under president ronald reagan we recruited the mujahideen. we recruited people from the arabian peninsula, from the africa come from different places to go to afghanistan to fight the old soviet union which was occupying afghanistan, in the name of islam. after the world was over and we forgot about afghanistan, they stood there on the base. the were based in arabic was the beginning of al-qaeda. we in essence with and shaping factor that brought that about. and then they got very upset at us because we abandoned them. they try to go back to the home country. the only country did want them armed, opposing the system because they have become so devoted to their version of islam, and they felt very stranded and abandoned and they tried to take revenge on the united states and september 11 happened. the invasion of iraq brought on the current wave under isis, or isil, the islamic state of syria and iraq, iraq and syria. if we didn't have a war in iraq, they would not have been an isis. if we didn't help the mujahideen in afghanistan, they would

concept of ghost wars, and, you know, effectively by doing a deal with the devil, with the afghani mujahideen, we created osama bin laden, and we created the circumstances. and i think policymakers sometimes call that blowback, you know? in covert areas, that's the blowback of our secret cia operation. but how do we look at that? and there are many examples of that. of course, we had to do a pact with hitler -- with stalin to defeat hitler. we had, you know, many, many issues like that in our foreign policy. how can we look at that? it's almost like dealing with one rhino crisis, sometimes you have a baby rhino that many years later, in the next generation, comes back to haunt you. >> very much so. and then sometimes, and i see situations like this right now, where you've got clashing rhinos. and you've also got situations where people will define them very differently. syria, you look at that absolute quagmire which is one of the types of rhinos i call a gordian knot in terms of how hard it is to unpack. i think you have, you know, russia and the united states defining the nature of the thre