Former Afghanistan 'war czar' explains to CNN's Jake Tapper why Biden was right to get out
Ret. Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served under two American presidents in Afghanistan, told CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday that President Joe Biden was absolutely right to get out of that country after 20 years of war.
During a discussion about the Afghanistan withdrawal, Tapper quoted a blunt assessment that Lute, who served as the Afghanistan "war czar" during the Obama presidency, gave to U.S. officials about what the United States did wrong in Afghanistan over the past two decades.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan," Tapper quoted Lute, who delivered this assessment six years ago. "We didn't know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
Lute then explained why he gave such a bleak report on the war.
"Afghanistan is an enormously complex, and for Americans, an enormously foreign place," he said. "There may not be a more complex and foreign place on the face of the earth than Afghanistan."
Lute explained that while the military had great initial success in routing the Taliban in the months after the 9/11 attacks, they were left without clear direction in the years that followed.
"Then we were left with the rest of the problem in Afghanistan," he said. "And my comments to the inspector general reflected that, in my experience, at the ten-year mark of personally working on this problem."
Watch the video below.
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