General H. R. McMaster and military historian Victor Davis Hanson are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In this frank, no-holds-barred conversation, they discuss the United States’ mission in Afghanistan: how it began, how it was conducted, and its ignominious end. McMaster and Hanson debate what worked and what failed, how social issues in the United States may have influenced our mission in Afghanistan and our decision to leave, and whether the United States should have continued to maintain a presence instead of leaving in a matter of weeks, abandoning thousands of Afghans loyal to the U.S. mission there (as well as an unknown number of U.S. citizens) after 20 years of military operations in the country.
Recorded on September 17, 2021