Jon Lee Anderson

And ultimately, we saw what happened.

I mean, you can talk about Afghanistan from many different angles, but ultimately the country is now back in the hands of the Taliban.

And that effort at regime change did not work.

But the main reason it did not work was an American failing.

We did not, one, invest the man we chose to be their president with true power, visible power,

And two, we never engaged fully culturally with the country.

We were always just hovering above the ground in our bases and our Humvees and our airplanes.

We never really entered the country.

We didn't empower it in a civic sense, truly.

We didn't invest in it in any kind of rooted way.

We dug wells, we taught women's rights, we did this, we did that, we had military bases, and then we left.

We left a lot of military gear behind.

But we didn't invest in housing, we didn't invest in education, we didn't think about it beyond our own immediate needs of counterinsurgency and what political solutions we oversaw were Band-Aid solutions.

If you show that much disdain and cultural divorce from the place you're entering,

in a bellicose way, as a warring party, then you're not going to win them over.

You're always going to be an alien.

That's what we did in Vietnam.

It's what we did again in Iraq.

It's what we did in Afghanistan.

And I'll mark my words, it's what we're doing in Iran.