Sam Harris

I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan.

I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan.

And I will admit, in hindsight, that looks like...

you know, at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, you know, more likely a fool's errand, right?

It's like that, you know, it did not turn out well.

It wasn't for want of trying.

I don't, you know, I have not done a deep dive on all of the failures there.

And maybe all of these failures are failures in principle.

I mean, maybe it's just, maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions.

But yeah, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me.

And when we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that moment, you know, Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and, you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan.

Anyway, you know, so yes, but my...

my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of, you know, insofar as the neocon spirit of

You know, responsibility and idealism that, you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as the world's cop.

And we have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often because, you know, if we don't do it over there, we're going to have to do it over here kind of thing.

Yeah, some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking.

There are obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan.

And if you can't change the culture, you're not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture.

It certainly seems that that's not going to happen.

And it took us over 20 years, apparently, to realize that.