problem. i have a problem. so do my peers. thanks to our problem, all of america has a problem. to whit: two lost campaigns end a war gone awry." general bolger: this is the most serious thing i have ever had to do in my life. where we are at in this war is not where i ever wanted to be. i owe the american people and an accounting of what i did, what my peers did. to see why and what we can learn from it. brian: whose idea was it to title this book "why we lost"? general bolger: i was going to call it something more neutral. like "the war on terror" or something like that. after i finished writing it, i realized what i had actually written was a narrative that gave an explanation of why we failed. brian: when did you retire?

general bolger: i retired in june of 2013 and i was a lieutenant general. brian: what are you doing now? daniel: i teach history at university of north carolina raleigh. brian: where were you born? daniel: chicago, illinois. the west side of chicago and then the west suburbs, westchester. brian: and you went to college where? general bolger: the citadel, the military college of south carolina. the army selected me for graduate school. i got my masters and doctorate from the university of chicago.

brian: what time did you go to college? general bolger: i was commissioned in the army in 1978 and i completed my graduate schooling in 1986. my dad served as an infantryman in the korean war. he rose to the rank of sergeant and then got out. he was proud of his service. the people in my community were volunteering or being drafted for vietnam. until i was older, i never met anyone who resisted the draft. my neighbors were all world war ii veterans. i wanted to see if i could do that. brian: first of all, where did you get your commission? general bolger: the citadel. reserve officer training corps. it is run sort of like west point. brian: what were the highlights of your career? general bolger: the most important thing, i served mostly during the cold war. we were preparing for combat, so

we did not fight. i was a company commander. my division commander at one point was norman schwarzkopf. during the gulf war, i was a major. no action occurred there, but we were ready. we had loaded weapons and all that. fortunately, nothing happened. during the mid-1990's, i was with the 101st airborne as an infantry battalion commander. i got to go to haiti for a few days, that was a peacekeeping operation. i wore a blue hat, as did my troops. united nations, yes. my first -- i was a brigade commander in korea. a unit of about 3500 soldiers. as a colonel. when i made general, a war had broken out in my first combat experience was in 2005 when i deployed to iraq.

i was a one star, a brigadier general. my duties, i was the deputy commander for the senior field command. after a few months, i spent a year training the iraqi army air force, navy, and their small marine corps. petraeus. brian: do you have any idea of how many generals there are in the army? general bolger: just over 300 generals. of that number, 43 are three-star generals. brian: what is the difference from someone being a general and a colonel? general bolger: if you are a general, you are part of the

inner leadership, part of the board of directors. the army is a large organization. counting guard and reserve, well over one million people in uniform. you are part of that inner circle. the key thing they tell you, you have been selected, not anointed. sometimes when people make general, with the military protocol, they can get a little inflated with themselves. the best advice i ever got was we were put in a briefing and the first thing a four-star -- congratulations, but be aware, if all 38 of you left the army we have 38 more on the bench. i think that's reflective off the quality of our service. brian: i want to show you a video of a four-star general that you know back in 2003 testifying in front of the senate. eric shinseki, he went on to run the veterans administration. [video clip]

>> i would say that to what has been mobilized at that point -- at this point is about several hundred thousand soldiers. we are talking about hostilities controlled over a piece of geography that is fairly significant with the kind of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems and so it's takes significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure people are fed and water is distributed. all of the normal

responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this. brian: why did you put that in your book? general bolger: he was the chief of staff of the army. think of the chain of command, the army works for the secretary of defense. ultimately to the president and commander-in-chief. but also under our constitution they are responsible to the people. in that clip, he was testifying before the senate and they were asking him, how many troops it would take to secure iraq after we knocked out saddam's army. he fought in vietnam, badly wounded in vietnam and he served in the balkans. had a pretty good idea that if you would into a country the size of iraq, with 28 million people on the ground, a lot of ethnic tension on the ground and to dangerous neighbors like the iranians to the east and things like that, syrians to the northwest, he was saying look

-- you cannot do this on the cheap. he was speaking from experience. he was providing his best military advice. when he said that, he was chastised in public by the secretary of defense, donald rumsfeld, by deputy terry secretary of defense paul wolfowitz,. they did not want to hear that. they thought it would be a quick operation and we would be greeted as liberators. people would throw roses at our vehicles. handing out water and things like that. it turns out general shinseki had a much clearer view. he was the chief of staff of the army. it was leaked when he still had a year of left in office, it was leaked that he would have a successor. one of the names mentioned was general jack keane who was his chief of staff. i do not know if that was true or not, but that was a leaked. in the melissa -- in the

military, not an similar to corporations they made him a lame-deck. -- in the military, anyway, they made him a lame-duck. they disagreed with his military advice and they publicly undercut him. when he had his retirement, it is usually a big event and sometimes the president comes. secretary rumsfeld was not there. that was a statement in itself. brian: what did you think of at the time? you were a one-star. general bolger: in 2003, i just made brigadier general. i was picked the month after the testimony occurred. that testimony was like march of 2003, i was picked march of 2000 -- march of 2003. i was in korea serving with the second infantry division, did not know that anybody was going to iraq. the build-up had largely been kept secret and we weren't talking about it and weren't supposed to talk about it. when that testimony occurred, i knew

he knew what he was talking about. general since xts -- shinseki's reputation was good and he spoke from experience. he had seen the cost of partial escalations in vietnam. he knew what it takes to secure villages and he was giving a warning. we should have listened. i knew he was onto something. i have to tell you, like most people in our service, i thought things were different this time. because i figured maybe this , time, we will get it right. we are trained it and ready. we what happened in the first gulf war, i thought, if we could do that, we had just beaten the afghan taliban, i thought, we will knock these guys out quickly. maybe they are right. maybe they know something i don't know.

ryan: here is some other video i want you to see. this is from 2007. our president now was in the senate. [video clip] president obama: i think the surge has had some impact. i would hope it would. given the sacrifices and loss that have unmade. i would argue the impact has been relatively modest given the investment. and i have to say that based on my testimony it is not clear to , me that the primary success you have shown in anbar has anything to do with the surge. you said that it is political. the reason for the success. not because of an increase in troop strength. we have seen some modest decline in sectarian violence inside baghdad as a consequence of our troop patrols. that has of course increased u.s. casualties.

it is unsustainable. brian: put that into context. general bolger: it is interesting to see the president speaking as a senator. for one thing, he looks a lot younger in that picture. that tells you something. the president was on to something there. the last word is the key word. unsustainable. by definition, it is like a wave coming up on the beach. the surge of troops -- the majority of those troops in baghdad, what the president was referring to was something that had happened. what a president, at that time president obama, was referring to was something that had happened out in anbar. the sunni arab tribes split with al qaeda in iraq. killing women and children imposing very vicious sharia law. every man had to grow a beard. you had to worship a certain way.

you couldn't even smoke a cigarette on the street. all of that stuff got out of control. that happened before the surge. it started in 2005 along the syrian border and by late 2006 it was beginning to settle down because some of the sunnis had come to our side. i think president obama's comment -- that time senator obama, unsustainable is key. as we look at iraq today, we see isis, those guys are the same insurgents we were dealing with in 2005 and 2006, 2009 and 2010. basically, from 2003 -- 2011. the head of isis was lieutenant at that time. the surge was unsustainable. it created temporary security. when you pull them out, the enemy waits you out.

it goes back to the oldest things of guerrilla warfare. the person who codified it, he was not the inventor but he wrote about it. mao tze tung wrote about it. he said in his rules for gorillas -- guerillas enemy advances, we retreat. we advanced, the enemy looked at their watches. brian: you relate what happens in iraq and afghanistan to other wars, other times, other generals. sun tzu, people like that. why did you do that? general bolger: the u.s. experience in iraq is not unique. and i will tell you the other thing, brian. in a way it has taken myself to task. i read sun tzu. it has taken

myself to task. i thought i understood what they were telling me. i went along with my peers and made some of the mistakes they warned against. in their time, in ancient china, he was captured by french forces. he fought in the russian campaign. he was at waterloo in 1815. with the prussian forces. he had seen guerrilla warfare. he had been successful and he had failed. as a commander as a general, one of the things i had to look at was what does history teach us? what have we learned from our experiences, in that regard, i hope that maybe -- maybe i can and go with -- maybe i cannot go what i learned there. brian: what was your biggest mistake? general bolger: not understanding the best way to use our forces.

the american military is built for short, violent, decisive wars against conventional forces. it is not built to do decades long rebuilding, counterinsurgency against irregular forces. with us in the lead, we were almost guaranteed to fail. because we never controlled the time clock. our country was not going to leave is there for 30 or 40 years. we never had the discussion with our political leaders. and secondly we never controlled , the avenue of governance. the locals were always running the elections. the governments, we would give them money. we would influence them, but it was going to be an iraqi government or an afghan government. those governments, by nature were not going to do with the united states wanted. as a result, there would be a great deal of dissatisfaction. they would see the government in baghdad and the government in kabul as u.s. puppets. brian: we have some video of you training afghan army troops.

before we show that how much , training did you do in iraq and afghanistan? general bolger: i was in charge of the coalition military assistance training team. myself and our team of about 550 allied troops working with the iraqis, built large portions of their current army and air force, their small marine corps, and their navy. i did a year there. afghanistan, i was in charge with their military and they have police. in afghanistan, i have the whole operation. brian: here is video from 2012. [video clip] >> legacy weapons from the soviet era. building on the existing assets and experience of the afghan national army with new technology is key, according to

nato's training mission in afghanistan. >> we focus very much on training the afghan trainers. so we do not deliver a lot of , the instruction ourselves. we teach the instructors how to do it. >> the afghan army officers we spoke to set their soldiers are ready to fight the insurgency. but many worried about the future. where more sophisticated weapons might be needed to protect their borders. brian: we've read all the time that they do not care that much. general bolger: i thought -- i fought alongside both of them. i not only trained them, i went out on operations. i found them in both countries to be brave in combat. but when you wanted them to do the best, you had to look at three things.

that is one component of it. the next component, embedded advisors. they have got to have somebody every day who can teach them and be with them side-by-side. americans, british, poles. various countries did it as well as us, working side-by-side. thirdly, it it helps to have a u.s. or allied partnering. somebody they can say, ok, i will go do patrols. how do patrols work? the system was built on that threefold step. it was built on places like korea, where we have had success training the korean army. it improved quite a bit to after the korean war. they fought as our ally in the vietnam war. as well as iraq and at anna stand. -- afghanistan.

they were built to work alongside us. the comment that the reporter made an interesting comment. the afghans were worried. they do not know what the length of the u.s. commitment is. we saw this in iraq. in iraq, we pulled out the bulk of our force in 2011. we left a small number of uniformed trainers and a small group of contractors. that was the first leg, the training part. they did not have embedded advisors. and they sure did not have partner units. now isis rears their ugly head , and this army is very shaky. we should not be surprised by that. you can not undo decades of soviet stuff in eight years. especially when you have taught them on a model where they have u.s. advisors. afghanistan, we have 10,000 troops there in a training and advising role. but we will draw down to 5000 the next year. and down to almost zero the year after that. i would warned that we will probably see a similar result to what we saw in iraq when isis attacked. that afghan army is going to be very shaky without u.s. help. brian: what did you think of

donald rumsfeld? general bolger: a very forceful guy. sometimes a little too forceful. i think he had a clearer view than most people think. i don't think he always had as clear a view on how to fight them. in that regard, he was not unusual. one thing i would mention know, brian, is that within the military, secretary rumsfeld has this impression that he is a head chopper. and that he is a very oppressive guy. his successor, secretary gates reputed to be superb, fired a lot more generals and admirals than secretary rumsfeld did. secretary rumsfeld in many ways was a guy who's bark was worse than his bite. maybe if he had been tougher on us as generals, he would've gotten a lot better results early on. brian: here he is talking about his book. [video clip] secretary rumsfeld: i do not know how many times i said anyone who tells you how long it will last is making a mistake.

people are almost always wrong. >> we were talking about major combat operations. there was nothing an accurate there at all. anyone who tell us you how long it is going to last, how long it is going on, how many lives will be lost, is someone that is always wrong. general bolger: he ought to know because he was wrong. major combat operations, that is the part of the war the americans like. where we fight according to our rules. the first few months in afghanistan. the first few months in iraq. where we fight a uniformed army that has tanks and jet fighters and rings like that. we defeat them very well. the problem is, the enemy we were fighting did not choose to end the war. they chose to continue the fight in a style that suited them. which is to say, in in insurgent

irregular terrorist style. in civilian clothing and mixed into civilian streets and towns and very difficult to tell which guy is a farmer and which guy is in insurgent. it is the second war we were not well suited for. secretary rumsfeld was exactly right. no one could say how long that lasted. moreover, guys like him, we were not as blunt as general shinseki was. he warned, hey, this is going to take hundreds of thousands of troops. it is going to take a decade to do. instead, we always seem to think that just a little bit more, maybe a surge of troops would solve it. the reality was, it would not. and -- an insurgent enemy like that can only be defeated by an effort of decades. we never said that to the american people. the civilian leadership has rarely talked in terms of how long this effort will last. only recently with the effort to go back to iraq with isis has the president started say

publicly, this is an effort of years that may last past my administration. that is welcome, but i would tell you as an american citizen, not as a general. i would note that the last authorization for use of force in afghanistan was passed in 2001, the last four iraq was passed in in 2002. we are also operating in yemen, somalia, malia. our constitution says all that should be authorized and debated. before we do it. but, here we are. brian: we hear the generals in public by and large supporting the president whether it be george bush or barack obama. and then after they get out, they write books and tell us what they were really thinking. when you are sitting around talking to your officers and friends, what did the other generals say they thought about this war in the first place? general bolger: two things hit all of us.

and i should not say all. there is always a range of opinion when you get guys to get there. but i think most of us had some disquiet within the first year or so after the iraq invasion. things seem to settle down well in afghanistan. we did not really know when that would spur back up, but we knew it might. i would say by the turn up of 2003 or 2004, people started to say, things are going wrong. i can remember a general who served in iraq in the first war, work, he knew that area very well. spoke arabic. he was the commander, central command, in the korean war. i remember he used the term counterinsurgency and a lot of our ears pricked up. because we knew, oh, that is a long, long war. i think what worried us was we never heard that strong public u.s. commitment that we would stick with it. the military guys, we figured, we will keep trying this month and hope the political guys have our back. that they will pass laws and

make that happen. by and large, that happened. even though the government change stance from democrat to republican, both the congress and the presidency, in general, we kept going. but what we never had was that honest discussion with our political leaders to say, if you want to fight a us-led counterinsurgency in iraq or afghanistan, you are talking about 20 or 30 years. there needs to be a publicly debated treaty. like we have in korea. 1954, after the armistice. we will help defend this country for a long time. we never had that debate. to this day, brian, we have no treaty with iraq or afghanistan. we could choose to pull our troops out tomorrow. there is no force of law or anything that would prevent it. or we may choose to stay. our enemies judge us based on past performance. and what do our enemies think? if they are in iraq, they have seen us leave in 1991. they believe we will leave again in the fight against isis. if they are in afghanistan, they saw us pull out when the soviets collapsed in 1989.

they have heard us make noises about pulling out now. and ending combat operations. the taliban is waiting us out. and, back to mao zedong -- mao tse tung. enemy advances, we retreat. enemy retreats, we advance. brian: it that, you cite in the book that these wars cost us a couple of trillion dollars, not of it paid for, all borrowed. 7000 people have lost their lives. general bolger: 7000 military people. plus the almost 3000 civilian people we lost on 9/11. brian: is any of this worth it? general bolger: that is where we have to lay out the balance sheet. i would say what has been accomplished, a great deal of attrition against al qaeda. the terrorist networks that at us on 9/11.

the old al qaeda with bin laden is no more. al qaeda is fragmented into successor groups. these organizations that attacked things like charlie hebdo in france, the brothers in boston, -- two of my soldiers that were killed were killed in fort hood by the major who committed the terrorist act in the united states. those people are inspired by al qaeda. but the classic al qaeda is no more. it was largely destroyed during this war. that said, that attrition is one thing. certainly, we are keeping the pressure on those terror networks. yemen, somalia, and others. that needs to be done. with that said what we are not , doing, it is questionable how strong our allies are in this region. can we depend on iraq? which is heavily influenced by iran. it is noteworthy that the current president of afghanistan, educated at

columbia, speaks english better than i do. taught at berkeley. his first visits were not to be united states. they were to iran, pakistan, and to china. there is a message there to our -- from our erstwhile allies about where their sympathies lie. brian lamb: after the vietnam war, the american government started to admit they did not understand the vietnamese. the same thing happened in this war. we do not understand it the middle eastern's. why did we get in these? general bolger: it depends on what you want your military to do. you do not have to have a great degree of cultural understanding -- you go in, you locate the enemy military, and you destroy it.

that is a military targeting issue. you do not need cultural awareness for that. when you talk about rebuilding states, you are on a steep slope. then the degree of cultural understanding is massive. now, could we avoid it? yes. one way is to accept the fact that the afghans and iraqis have to choose their future and we have to be in a supportive role. we have to take a role at not unlike the role we are currently taking in iraq. we limit it to if you airstrikes and we accept that the iraqis will solve it in their way. and on their timescale. that is intolerable for americans, because we want a quick solution. but we cannot impose that on other countries unless we are willing to stay in an imperial sense. and we are not. brian lamb: in 2014, david patraeus talked about a surge of ideas.

let's watch him at tell me what you think of him. [video clip] david patraeus: the surge that mattered most was the surge of ideas. among the biggest, driving violence down, was reconciling the elements of the society, of the citizenry of iraq that had felt disenfranchised, cast out. we reached out to that element we have done reconciliation before. it had not been supported. we did it in the north when i was a division commander their inmost soul. -- in mosul. it was done again in 2004-2005 and it did not work. we were determined that this time it would work. we reached a number of agreements. brian lamb: you say in your book that to general petronius was

interested in general entrance. -- gen. petraeus was interested in gen. patraeus. general bolger: david patraeus is the man of the match. he is the general most people identify with iraq and afghanistan. for all of his talents and skills, he was the commander of a surge in both countries that was temporary. he talks about the surge of ideas, and the ideas lasted. the sunnis are now with isis not with the government in baghdad. they are struggling to get arab support. that surge worked. it started before general david petraeus was there. it was underway before he took command.

great. he jumpstarted and he deserves credit. but that idea did not persist. , they did not crest the baghdad -- trust that baghdad government because it was largely shia and kurds. other ethnic religious groups. when americans began to withdraw, sunni arabs lost. the prime minister of iraq -- a guy who played with the election results in 2010 to try to keep himself in office and tried to do it again last year and was finally run out with pressure from us. he made a temporary agreement with sunni arabs, but he showed his true colors.

maliki was a guy who spent time in iran. he never fully trusted the americans or the sunni arabs. many sunni arabs were, but not all. he did not trust them. that temporary surge of ideas was the same as the temporary surge of troops. the ocean is fair. but it is an ephemeral. the beach is still there. what has changed? what have they changed? brian lamb: there are two generals the got attention for the wrong reasons. one of them is stanley mcchrystal. how well do you know him? and, what was the reaction that article came out? in rolling stone that michael hastings wrote. general bolger: he is the unknown man of the iraqi war. those americans are not aware of this, eating our special operation forces, he was the guy that made sure we went after and did the damage on the rate on bin laden. general mcchrystal used to say that to fight a number, you need a network. -- to fight to a network, you need a network. he organized better integration

with the cia. we learned things from his people -- in the old days, they used to operate in a backed him. you did not know what they were doing. they came in the night and left in the night. they were the experts at chasing down enemy leadership, and that was stanley mcchrystal. he was then put in command in a afghanistan in a conventional mode. but you know, he spent so much time in the secret world, when he dealt with the media, he was caught flat-footed. he agreed to embed with michael hastings who was at that time writing for "rolling stone," and he looked to be a pretty good guy to write the article. his brother was an infantry the -- lieutenant. hastings loved writing by the military. he had a little bit of a rebel streak. i think he thought it would be cool to be covered by rolling stone -- share the cover with lady gaga something.

to get the word out to people who otherwise do not know what the military is doing. what he did not know is, they never set the ground rules. and hastings recorded all of the locker room talk. you asked me earlier -- what do generals think about him? what we say among each other is one thing. stanley mcchrystal just blew off steam, the problem was that hastings wrote it all down. we lost stanley mcchrystal when we needed him most. david petraeus was not available. most people would agree that when he went into afghanistan, he was tired physically. he had a few minor health problems that had worn him down. there are other things going on in his life. all of those were distractors for david patraeus. these situation with paula

broadwell had begun to bubble up and all of that. losing stanley mcchrystal was tough at the time we did. and i think in a lot of ways he was a special ops guy and he just did not know the press as well. brian lamb: i want to read back what you have written. most officers look at the press and other civilian visitors much as citydwellers regard pigeons: noisy, obnoxious, and numerous. explain that. general bolger: it comes down to -- military guys do not have much to say to the press. we are always worried about operational security. what we want to tell press is usually innocuous. mom and apple pie. the troops are doing great. and as are doing great.

but it is not really news. , if a person like me makes news, i will probably get a call from my chain of command telling me that my services are "no longer needed." on the other hand, if i feed you the pablum the public affairs wants me to, it will never get printed. it puts the military in a position where they can either break even when they make news and lose. when i was a military guy, i did the bare minimum of press. as the war went on, the press became increasingly skeptical. there had been enough generals who talked happy talk and told us we were about to win. i realize, especially by the time i was in afghanistan 2011-2013, the press did not want to hear anything from me that i wanted to tell them. brian lamb: you also wrote that top military officers gave views to civilians behind closed doors disdaining the old washington games.

should they speak up? general bolger: after we retire, we can say what we think. i am not a guy who thinks that generals should be involved in politics. that to is a domestic issue. but i think on military subjects, we should at least offer opinions in public. all we can do is go with what the military is thinking and presented to the public. our personal opinions -- we certainly have them. there is a lot more disagreement in military circles behind closed doors they and you might think. i spoke with secretary rumsfeld secretary gates, secretary hagel, every one of them. where i was sitting as close as i am to you, and to them i could give my honest opinion. but when the door opened, it the opinion giving was going to be the secretary's opinion. they listened to what i said but they went their own way.

brian lamb: you wrote -- do you agree with that? general bolger: secretary gates sent to bank troop surge is into asia during his time -- sent two troop surges into asia during his time. i think the military has to give hard advice. the advice i did not give was to say, look, you have signed us up, we as americans have signed up for a multi-decade counter insurgency.

are you ok with that? are the american people ok with that? do you understand that we will have troop in a rack for the next 20-30 years. do you understand that we will have troops in iraq for decades? are we good with that? that discussion was never had. the cause it was never had, we do not know how long these commitments will last. in korea, it was understood that we would support south korea as long as it took because we signed a treaty. we have not signed a treaty with iraq and afghanistan and there is no effort to do so. that tells me we have not had that discussion. in korea there was no doubt that we would support the korean government because we signed a treaty. we have not signed a treaty around afghanistan and have not done that. that tells me we have not had that discussion. brian lamb: what do you think of michael waltz? general bolger: i think he is very knowledgeable. are you talking about just and unjust wars? brian lamb: here's a clip from his book. [video clip] michael waltz: today, we have a policy of assumptions. right now, we are assuming.

it was just discussed today at the london conference, but we are assuming that the afghan national army and afghan national police can stand on its own. i find it difficult to wrap my mind around how they are going to do alone, without our support, what western nations -- 40 two western nations could not do in the last 10 years. and personally, i have been hearing that in pentagon briefings and at the white house since 2005. that the national afghanistan army would be able to stand on its own. my 2005, by 2007 -- general bolger: he nailed it. it is a long-term effort. whenever you start talking about another fighting year, you are in the mental framework of a british general on the western front saying "one more push."

to break the german trench line in 1917. you have to make a long-term commitment. the one thing that would have damaged recruitment of isis and the taliban the most was telling them the united states was never going to leave. we did not need 100,000 troops there. 10,000 or 12,000 that state to provide training and was willing to stick with it would have done it. it would have done very much damage to recruitment. the americans are not pulling out. every time we publicly talk about a deadline or limit or begin to discuss a withdrawal plan, back to mao tse tung. the enemy retreats, we

advance. brian lamb: how far can this country go and how much can we afford when we are in debt? $18 trillion. general bolger: that is a great discussion. that is a matter that should be debated in public. it should just not be on the authority of the commander in chief and should be a public debate. most of these cases do not require immediate action. we have been at it for a long time, we can certainly have a debate. in this book, i want to get people thinking about what just happened in the last 14 years, why it happened, and what we should do about it. one of those things we should do about it is we should have an honest debate of where we should put our troops and how long they should stay. our constitution has ways that can be arranged. our congress can authorize use of military force. the congress and president together can make treaties and submit them to the senate. the places it you mentioned. south korea, japan, germany under nato, those are all

authorized treaties that we -- the senate, advised in and consented on. they could be ratified tomorrow if they so choose. brian lamb: you write "the war required away to use adversaries, and we failed," did any generals do good job? that is a broad statement. general bolger: i want to distinguish one thing. as far as individual leadership -- ethics -- i think generals did do a good job. in this regard -- you know -- there is nobody here who was not trying to be a good field commander. the mistake was in elections -- the gap, the error. backing into this counterinsurgency, the idea that you can fight a regular enemy with hundreds of thousands of

u.s. troops in the lead. by definition, that was not sustainable. senator obama's statement was very true. that was where the gap occurred intellectually. at that point, the military needed to go to leadership and say, here are your choices. you can pull out now, having knocked out their conventional armies and leave it to them. you can leave a small force to help them, or you can commit to 20 or 30 years. choose one. we never had that choice. brian lamb: how the decisions during your time -- or before that -- do you think politicians made political decisions as to what we did in iraq and afghanistan? general bolger: all decisions are political. both surges had a domestic political -- brian lamb: i mean, looking at the next election. general bolger: i think it was there but it was almost the reverse. president bush, to use his term, they had a shellacing in the domestic election of november 2006. they basically told him, cut

your losses and pull out. they gave him all the cover in the world and he had a new democratic congress coming in that one of that. -- that wanted that as a domestic priority. instead, he chose to do the surge. he did the opposite of what conventional wisdom in washington said to do. barack obama in 2009 he is the new president. he comes in and had certainly run on a relative peace platform. but yet basically poses a surge model. in both cases, their domestic constituency were probably pulling the opposite. but they did the commander-in-chief thing. in that regard, they are not that dissimilar to another commander-in-chief president harry s truman. everybody loads him today for standing up to the russians in berlin, for nato for korea. that we forget sometimes that

truman left office in 1953 with a 29% approval rating. vilified. basically, the opposition party had taken control of the government. sometimes the weight of history will look back and see that decisions were not all political. i think there was some actual courage is shown by both administrations. brian lamb: what do you find in your classroom? general bolger: i teach students about 18-23 years old. a wide variety of folks. north carolina state university is largely a science technology, and mathematics and engineering folks. some liberal artists in there. we also have a very strong reserve officer training corps program. army, navy, air force, marines. brian lamb: what do they think of this war? general bolger: they see it not dissimilar to what i saw in vietnam. they applied the service of the guys over there and they look at

guys like me and say, how did you screw it all up? and i told him, let's learn from this. so that we do not screw it up. brian: david cook followed several soldiers around that had been injured in iraq. here is video i want to to comment on. [video clip] >> this is what they did. this is what their war was. they were cowboys going around this vicious neighborhood, trying to get to know the populace. that was the main idea of this counterinsurgency strategy. they were basically just waiting to get blown up. at night, they would search for bad guys who were blowing them up. >> turn against bandages, grenades. all of them carrying a rifle. some of them good luck charms.

sometimes they would put one foot in front of the others so only one would get loan up. -- blown up. sometimes they joked about what the last words would be. they were getting their jeeps and off they would go. this day, this trip was on a street in baghdad from one camp to another. driving slow enough to find a bomb before it went off. you can see in the distance right now -- there goes. and then [explosion] brian lamb: have you seen that before? general bolger: i have been there before. david was exactly right. that is what we asked young men and women to do every day. not just in vehicles, not just in helicopters but on foot. and the boot is not armored, and , we lost men and women by doing that. we have to think hard before we

send young people in do that stuff on behalf of the country. it cannot be something where we say we don't know how long it will last. very, very hazardous. the other thing i would add, and david mentions this in his work. many of these people have been there multiple times. i'm am not, by any means, the recordholder. many of these young people were serving three and four times, because our military was not large enough or the mission. they include people from across the entire country. their heroism is not in doubt. that is where i would kick myself because guys like me should have given him better things to do. brian lamb: have you seen "american sniper?" the movie? general bolger: i plan to. brian lamb: it was the biggest selling movie in january, ever. you see a lot of things like this in there. during the afghan war and iraqi

war, we left coverage of those -- we got less coverage of those wars on television certainly been in vietnam. what is your sense of what the american people think of that? after the embedding and that you did not see a little -- many reports. general bolger: the embedding was on the initial phase. to a degree, the news media is not unlike our military. it is built for small, concise wars. a village town war like that, it is difficult to cover. it seems like every day, you are because, as david saidit seems like every day, you are out doing the same thing. patrolling around in a vehicle or aircraft trying to find the enemy. you find him, he shoots at you you shoot at him, whatever. very hard to cover. during vietnam, the only movie which made money on vietnam was a john wayne movie, "the green beret. " i think people saw it just because they like john wayne.

but during the war, most of the movies that were made were not well-liked or well looked on. it took a couple years after for other films to get coverage. now, we went through a time when military movies made money. but even "the hurt locker," not a lot of viewers. the american people support the soldier. to me, that is to the credit of the american people. they know what they want to know or want to feel about what men and women have gone through in this war. they don't understand it and frankly, it frustrates them. they don't know why it turned out this way. they are citizens of a superpower and they cannot understand why people are poking alongside the road looking for explosives in garbage piles. brian: why are we? >> we don't understand this enemy and how to go after them. we mistakingly believe that we have to rebuild countries, but what we need to do is narrow our focus, figure out who can kill us and go after them and only them. except the fact that there are parts of the world where bad things happen and we cannot fix all of it.

brian lamb: you see these convoys and you know people are going to get hit. and you just wonder, why do we keep going after that and what good has it done and what impact has us being there had on all this activity with al qaeda and isis? general bolger: without leaders, it is hard to mount international terrorism attacks. that has been a positive affect. with regards to the country, the jury is still out. it does not seem to be positive. iraq and afghanistan are i mean both hobbled countries which now may not make it without american support unit we

have asked our men and women to do difficult things and they have done it well. but we should not asked them to -- but to should we have asked them to do all those things? that has to be done by local folks. the have to be iraqi were afghan. we need to stick to how to knock out conventional enemy forces. focus on that and that is the fight we need to fight and leave counterinsurgency to local people. brian lamb: what is your favorite part of this book? if you were going to pick a part of it that you think everybody ought to read? general bolger: the part i recommend that everyone should read -- and it was a hard book to write -- i would point them toward chapter 17. chapter 17 is called "attrition." it's tells the story of the state of the american military

and the state of the war well into it. we are pulling out of a rock that year, it is in 2011, 2012. we are trying to keep things in peace and in control south of kandahar. i'll soldiers are having trouble psychologically, dealing with multiple tours of duty. our leadership is having trouble seeing the war, because all they see our statistics and numbers. brian lamb: i will read what you write. general bolger: that's what happens when you send people over and over to an unwon war.

is that what we want to do to i mean our citizens? i know it is not what i wanted to do we have means of stopping to my soldiers. it, discipline and stuff like that. but, people are just asking, what am i doing over here? brian lamb: your son is in the military. general bolger: my son is a west point graduate. class of 2010. he is in armor officer. he was an infantry battalion in afghanistan. he has been in fire fights. he has done his job. but i can tell you, his five-year obligation is coming up in may and i think he is going to get out. not because he didn't like service, but i think he is ready to move on like a lot of his classmates. brian lamb: our guest has been lt. gen. daniel bolger, rtd. his book is called "why we lost: a general's inside account of the iraq and afghanistan wars." thank you.

>> for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> here are some other programs you might like. james rise in talking about his book. documentary filmmaker rory kennedy with her film. and the inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction. you can watch this any time or search the entire it library at c-span.org.

>> in a moment, washington journal is live here on c-span with your calls and this morning's latest news. indent 10:00 eastern, we will take you to the center for american progress for remarks by former secretary of state hillary clinton. and at noon, the house gavels in in with legislative business scheduled for 2:00. >> coming up this morning on washington journal, a look at the 2016 republican budget plans released last week in the house and senate. then, the associated press talks about the freedom of information act and how the obama administration and other federal agencies have responded to request for government files. and a discussion on the social

security administration so-called death master file and how inaccurate records have led to improper payments to the ceased individuals. ♪ host: republican senator ted cruz made it official after midnight last night. he sent a tweet announcing he is formally running for president of the united states. the first official person to get in officially. he put out a video as well. he will make the announcement in person today. we will have live coverage of the speech at liberty university in virginia at 10:00 a.m. eastern time. it can watch it live on c-span 2. the first person to officially enteral the