways but from the very beginning the Americans were not wanting to negotiate with the Taliban in fact it took more than a decade before they changed that policy which I think was a fundamental mistake so you saw three things right at the beginning of the war bombs that don't go where they're supposed to causing Afghan grievance the imposition of America deciding who the leader of the country was going to be very much a sense of this being an American dominated project rather than allowing Afghanistan to decide for itself and thirdly that the Taliban offered surrender there was going to be no talks with the Taliban the Taliban were going to be defeated on the battlefield the race to Kandahar ended up in fact with two American units almost fighting each other because as well as Hamid Karzai there was this guy called Aga Sherzai and as the CIA station chief in Islamabad said make damn sure he's wearing a turban when he introduced him to an American general before he went in the American sense was that these were the people who were going to pacify the Afghan countryside they put back into power people like Sherzai with again with an American detachment within in order to give him support and if you were in the south of Afghanistan and the name of Gulag Sherzai came to you in the mid 1990s he was one of the most corrupt warlords in the south of the country a bandit chief who's excesses as the governor of Kandahar in 1994 were the reason the Taliban emerged in the first place so by putting Gulag Sherzai back into power in Kabul it looked to the Afghans as if America was taking a side in their civil war and so rather than you know coming in understanding the context realizing who these people were, who the good guys were and who the bad guys were the old warlords were put back into power many of these people expected to face trial instead millions of dollars were shoveled into their pockets so you could get money as an Afghan warlord very easily in those days by saying that guy, the mayor of that village, he's al-Qaeda and the Americans would drop a bomb in his head and give you the money and that was so we were taking sides in small local conflicts all the way along right from the very beginning of the Afghan war and the place where we saw this most egregiously really that we saw what had happened in terms of policy was such a mistake it was the Battle of Torobora in October just a couple of months in fact before the December, no it's just after the December 5th event when Osama bin Laden was found to be holed up in the Torobora cave complex that he built in the 1980s during the war against the Russians and of course this was finding Osama bin Laden was the reason for the war there were three and a half thousand U.S. Marines available to conduct this operation they had helicopters, a winter kit, they were geed up because of 9-11 and their commander Jim Mattis later of course the U.S. Defense Secretary later in general and the U.S. Defense Secretary they were screaming at Senkot to send in my boys and they weren't sent in because of the demand to have a light footprint I put that photograph in of foreign journalists because there were other end other end I put that photo in because there were more foreign journalists at the Battle of Torobora than there were foreign journalists and in fact the guy on the left there, Peter Juvenel was then a photographer, a very good friend of mine in fact went back after August last year, he's in a Taliban jet he was jailed 12 weeks ago, he's been there for 12 weeks and he was trying to do business in the new Afghanistan so you can see how difficult Afghanistan is to work under the Taliban now so there was a sense from the very beginning of not putting troops in of a real obsession with the way General Tommy Franks put it that's really about the Russian war a real obsession with how Russia had been defeated in Afghanistan America didn't want to repeat what had happened in the Russian war running around, losing lots of soldiers we're in and out of there in a hurry but at the same time there was this contradictory sense in the Bush White House that America was the exceptional country that wouldn't just leave Afghanistan stranded that would actually leave this a different kind of country and although there was this strong sense in American foreign policy of not doing nation-building and particularly among Republicans who'd seen Clinton in the 1990s doing a variety of small different wars right across the world which they didn't, about every two years during the Clinton years during the eight years of Clinton there was an intervention somewhere in the world and they didn't want to be involved in that but at the same time there was this sense from George W. Bush that they wanted to leave Afghanistan a better place and to the surprise of officials on the ground who'd heard that there was going to be no real aid for Afghanistan and certainly no military support in the spring of 2002 he went to Virginia Tech which was the University that George Marshall had taught at and made this speech appealing for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan the Marshall Plan you'll know was the plan that rebuilt Germany and some other European countries after World War II huge American intervention in post-war Europe so there was a real sense of this contradiction in plans so without troops on the ground standing up warlords but at the same time funding, beginning to fund but not funding with any sort of sense of a really functioning policy and there was no pause at the time for discussion of goals, timelines, strategies no single decision that led to the long war but instead there were a series of small changes in policy during 2001 and 2002 that led to incremental increases in troop numbers and although the light footprint was designed to satisfy the tax-paying public who had limited appetite for wars, certainly long-term foreign military engagements it failed to stabilise the country and it set the very conditions in my view that made that long-term engagement inevitable because there weren't enough troops right at the beginning so what you had was what this is Marshall Fahim who has been the commander of the Northern Alliance forces the Jamiat forces after Amit Shah Massoud was killed by the Taliban a month before and he was really keen on his militias he was made the defence minister of the new government immediately broke every deal that he made with international forces by bringing his troops into Kabul within a year there was almost a standoff between American troops, international troops and Fahim's troops because he still had his tanks and he still had all of his heavy armour very close to Kabul so he had this contradiction that the army was under a defence minister who had no appetite to build a standing army in the new country because he wanted to continue to build up his militia so he was standing in the way of what the international community were trying to do right from the beginning in the Lloyd-Jergar in 2002 the first meeting of Afghanistan since the civil war, since the Taliban had emerged the Taliban were not there and should have been in my view they should have had some representation of Taliban figures but the country wasn't ready for that but it was the first opportunity for the old communists from the 1980s the jihadis from the 1990s and diaspora figures people who came back from abroad people like Ashraf Ghani basically became president were very prominent in the Lloyd-Jergar but the people who were most prominent were the old warlords who when it was set up swept in and took the seats at the front and were most prominent in what happened in that Lloyd-Jergar and at the same time as this quite significant security mistake was made in terms of handing the country over effectively to old warlords a huge amount of money began to pour into Afghanistan because of the George Bush's Marshall plan in Bish and a billion dollars in the first year that went up to several many billions in the years to come the World Bank started talking about an aid juggernaut that had descended on Afghanistan and of course all it did was to fuel corruption that by the way is 19 million dollars that photograph happens to be just one sort of tranche of money coming into Afghanistan and the sense of corruption beginning to take root and the money going into the hands of the warlords unaccountable funding coming into the country began very early on and there was a sense in which from the beginning rather than building an Afghan state too much of that money was going outside the state very large donors particularly the United States and Japan put their money into parallel systems rather than putting it through state systems and I write about this quite a lot in this book the problems of corruption that began right at the beginning of Afghanistan because of this parallel economy that was built and after 2014 when we started taking the scaffolding away that was supposed to be holding this thing up it was as if there was no building left behind all that had been done was to build this infrastructure of scaffolding because so much of the money went into the hands of security contractors, foreign contractors effectively went back overseas again rather than actually coming into the country and of course as the corruption began to emerge in the country it became easier for the Taliban to regroup 2001, 2003 it was quite difficult for the Taliban to recruit people were tired of them there was a new opportunity there was a new government people were talking about democracy whatever that was people really understand what it meant but by 2005, 2006 I remember going into rural villages and it became much more easy for the Taliban to recruit people because of this corruption and because of the way that the government was seen as predatory rather than supportive of the people because the police were seen as predatory and because the government was seen as predatory rather than supportive so in the rural villages where the Taliban controlled security where the Taliban controlled government they were able to operate a very different kind of system and people would talk about the Karzai government as this sort of alien corrupt force whereas the Taliban was seen as their protectors and that was the language that they were using and the way this was put to me by one American analyst and I really like this phrase in any society you have about 4% thugs and about 1% of warlords and the foreigners didn't understand this so they gave money to the thugs so the inevitable reaction of the 95% everybody else was to ally with the extremists against the thugs because they were the people who were the problem and so there was a sense in which there was a rational, rural support for the Taliban because of the people that we had re-enfranchised and at just the same time that this sort of this very sense of small life footprint ate money going wrong by 2004-5 there had been an agreement in NATO that the country was now a country that NATO would stabilise this was called the International Security Assistance Force we weren't fighting a war we were supporting Afghan forces who were fighting their own war and the really significant powers that came in Germany to the north Italy to the west America in the east those were the big powers who remained in Afghanistan until last summer they were the most significant true country nations alongside the UK of course actually and the Canadians in Kandahar the UK who took Helmand province most controversially they wanted to go to Canada who was going to go to the south the Canadians had some investment in Kandahar so Tony Blair had agreed as Prime Minister that what Britain was going to do in terms of priorities in Afghanistan was counter-narcotics was going to end the poppy growth and of course because most poppies were grown in Helmand it was rational for UK forces to go to Helmand and from the very beginning this was seen as a policing operation to support aid and I remember Henry Worsley who was the SAS officer who on the ground right at the beginning in 2006 who handed over to the conventional forces very quietly sitting in the streets and they we've come to police aid but there's no way to police and the politicians who sent the soldiers in and I think this is actually the most stupid phrase by any politician in the 20 years of the Afghan war we'll be happy to leave in three years and without firing a shot as John Reid who was the UK defence secretary who sent in British troops in 2006 he really liked this phrase he came out with it a couple of times and this was a sense of policing aid and not really being engaged in a shooting war which of course the United Kingdom forces were very significantly from the very beginning more sanguine military analysis came from Brigadier Andrew Mackay who was one of the best British officers who went to that we went to Helmand with our eyes closed and our fingers crossed and there's a sense that the policy was not connected again I write quite a lot of detail in my book of the disconnect in policy in 2006 between Whitehall, Brussels the soldiers who were training to go in and if you read Patrick Bishop's book Through Para Through Para was the unit that went on the ground in the first place he hasn't won a lot more detail on that a couple of years later there was a reset were four US presidents all together engaged in the Afghan war and in 2009 President Obama came in very much wanting to change policy his ambition was to end the war his ambition was to pull out all American troops to leave the country as he did in Iraq and he spent the whole of 2009 his first year in in office engaged in a whole series of decisions on the Afghan war more thinking went into Afghanistan and any other foreign policy objective in the Obama Whitehall's during that time period senior officials that I talked to for the book said more senior executive time i.e. President Obama's time was spent on the Afghan file than on any other file quite quickly in the spring he fired the commander on the ground General David McKinnon he was a really decent really decent man who was actually doing counterinsurgency but he wasn't charismatic enough I think for some of the people in Washington he wasn't watching his back and in fact this was quite a big deal McKinnon was the first US expeditionary field commander to be fired since General MacArthur in career in 1951 so this was a political activism political decision making in a war but this very much made it Obama's war McKinnon had been a really successful tank commander he commanded the move across the desert in 2003 into Baghdad which had been the longest and fastest armored assault in military history and highly successful in those terms but he was yesterday's man by 2009 counterinsurgency was the new thing a coin as it became called under General Stan McChrystal who replaced McKinnon in the field and McKinnon was the heavy army his skills were not regarded by the new light army the new intellectual thinking your way through everything Stan McChrystal loved whiteboards and if you can see any of the useful about insurgent math and he'd go around Afghanistan into forward operating bases with a whiteboard and he would work it out so there's Afghanistan there and you can see the fame diagram the insurgents are on the side the irreconcilables are in the top of it some of the insurgents were irreconcilable and there's respect and honour as two words that's what the soldiers were supposed to be doing with the Afghan population and insurgent math was if you take you can see 20 insurgents at the top which is the final result if you take 10 insurgents and you shoot two of them how many are you left with and of course everybody says eight and he's no longer left with 28 because the two insurgents have nine cousins between them so it's a multiplier of the number of people you kill so you've got to be really careful of not killing people and that was all of this counterinsurgency thinking in order to try to connect the population to the government separate the population from the insurgent classic counterinsurgency theory going back to David Kalula and Chairman Mao in fact that was the key sort of learning of counterinsurgency of draining the water out of the pond so that the fish you know the fish would drain and the fish of course being the insurgents and the water being the people who would then be on the side of the of the government McRisto only lasted a year and I think it's one of the counterfactuals of what ifs of the Afghan war if the ash cloud hadn't happened remember the ash cloud in 2010 which came suddenly stopped all global flights for about a week and McRisto at the time was on a tour of Europe going from country to country quite quickly in his little executive jet with his team in order to gee up the allies and make sure that there was this alliance because by then there were 150,000 troops in Afghanistan 50,000 of them mostly from NATO countries and he needed to keep them on side it was his wedding anniversary his wife was there he went out to dinner with the boys you know some dream was drunk and there was a Rolling Stone correspondent who was a T-Total who was sitting quietly on the side who had been given very open access to McRisto and his team and he wrote up all the stuff about the kinds of name names that this team America is the as their opponents called them very tightly knit group of officers who worked with him very tightly and of course he all appeared in Rolling Stone he was out of office and I just wonder if the ash cloud hadn't happened he was committed to staying in Afghanistan for as long as it took three, four years if necessary and he had this will to really change the change the nature of the war whether it would have been different there bottom of the picture there on the left on the right by the way that's Nick Carter who was who commanded in the south of Afghanistan a British officer later became chief of defense here the head of the armed forces in the United Kingdom and at the time as a two star major general was commanding more American troops than any other British officer since the Second World War so you know there was quite a lot of quite big military activity going on for these large armies of very large forces that were in Afghanistan and there was a peak of 150,000 troops as I said and some of that development spending began to stick to the sides and began to be effective and by 2011-12 you were actually beginning to see some effect of what had happened in Afghanistan but it was still a really really tough and Marjah for example which was a big campaign in 2009-10 to take a huge area of the poppy fields in Western Helmand became it was supposed to be quite quick and it became bogged down in what a McChrystal called the believing ulcer Nick Carter was the general who was commanding that I think it was a really tough a really tough battle and despite what they were doing in terms of improving development and in terms of taking more ground and pacifying more ground, they were still unable to control corruption and that remained a significant challenge for Afghanistan and in 2011 there was a report in the nation magazine at the United States 2009 rather which sounded the alarm about how serious things had become on corruption and a huge convoy of trucks bringing in goods to this huge force the ground forces the ground convoy were going in from Pakistan for food and fuel and ammunition and all of the things that the American army but war needed you know Kentucky fried chicken and all the rest of it and around 70% of what was brought in came across came from the land and was very vulnerable inevitably to attack in these big exposed convoys that weren't very heavily armored and in order to get those convoys going protection money was paid all the way along to people who in the end of the day turned out to be the Taliban and this report in the nation worked out that around 10% of the $2 billion a year that was going to fund this supply convoys the United States was literally funding the enemy and as Congress the Congress report that looked into this found there was a reliance on warlords for supply chain security which has the effect of dramatically undermining the objective of bolstering the Afghan government which is what the war was about so you have this corruption was literally eating into the very logic of counter insurgency and trucking contracts were only a small part of military spending by these years the American military was spending more on aid in Afghanistan than USAID and huge amounts of money most US reconstruction money went through the Army the State Department the peak year was $19 billion in 2012 which was just a billion dollars less than Afghan GDP so you had an aid budget being spent by military officers who weren't experts in places to put aid and with very little coordination between the military and civilian sides of government General John Allen who was there in 2012 told me that if there was a joint civil military development plan he wasn't told about it there was a strong sense on both sides that this wasn't coordinated and at the same time you had surge troops leaving on timetable there was a timetable for pulling troops out of the country and you had a civilian service that was the biggest failed part of President Obama's plan for bringing all these soldiers he wanted to try and recruit agricultural experts teachers etc to go into the Afghan countryside both in terms of quality and quantity that failed really dismally in terms of the kind of people that came in and the failures of the recruitment campaign in the first place even paying the American departments the Department of Agriculture didn't have a program to be able to pay people to work abroad in the way that they wanted to work abroad so the systems didn't operate for the presidential desire to do things and at the same time there were still civilian casualties in very big numbers and civilian casualties mostly caused by special forces rather than conventional forces and what you saw was I mean this quote from Doug Luke who was running the war in the lighthouse the sun would come up and there would be a burning compound a conventional infantry unit would have to go and figure what happened just make amends with the locals and it just went on and on and that sense of civilian casualties which again corroded the capacity of the international community to build the kinds of links with local people that they were trying to build outside every time there was any kind of civilian attack would go immediately on to television and weep and demand apologies from the Americans and because of social media because of Facebook people were hearing about these much more quickly than they had before the flash of bang time as they like to say in terms of information was much quicker than it had been before it was very difficult for the United States and the international troops to sort of control the narrative even if they managed to with a number of civilian casualty incidents quite big incidents 80 people killed in a wedding party 100 people killed by a bomb who were civilians and it's how calling attacked one after another during 2009-1011 when all these troops on the ground caused very significant again erosion of the relationship between the state and the people 2016-2017 the third American president comes in it's exactly the same as 2009 a president comes in wanting to close down the war not his war didn't see it as being a very good war to be in but a year later the generals who he'd appointed including Mattis and most significantly Mattis as his defense secretary persuaded him to change policy and for the first time there was no conditions put on withdrawal of international troops until then there was very they were on a timetable up to 2014 the surge troops were pulled out someone remained there was the end of operations for NATO in 2014 but after 2014 American troops could still carry out offensive actions against the Taliban and other insurgents but only in very limited circumstances mostly in self-defense so you saw significant reduction in American fire power 2014-15-16 and in 2017 Trump took the gloves off said to General Nick Nicholson who was then commanding in Afghanistan you can drop what you want as much as you want on whoever you want and in fact Nicholson then took that literally and dropped the Moab the largest bomb that America has in its military arsenal on a huge cave complex of Islamic State in the spring of 2017 and I saw the effect of that because I was working in the presidential palace and a group of elders and it was effective in a liberty to one valley a group of elders came to the presidential palace with a white horse which they presented to the Afghan president it was a great war leader it was a slightly bizarre event so there was a strong sense that also at the same time in this policy in 2017 that they were going to move towards negotiations so people who talk about negotiations the mantra about negotiations is to have a mutually hurting stalemate and until 2017 there wasn't a mutually hurting stalemate because the Taliban weren't losing but all of this offensive capability 2017-2018 led to a peace deal and by 2020 you had and it was a really bad peace deal so you have this really good policy in 2017 pushing the Taliban to have a negotiating table but then you have Zalma Khalzad who was appointed as the American negotiator who negotiated the deal who was told effectively just to pull out Trump wanted the troops out before the election in 2020 ideally and there was this very strong demand on Zalma Khalzad and it was a really so this is where the beginnings of the end of the war was such a a mistake and such a scuffle that we fled from Afghanistan rather than leaving in any kind of good style but in 2020 there was finally this peace deal sign and all that it did all that it demanded of the Taliban was that they would sever their links with al-Qaeda in return America had a very strict timetable and there were two other parts to the peace deal it was a ceasefire and a demand that the Taliban would talk to the Afghan government but neither of those were conditions based neither of those had any kind of international apparatus to control them so there was not really any seriousness about the other parts of the policy there were some desultory talks that went on in Doha between the Afghan government and the Taliban in the autumn of 2020 and into 2021 but they were never serious and there was never a ceasefire and there was no apparatus to manage the talks and they really lived into the ground after the presidential election when Trump was defeated at the end of 2020 so fourth American president comes in last year President Biden and he really wanted to close the war down even more than the other two who come before him and in the Obama White House when he was the vice president he was the strongest voice in the room always for no more troops in Afghanistan he had pulled down to a thousand troops back in 2009 rather than having the surge and if you look at the body language of these two men this picture is taken when then vice president Biden went to Afghanistan soon after the election between the election and the inauguration and you can see it he's not having any of it tries again with one more American tries to say look just give us a few dollars more and there was what was described by a senator who was at this dinner as a dinner to remember after this meeting in the private office so I was shouting at President Karzai and in the end he stalked out of the room because he wasn't getting the guarantees he wanted in terms of cutting corruption and ending corruption for the Afghan government so in 2021 when he extended the Trump deadline for only a few months he pulled the troops out he walked to section 60 of Arlington Cemetery which is where the graves of those dead in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried he said to the cameras just after he was walking across he said from the very beginning I never thought we could unify Afghanistan he didn't even see it as a united country it had no sense of Afghanistan as being a function place at all so we left that's August 2021 Major General Chris Donahue an echo of the famous picture in February 1989 of General Gromov crossing the friendship bridge into Uzbekistan the last two general officers in the last two wars 10 years in the Russian war 20 years in the American war their government lasted three years the American that government lasted three hours after the last helicopter left the American embassy and then there was that terrible fortnight when they were trying to get as many people out as they could we lost the war we lost in the most significant sense that the reason why the war happened was to end terrorism from Afghanistan this is the first United Nations sanctions report six months after the fall of Kabul looking at the Taliban and its links with Al Qaeda which they promised to serve in the 2020 peace deal you'll remember the UN sanctions committee found that the Taliban had had a tactical alliance with Islamic State in the month before the fall of Kabul in August Osama bin Laden's son had visited Kabul quite openly Al Qaeda have only maintained strategic silence so as not to compromise Taliban efforts to gain international legitimacy and the sense of the Taliban wanting to gain international recognition is very very strong but terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom than at any time in recent history in Afghanistan so it was a defeat really on epic proportions in Afghanistan and I just wanted to could we're running a bit short of time my lessons if you like of the Afghan intervention which are understand context, don't go in and give money to wars we're too obsessed with an exit strategy people are always talking about exit strategies in these insurgency campaigns what's needed instead in my view is an intervention strategy we need an intervention doctrine, we need forces configured to go into these kinds of countries because if countries like United Kingdom, United States countries that see expeditionary capability as being something our militaries do having the responsibility to protect of people in countries abroad then we need to have forces configured to do the task and we need to train those forces in order to do the task and we need to have much better coordination with the civilian side with defence diplomacy and development so that the 3Ds so called have much more understanding because in Afghanistan counterinsurgency was made up on the hop was made up all the way along between the State Department and with and with the Pentagon in the United States and I just want to close I just that's a viewer again of Arminalo's desk by the way which is a bit of a shock to me when I saw that photograph having sat in that chair on the right in the meetings that I had with the President which I put in we can talk perhaps about options for the future in questions as to what we what we might do what the international community might do in Afghanistan because they're quite tough but I just wanted to close with a few pictures which I'll rattle through quite quickly for and after pictures because although it was an epic defeat in Afghanistan the international community the West didn't lose the people and more than half of Afghan citizens were born since 911 it's a remarkably young population and the Taliban are finding it an alien society it's much more difficult for them coming in to Kabul and to the cities of Afghanistan now than when they came in in 1996 and they're not doing the same things that they did I was actually on the phone just in the taxi coming here tonight to a friend of mine in Kabul who said we're just coming up to Nowruz New Year which is a in the Persian world in the Islamic world is seen as a great moment of celebration but not traditionally in the Pashtun world and in some of those cities there's more sense of Nowruz this year so there's a sense in which the Taliban are allowing some differences to come and that's because although a lot of the aid was misspent and a lot of what happened went clearly wrong and the war was lost we spent the Marshall Plan and we didn't get Germany out of it which the Marshall Plan delivered in 1945 these are before and after pictures of Kabul that's the main street below the Balehissar in the north of the city and that's it today so that's the what year are these? that's the 2001 so that's what the Taliban left us in 2001 they've been in power for five years and that's what Kabul looked like after the Taliban have been in power that's what that's what Kabul looks like now after what's happened so it's down right in the centre of town the two swords are called now as a teaming bazaar the back streets of Kabul the Taliban back in 2001 now again functioning streets the right across the city you're seeing a very different kind of landscape physical landscape very different people so there's even shopping malls in Kabul that's all again so what has happened over the last 20 years it's the Javan Masjid the big mosque on the other side of the river teaming now with coaches much better built than it was and it's also of course in terms of the people of the country and there she had proudly voted in the 2019 election showing the economy the Afghan cricket team the blue tigers highly regarded worldwide playing now at world cup level within climbing mountains in Afghanistan the restoration of the Darul Aman mosque and it goes on there's a completely different sort of society and I think the Taliban are going to find it much more difficult this time to govern in the new Afghanistan so I'll stop there and so very happily engaging in many questions