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giving you a front row seat to democracy. now special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction shares details of corruption and oversight. this is just over an hour. >> i think we're ready to get started. our first speaker needs no introduction. he's been speaking truth power.

he has accurately predicted everything that's gone wrong with the reconstruction effort and shortly before kabul fell he described the failures of the u.s. mission in afghanistan in two words. on behalf of the military reporters and editors association, it's an honor for me to introduced john

briefly with you today. as we reported in today's quarterly report, audit inspect

financial reports that were on our website because the department was afraid that information included therein would be afghan allies at risk. let me be clear, i strongly believe that afghans who are a genuine risk of reprisal of their work for the united states government, ngos, news outlet and other groups should and must be protected. the protection of afghans at legitimate risk of harm is not an issue to quibble over and something our agency has respect ed over the ten years i've been there. despite repeat requests, the state department was never able to describe any specific threats

to individuals that were supposedly contained in our reports. nor did state ever explain how removing our reports now from public dissemination would possibly protect anyone since many of those reports were years old and already extensively disseminated worldwide. nevertheless, with great reservation i succeeded to state's initial request and pull ed down all of our reports because it was at the height of the evacuation and i thought that request would only be temporary. recently, i received a second letter from the state department. they stated they have reviewed the relatively few materials still remaining in our website and included a spread sheet containing roughly 2400 new

items that they requested we draw down the race replace et cetera. given how hard the department reportedly was working to evacuate americans from afghanistan and resettle afghan refugee, i was a bit surprised that state department found the time to go through every one of our reports and produce that list. nevertheless, upon reviewing the request, it quickly became clear to us that the state department had little, if any, criteria for determining whether the information actually endangered anyone. i think you will agree with me that some of their requests were a bit bizarre, to say the least. for example, the state department requested that cigar redact the name from every one of our reports. now, i'm sure president ghani

may wish to be excised from the annals of history or there's threat to afghan by mentioning his name in our reports. state department also requested that we consider redacting a reference to quote, unquote, red stone arsenal. huntsville, alabama. this is a bit bizarre for those of you that have visits that arsenal that somehow its name itself is a threat to afghans. possibly, maybe by uttering its name it's a threat to alabama. state also asked us to consider redacting the name of a usaid american, an american citizen who testified publicly before congress in 2017. even though his testimony remains on the website of the house foreign affairs committee

and the hearing video is available. i think by c-span. these are but a few of examples. we cite many more in the report. regardless of this weird request, he did conduct conduct risk based assessment and looked at every one of those 2400 requests for redactions, and we actually found four that made some sense. and we will and did redact them. we also did an another internal review and looked at all of our other audits and reports we had taken down before and made the decision that they should go back up on our public website unadulterated. now, no audience in washington better understands the danger of limiting public access to information in the name of security than you.

and simply because the war in afghanistan has concluded does not mean the american people or its elected representatives do not have a right to know the truth about what happened in afghanistan over the last 20 years. to that end, congress has tasked sigar with a number of assignments since the collapse of the afghan government. they include answering the following questions. why did the afghan government collapse in spite of $146 billion and 20 years of reconstruction assistance? why did the afghan security forces collapse so suddenly? and how did the u.s. train, advise, and assist efforts possibly contribute to that collapse? they want us to find out about continued risks to u.s.-funded reconstruction assistance, including any contracts that may be still active or pending.

they want us to explain the extent to which the taliban have access to previously provided u.s. government funding and equipment, particularly weapons left behind. congress wants us to also explain and document the status of and potential risk to afghan people and civil society organizations, including afghan women and girls, journalists, educators, health care providers, and other nongovernment institutions since the taliban took over. congress also wants us to determine whether afghan government officials fled the country with u.s. taxpayer dollars. and congress wants us to conduct a comprehensive joint audit with the state, usaid, and dod igs to look at the administration of the special immigrant visa program. in my opinion, the full picture

of what happened in august and all the warning signs that could have been predicted that outcome will only be revealed if the information that the departments of state and defense have already restricted from public release will be made available. for example, dod restricted from public release a range of information going back to 2015, on the performance of the afghan security forces, purportedly at the request of the afghan government. this included information such as casualty data, unit strength, training and operational deficiencies, tactical and operational readiness of afghan military leadership, comprehensive assessments of afghan security force leadership, and operational readiness rates down to the core level.

in essence, the information withheld at the request of the afghan government is nearly all the information you would have needed to determine whether the afghan security forces were a real fighting force or a house of cards waiting to collapse. in light of recent events, it is not surprising why the afghan government and maybe some people in the department of defense wanted to keep that information under lock and key. but that information almost certainly would have benefitted congress and the public in assessing whether progress was being made in afghanistan and more importantly, whether we should have ended our efforts there earlier. yet sigar was forced to relegate all of this information into

classified annexes, making it much more difficult for members of congress to access the information and completely eliminating public and press access to and discussion of that very important information. in recognition of this, that this information in particular will be essential to sigar to effectively respond to all of those congressional directives, the bipartisan leadership of the house oversight and reform committee and the national security subcommittee have formally requested that all information in sigar's classified appendixes be declassified by the originating agencies. just so you know, sigar when we were created, we have no classification or declassification authority. so the only people who can do it can be the originating agencies. now, i strongly support that request. and i hope you do, too.

but at a bare minimum, dod should immediately make available to sigar and the public information restricted at the request of the ghani government, for the simple reason, there is no ghani government. and there is no ghani security system or security forces anymore. they have completely collapsed. so my question is, who are we protecting by keeping that information sacred? likewise, the administration should declassify and make available to sigar and congress all internal dod and state department cables, reports, and other material reflecting the security situation on the ground over the last few years. especially those reports that differed from the public statements of the agencies in

washington. it is especially important for sigar and congress to have access to any reporting related to the reaction of the afghan government and the afghan people to the withdrawal agreement signed between the prior administration and the taliban in february of 2020. again, what possible reason could remain for keeping all of this historical information out of public view? now, rather than attempt to impede sigar's work, i believe the current administration should have every incentive to help us deliver the answers congress has demanded. i fervently hope for it. but as sigar has experienced all too often in the past, good intentions for transparency by government leaders are

frequently thwarted by bureaucratic inertia and bureaucratic fear of the public knowing too much. this is where congress, the press, and sigar using all of our legal authorities must continue to pursue leads and demand answers. to answer these questions, we must find out what our government knew, who knew it in the government, and what did they do, if anything, with that information before the collapse. sigar's investigators are already interviewing many afghans who were evacuated to the united states, to see what information they may be able to provide about corruption and other nefarious activities by the afghan leadership. sigar's auditors and subject matter experts have already

interviewed u.s. and afghan government and military officials to start to put together the full picture of everything that happened that ultimately led to the taliban takeover. but luckily, in doing this work, sigar is not starting from -- from scratch. we already know a lot. sigar's 11 lessons learned report, which i have a copy. i hope you all have it, too, is a retrospective on all of our previous lessons learned reports. and it was issued to coincide with the 20th anniversary of our intervention in afghanistan. ironically, it was released by sheer coincidence right before kabul fell. the seven key lessons we identified in which i'm happy to expound upon in the question

period, are instructive not only for afghanistan but it's important. it's for anywhere else we may try to undertake a similar project again. and they form the basis of our work, the ongoing work answering the questions from congress. now, while sigar has identified these key lessons, there is without question much more to be learned as we dig into what happened in washington and kabul during the months, weeks, days, and hours before ghani fled and the taliban walked into his palace. i sincerely hope we will have cooperation from every corner of the u.s. government, as we undertake this work. i dare anyone to say that these matters are no longer important. you know, sigar's twitter content was accessed 2.2 million

times in august. demonstrating, i believe, that the american taxpayer not only deserves answers, they want answers, and they demand them. as do their representatives in congress. we also owe it to the families of the over 2,400 americans who lost their lives supporting that mission in afghanistan, to tell them why the effort to build a strong and sustainable afghan state failed so dramatically. so in closing, it is up to all of us at sigar, in congress, and in the press to ask the questions that must be asked, and uncover the answers no matter how unpleasant they may be. so i thank you. and i look forward to your questions, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant they may be. thank you.

>> thank you. sorry about that. thank you. i know we have a lot of questions. i'll just ask one to kick it off and hand it to the audience. you mentioned that the defense department has made so much information about the afghan military classified. this war has lasted 20 years. has it resulted in a generation of military commanders who no longer can tell the truth? >> i think there's a lot of military commanders who know how to tell the truth. and i think there are a lot of younger officers in the military who were telling the truth. and a lot of them actually risked careers by sending reports back up the chain. those are the type of reports we really want to find. likewise, there were state department and usaid officials writing back urgent memos saying things are going wrong. some people say those dissent

memos, dissent cables. i call them honest assessments. and those are the honest assessments we want to get. we need to find out what went wrong with the information flow, because i have talked to too many commanders, captains, colonels, sergeants, privates, ambassadors, junior state department officials, who knew this was going south. and they said they were reporting. so where did those reports go? and why weren't they -- maybe they were. i don't know. why weren't those reports then sent over to the leadership so we didn't have to hear all this happy talk for the last 20 years? >> okay. i just ask that please ask a question and not a comment. megan. we'll hand the -- >> okay. i'm megan from military times. i wanted to ask with all of this information being out in the open and like you said, many

junior and midlevel officers and ncos openly saying this was not going well, do you think maybe the issue is that the white house, the pentagon, of course, and even in congress, that there was -- because there was no end game, because there was no date, there was no goal as it were, that they just thought, well, we don't have to fix it because we're never leaving. no one is telling us we have to leave, so we can just keep kicking it down the road, and if there's no progress, it doesn't matter because we're not leaving anyway? >> i don't know. that's a good question. i don't know the answer to that. that's what we want to find out. was the information flow going up and people at the highest levels were briefed, and they just said, we'll kick it down the line? i don't know. i think part of the problem is we didn't fight a 20-year war, nor did we have a 20-year reconstruction. it was like we did 20 one-year

ones because of rotations. that's one of the things we're trying to find. i don't know the answer yet. that's hopefully what my staff will learn. >> general gordon. >> hi. from the associated press. two questions. one is, if i remember correctly, the metrics around afghanistan started to be classified, you know, things like -- you know, strike reports, on the ground, and it was all tied to the 2020 deal. the talk from the pentagon is once we finalize that 2020 deal with the state department, those metrics can then become available. so that question is, did those metrics ever become available again? >> no, that's what we're talking about. >> the second part is i remember you once saying in a congressional hearing one of the issues sigar has is that the agency doesn't have subpoena power. you're talking about, and just to be clear, the treasury

department, like the treasury ig, they have subpoena power. they can subpoena documents and things like that. your mission is to now find out what happened, what went wrong. we need all the documents to figure that out. do you have subpoena power yet? >> well -- >> can you subpoena documents? >> we can't subpoena documents from the u.s. government. i can get subpoenas issued for contractors, but not the u.s. government. so we don't. but the important thing is we had access. we being sigar, to a lot of the information. we had the clearances. but we couldn't -- the problem is, and if you work on the hill, you understand this better, is when you give congress classified information, first of all, they have to go out of their way to get it. they have to go to some secret place to look at it, the cone of silence comes down. many times, particularly we don't know if this was intentional, and i don't want to

assume bad intent, but most of the documents that were withheld were classified nato secret. most of the staff on the hill do not have nato secret clearance. so you would have a member, he can go in and see it or she is go in, go in with no staff. which puts the member at an extreme disadvantage. who is he supposed to talk to? who is he going to bounce ideas by? so this whole thing, and this is why i find so offensive is the state department, the dod, and all of the government agencies are now classifying or stamping documents with these bizarre classifications that don't exist. sensitive but unclassified. official use only. those aren't classifications. those are states of mind. okay. but when they go up to the hill,

a staffer thinks, oh, god, this is classified. i can't share it. i gotta hide it. my boss thinks it's classified. that is outrageous. and that's one of the problems, is that even if members try to get it, and i remember briefing some members, and we had to leave all their staff outside because the staff didn't have nato clearance. which isn't any super duper clearance. just a different clearance process. so that's the problem. there was no public discourse about this because the public didn't have access. and i'm old school. i am really, you know, you know, people say i'm ancient. i believe in public discourse. i believe that's how we solve problems. the american taxpayer has a right to know. and that's one of the things i'm still outraged about. most of this material, the taliban knew it, the afghan

government knew it, our u.s. government knew it. the only people who didn't know what was going on in afghanistan were the people paying for it. both in lives and in money. and that's the american taxpayer. that's what i find offensive with the process. so count me as old school, antidiluvian or whatever, but that's something we have to address as a country. >> military for the san antonio express newspapers. i spent a lot of time in afghanistan and iraq over the years. and i have also talked to people in vietnam, and they talked about how vietnam was pretty similar in the reporting process. there was a thing that they said about reporting from the bottom to the top, they called it the reverse filtration loop. the higher the reporting, the more full of crap the story

became. so i wonder, have we learned anything from these three wars, which are very similar in an awful lot of ways? and we keep getting into them, too, so it suggests we don't, but what have we learned from this? because it seems like the government works every time in the same way. what they're doing to you by classifying information or marking it sensitive, it's a bit much, but it's how we seem to do things in this country, isn't it? >> i believe you're right. that is basically the underlying point of that lessons learned report that came out. you know, basically, we don't -- not only on the classification, but just on doing it. i mean, you know, everybody will tell you we're never going to do this again. we have done it three times in the last 50 years. vietnam, we didn't learn from that. and after it was done, we totally forgot everything.

and we eliminated a lot of the capabilities we had built for usaid, for dod frrx state. we did it in afghanistan, we did it in iraq. there's four or five countries, and i'm saying we shouldn't do it. but we're starting that slippery slope again. and that's the one thing -- one lesson learned about this type of effort is it starts small and it grows. and it starts like a roller coaster going down, and the next thing you know, we'll be pumping more troops and more money in there. so no, we don't learn lessons too well in the united states. we should. because otherwise, we're going to spend another trillion dollars and have a horrible result. on the classification, all i can tell you is, again, i have been here maybe as long as you have. i have been here since 1982.

i have been dealing with classified information since 1978. and i have learned one thing, and i'll take it to my grave. that is, governments don't classify good news. that's the one thing i have learned. and i don't think it's changed since vietnam, probably since world war ii. if a government classified good news, it will then leak it. but i don't know how you break that chain. i think it was senator mccain who talked about classification is basically used to protect incompetency and other nefarious actions. and he would know better than any of us. but i think there's some truth to that. that's the best way to hide your screw-ups, put a classification on it. >> travis.

>> i don't recognize everybody. they have masks. the masked avenger. now i recognize you. >> thanks. travis with military.com. quite a slate of reports that's been requested by congress. i look forward to reading them. i was just wondering if there are any deadlines or any estimated completion dates for any of those, specifically the reports dealing with the speed of the collapse of the government in kabul. >> yeah, we -- i believe in the house version of the ndaa, there are deadlines to report, i think march or april. those may be pushed back because the ndaa hasn't passed yet, but we'll start reporting as soon as we get the information. you know, also depends really depends on how much we get access to a lot of this stuff.

so i set up the teams, and this is all we're working on. we have a couple more audits we're just finishing, but this is all we're working on, full blast. but i'm hoping we'll start releasing stuff as soon as we can put it together and analyze it. now, remember, there's a lot of allegations out there. and i want to just clarify one thing. there are allegations that some senior officials, including president ghani walked off with $500 million or whatever. these are all allegations. we have been asked to look at them. they're allegations. we have to determine, and you know how difficult it is in afghanistan determining what is truth and fiction. we have to determine that. because congress has asked us to do it. so give us time. and also, give us support. you know, we got to get access to that data. we got to get access to those people. and to talk to. and to see what we can do to

answer all their questions. >> james. >> sir, thanks for doing this. i'm james with abc news. i wanted to ask you to drill down on one of the things you said congress has asked you to investigate about the evacuation. just for full disclosure, i spent my summer beach vacation doing something unexpected which is helping to create one of the many ad hoc veterans groups that mounted essentially a clandestine operation to smuggle as many afghan special forces and their family members out as possible, and we got hundreds out. but we're now obviously for all the hundreds that these ad hoc groups got out, mostly of retirees who unexpectedly really came back to duty when most were trying to put the war behind them, but we now have sort of a crisis, which is for every afghan sf or nds or intel who

got out with his family, there were probably 5 or 10 times as many who didn't. you talked about assessing -- you're asked to assess the risk to afghan civilians, teachers. journalists, is that going to extend to those people who are really being -- i mean, we're getting videos every day of people being shot to death, captured or afghan operators, commandos and so forth. and this veteran population is still doing the bulk of the work to not only try to evacuate by shepherding them, but also to try to raise money to, you know, get them through what is going to be a brutal winter. these are people who are not getting a paycheck anymore from the government. they can't work, they can't leave their homes. this is going to be a tough winter. what's the scope of what you're looking at with all of that, and i'm curious with how far you're going to go in that effort.

thank you, again. >> that's an excellent question. we will go as far and as broad and as wide as we can, because we want to answer that question. and i think congress wants to know. i mean, many people think, we're only going to look at what happened to women and girls, which is very important because they're in a special category of -- of having to deal with this taliban and losing a lot of the little advances but some advances that were made over the last 20 years. but we're going to be looking at everybody who believed in democracy, rule of law, and what we thought we were doing in reconstruction. so journalists, film teams. i mean, i got calls.

i have gotten calls. too, from many americans, and many afghans concerned. i didn't even know how broad and how wide the nascent afghan film industry was. all of those people are running for their lives. all the judges, female or male, who believed in the american way and believed in democracy, they're all hiding. all the prosecutors, all the good cops, and all of the special forces. and that's afghan special forces. this is one thing you have to remember. you know, there were a lot of ghosts in the afghan police and military. there were a lot of soldiers that never existed because their salary and everything else was being stolen, but there were a lot of honest, brave afghans. especially in the special forces, but in other units, that fought, that fought hard and died. and now, they are all at risk. now, we have heard numbers going

to 60 to 100,000 that may be there, but we don't know how many are there. but they're stuck. just think about it. you're an afghan soldier, special forces, judge, female journalist. how do you get out of -- u.s. government isn't helping you anymore. nobody is. how do you get out? we only help you if you go to a third country. how do you get out? you need a passport. who is issuing the passports? the taliban. the same people you reported on or you fought. you need a visa. who are you going to go to for help? you have to go to a taliban official. he may have been the official you reported on. or what about the poor businessman who reported to what was called fintraka, which was basically our finsen, it was a

bank regulatory agency or whatever. you reported on people who were sending money to the taliban. well, who's got access to all those files? the taliban. those people are left behind. what i'm saying is it's a broad category of people who believed in what america was selling, who are now stuck. now, that's a policy decision, what we do or don't do, but as a human being, and we got over 300-some people that we're trying to get out, p-1, p-2s, and it's a black hole. we're not hearing anything. squat. crickets. and i'm certain many of you are hearing it, too. and we will be looking at it. i don't know how long it's going to take, and it's very difficult because it's hard to reach out to some of these people because they're moving all the time, and they don't want to use phones.

and god bless all of them that they get out safely. but there is a large -- and then you add to the fact there's economic disaster. next year, almost 93% of the afghan population will be below the poverty level. that's what the u.n. is predicting. we reported in this quarterly report. over 93%, 97% i think. fantastic number. can you believe that? the biggest economic humanitarian disaster. so those people want to get out. how do you -- how do you handle that? i don't know, but we'll be looking at it. and i hope you all are too. don't forget the afghans that were left behind. >> just wanted to give a word of thanks to everyone in this room who worked to get afghans to safety. thank you for everything you did. at such a perilous hour. if anyone who has a question, could you please raise your

hand. i'll try to get to as many as possible. >> thank you for speaking to us. you mentioned we fought 20 one-year wars. general milley said that, a lot of people have said that, been saying that for years. 15 one-year wars. when you're trying to assign responsibility for this, government officials are already defusing the responsibility. that's kind of one way to do it, saying there's 20 one-year wars. just specifically for that problem, who's responsible for conducting 20 one-year wars? is the blame on congress, the dod, department of state? because that seems to be the critical thing people point to as to why the overall 20-year effort failed. so who do you assign blame for, for doing it that way? >> there's not -- that's a very good question. there's not one person, one administration, one entity of the government that is responsible.

and if you read our report, it's just the way we approach these big efforts like this. we're not really organized for it, the u.s. government. so i would go back to our lessoned learned report and happy to come out here again and have my whole team who worked on the report give you soup and nuts on it at any time because we're already doing it with the administration right now. i have made this reference before that when we sent people to afghanistan, they weren't nefarious, stupid, lazy, you know, people. above and beyond, most of them were brave, smart, and eager to do the right thing. what we gave them is a box of broken tools. you have heard me say that. and the broken tools just -- it is something that we are dealing with, with the government right now, with the v.a., with hhs,

with dhs, with all of these agencies. our procurement system is broken. our reward system to employees in the federal government is broken. our overemphasis on contractors versus building the capabilities inside usaid or state is broken. our whole authorizing and appropriating cycle. our approach to the whole of government issue, and that's what you're faced with right here. and i would say, and i'll use the term from my -- not my home state, but where i run and hide all the time, up to maine. wickedly. every wickedly difficult issue we face as americans is due to the fact it's a whole of government problem, and we are not designed for, equipped for,

for dealing with a whole of government problem. and i'll throw it out to you. think of any problem you're faced with. education, the economy, the problem of health care, retirement. those deal with multiple federal agencies. nobody is in charge. so one of the problems, why there were 20 one-year wars, is nobody is in charge. and our staff is going out there from multiple agencies. who's in charge? congress, you have multiple committees and subcommittees looking at the same issue. so what i'm saying is read that report and focus on the whole of government issue. i think one of the classic examples is the whole opiate. there's a whole of government issue. it's not just police, it's health care. it's not just dhs, it's hhs, the v.a., every state and local. we don't have a way to handle

those yet. so that's based upon us looking at afghanistan, but i think you take that whole of government problem and apply it to the rest of the united states. so everybody has to sit back and think about how to better be prepared to handle these big wickedly difficult whole of government issues. and afghanistan is just one of them. >> let's go to the other side of the room real quick. phil, is that you? >> no, this is kyle. >> let's start with kyle. >> hi, kyle with army times. i had a question, and i came in a little late, so hopefully this wasn't addressed earlier, but i was wondering, have you faced

any pressure to end the mission of sigar, or are you expecting pressure? also i wanted to ask a second question, which was if you could duplicate sigar's mission and focus it on any other dod effort, anywhere in the world right now, where would you place that focus? >> well, let me answer the first question. look, there are a lot of people in this town who don't like us. they would like to see us go out of existence. and some have been dreaming about that for at least since i took over ten years ago. and that's okay. igs shouldn't make friends. we should be as mean as junkyard dogs, as president reagan said. and nobody likes -- there is nobody in town -- well, maybe we'll see if you guys disagree. i don't think there's anybody in town who picks up the phone and says, gee, the ig's coming to

see us. nobody. except some members of congress who like us. but nobody does that. it's like the old joke there used to be about, oh, great, 60 minutes is coming to see us. what did i do? that's what our job is. so yeah, there are people who would like to see us leave. we are going to go out of existence. and we should. we're a temporary agency. i believe in temporary government agencies. having spent my whole life working for non-temporary agencies, i think there should be. when the mission is done, we should disappear. and congress gave us the authority on hiring authority and firing authority, to go out of existence. and i don't know when that's going to be. congress has to tell me. all reconstruction is put on pause right now. it may start up again. i don't know. if it does start up, however you call it, you have to have an agency that looks at it, and i think we're probably one of the

best because we have whole of government. we're the only ig who can look at any government agency operating in afghanistan or reconstruction. so we at some point will go out of existence. we have a lot of work right now. actually, requests coming down and finishing this up. but you know, talk to me in a year. it may be time for us to go out of existence. i don't know. congress will tell me when. what was your second question? i apologize. >> if you could duplicate sigar's apparatus and focus it on any other part of the world where they're operating, what would that be? >> that's a good question. i don't know. i think a special ig, maybe we should do our final lessons learned report on what we learned about special igs. i think they actually are a good thing. i personally think it was a good approach to afghanistan.

and it was a good approach to iraq. but i don't know. you could create special igs for some of these wickedly difficult issues like the opiate. you know, bring in a special ig who will look at all of those issues. and i think that that might be useful. that's a good question. maybe i'll write my, when i retire, a novel on that, but i think it's a good idea because again, every ig except us, and there's 70-some igs, like every week they create a new one. is housed in a specific agency and can only look at that agency. so by definition, it can't see the whole of government. now, in response to that, congress has asked like 14 or 15 various agencies to look at, i

think it was the covid issue, but when you have 14 or 15 different igs looking, it's very difficult. you know, everybody has different approach, different staffing, different everything. and i'm not certain that's the way to go. if somebody asked me, i would have created a special ig for covid, but they didn't. so that's where we are. >> hi, mike brass with the washington examiner. thanks for doing this. during your recent testimony on the hill, you implored members of congress to hold people accountable for the war. given how you have already described today how there is such a decentralization, what does that look like? and who is there to hold accountable? >> well, i think when you find a program that didn't work, you should bring up the person who pushed it and ask them to explain why. when we get all of these records, and if it turns out, i don't know if it will, but if it

turns out that ambassador so-and-so was getting information saying the taliban are going to be at the gates tomorrow, and he doesn't convey that information, then i think we should ask ambassador so-and-so, well, why didn't you? or he did convey the information. and somebody up the chain never briefed the president. or if people testified before congress on monday saying the sky is blue, and we know it was black, they should be asked to explain why. now, you all heard a lot of spin over the last 20 years. you know. how many times did we hear, one more year, we're turning the corner. we're turning the corner. okay. have you ever thought after you get all the facts, 2016, general

so-and-so testifies, we're turning the corner. one more year. success. if he was getting reports up to the day he testified saying the sky is falling, it's over, those are people who should be held accountable. somebody should ask them why did you testify to congress that x was going to happen, and you knew darn well it didn't. that's accountability. everybody should be held account able for what they say and what they do. i'm not looking to put people in jail or embarrass them, but we have to understand, why did the system allow this? that's what i'm interested in. why did they allow the spin to keep spinning? even though so many mid-level, high level people who worked in afghanistan said, it's a

failure. that's all i'm trying to figure out. i'm trying to figure out why did the system break down. you know, i don't know. maybe the presidents have never been told the truth about afghanistan. i don't know. i have never been in the room. i feel like a play on hollywood. who was in the room? i mean, this is -- this is important for us. don't you see as americans, this is important? if foreign policy is being determined, not based upon facts but upon hope, you know, hope is not a strategy. i don't care what people say. it is not a strategy. it doesn't work. you need facts, hard facts. provable facts. many times, you can't prove facts. you don't have the information. but our job is to see if there was credible information out there and how it was used.

>> in terms of the collapse of the afghan government, the fall of kabul, you know, there seems to have really been some reports of afghan security forces, when they saw, you know, the u.s. leaving and stuff, the tenuous alliance, allegiance they had to the institution faded away pretty quickly. do you think a chaotic final withdrawal of troops was inevitable or do you think, you know, these evacuations started earlier, other steps were taken, we wouldn't see what we saw this summer? >> that's an excellent question. and i don't have the answer to that. that's what we're trying to do.

i don't mean to avoid answering it, but we're trying to figure that out. and that's why it's important. what did we being the u.s. government knew or know, who knew it, and what if anything we did with it. if we hypothetical, this is all hypothetical. if hypothetically, you know, officials were reporting that the afghan government is going to collapse in october 1st, and that information was relaid back to washington in january, this is all hypothetical, nothing is that specific as we probably understand. what do they do with that information and how do they prepare for it? i mean, that's obviously important. but i don't know the answer yet. that's what we're trying to do. >> isn't this based on all your years of work or anything, with a caveat? >> you know, i hate to, you

know, star gaze in afghanistan and particularly about bureaucracies. and you know, i think it was napoleon who said don't assume nefarious motives for what may be explained by incompetency. so i don't know. i really don't know. and it may turn out, if i was a predictor, and i will take a risk here. it may turn out that like everything in the government, you don't have 100% certainty about this information you're getting. it's always, you know, it comes down to making a decision on sometimes inaccurate or inadequate information. and it's probably, i'm guessing, because that's life.

you make decisions every day upon inadequate information. whether you buy a house, buy a car, don't buy a car, come here to this meeting with or without a mask. you're making a decision based on inadequate information, but you make risk-based analysis. >> can we have a quick show of hands of people who still have a question. okay. jim, if you could finish us off. >> yeah. i think we can all agree one of the most egregious things to come out of the afghan war was, especially for the people on the ground, the level of interaction they had to have with known child predators. which was in clear violation of the laws. the lichee laws called for ending support, ending funding to people who were known child rapists. yet, the defense department, the state department both overruled the laws and continued that

funding regardless if it was in violation. what is the lesson we should learn from that? >> well, we did -- i know you probably know we did a whole report on the leahy act. we were asked by, i don't know, about 300 members, bipartisan, bicameral request by the congress and senate to look at its work and how it was working in afghanistan. there, specifically, there's always exemptions. you know, okay, there's always national security exemption to everything congress passes, which is probably good. but you should at least tell congress when you're using that national security exemption. and what we found out in our look see is that based upon an opinion by i think the general counsel of dod, he said you didn't have to notify congress when you invoked that objection because in the statute of every

appropriations bill, they always use the term, not withstanding any other provision of law, okay, so he focused on that and said, well that means we can ignore the leahy act and don't have to tell congress that we are applying the national security exemption. the big problem about the human rights violations is this, not only were individual boys and/or girls being raped, and basically being sex slaves to senior and middle level afghan politicians and police and military, but i view it as what did the average afghan think about us as a

result? okay. so human rights violations are actual national security concerns, just like corruption. and that's what the takeaway should be from afghanistan. why did the afghan government lose the support of its people, if it ever had any? why did the afghan military lose the support of the afghan people, if it even had any? and why did the united states and our coalition allies lose the support of the afghan people, if we ever had any? and i think we did. it's because we became associated with the worst excesses of afghan culture. violating human rights, endemic corruption, supporting evil, really evil people and war lords. and then you add to that the

indiscriminate use of bombing, night raids, you name it. i think it was an ambassador or general officer, maybe have biiken berry or somebody said every time we accidentally kill an afghan, we just create ten more taliban supporters. so, you know, when you do the right thing, you do the right thing. and when you cozy up and you kind of ignore the law and what's right, you bear the consequences. i think one of the reasons it turned out this is a hunch, just based upon talking to afghans and talking to many reporters who have been out there talking to afghans and many people in the human rights area who say you lost the support of the afghan people years ago because

of your indiscriminate bombing, your night raids, your indiscriminate support for the most evil people in the afghan culture who the taliban kicked out once before. so you asked the question, how did the taliban win? well, they had the support of the afghan people. you know, they didn't have any magic weapons. they didn't have drones. they didn't have f-16s. but they had the support of the afghan people. and that's the question we have to answer. why? >> thank you very much. any closing remarks. >> thank you very much for this opportunity to speak. just so you know, for those of you who saw me speaking without a mask, i have all the shots in the world. i think this is still an important issue. let me just close with this.

i think if we do the right thing in answering these questions, this may be the most important series of reports in our ten years, my ten years in this job. because these -- these reports will answer really the question of what happened. and i think we are the only agency in town that the american people and congress trusts to answer those questions. so thank you very much. but we need your help. so we need your help in doing what you are been doing so well over the last 10, 20, 30 years. so thank you very much. >> and our next panel is slated to begin at 11:15. feel free to use this time to refresh yourself, take a stretch.

>> book tv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. watch our coverage of the wisconsin book festival with discussions on history, technology, science, and the criminal justice system. at 2:35 p.m. eastern, greg talks about his book empire of rubber, firestone's scramble for land and power in liberia. and then diaz on her experiences growing up in puerto rico and miami, in her book, ordinary girls. and attorney jarrett adams with his book, redeeming justice. from defendant to defender. my fight for equality on both sides of a broken system. at 10:00 p.m., on after words, 1619 project creator and pulitzer prize winner journalist nikole hannah-jones looks at american history, slavery, and its legacy in present-day america. she's interviewed by new york university history professor

steven hahn. watch book tv every sunday on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online any time at booktv.org. >> at least six presidents recorded conversations while in office. hear many of those conversations on c-span's new podcast, presidential recordings. >> season one focuses on the presidency of lyndon johnson. you'll hear about the 1964 civil rights act, the 1964 presidential campaign, the gulf of tonkin incident, the march on selma, and the war in vietnam. not everyone knew they were being recorded. >> certainly, johnson's secretaries knew because they were tasked with transcribing many of those conversations. in fact, they were the ones who made sure that the conversations were taped, as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and theirs. >> you'll also hear some blunt

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>> jen easterly, director of the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, and representative john katko, the ranking member of the house homeland security committee, talk about protecting critical infrastructure. they spoke at an event hosted by the center for strategic and international studies. >> i'll ask a few questions and then we'll turn and open it up to the audience for questions. so i'm looking forward to today's event. i actually have been looking forward to it all week, so great way to close out cybersecurity month here at csis. let me start, representative john katko is the republican leader of the house committee on homeland security. and he represents the 24th district, which we were talking before around syracuse. former prosecutor in new york, he worked on numerous cases. i saw he has