thank you to peter baker, anne gearan, vivian salama and peter bergen. and monday "the pbs newshour" for more on the fall of afghanistan. our conversation continues on the "washington week" extra. find it on our social media and our website. this week's topic is covid-19. i'm pete williams. good nht from washington. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: corporate funding for "washington week" is provided b. additional funding provided by the estate of arnold adams and koo and patricia yuen through the yuen foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and sandra and carl delay-magnuson. the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. announcer: you're watchi (man) this program is made possible in part by contributions to your pbs stations from viewers like you. thank you. can you all live the ultimate retirement? you can. (man) from the new world cente

. >>> joining me now, vivian salama, a former colleague and now with the "wall street journal." good morning. what a thing we are watching in kabul. you have a lot of knowledge how this unfolded over the years. what's going flew your mind right now? >> it is extraordinary. i think a lot of us who spent time in these places, including afghanistan and pakistan, where i lived -- it is something we all kinds of geft was inevitable at some point when the u.s. left. but i think over the past 20 years so many journalists, academics whona look at this ha real expected that the u.s. would invest time more in strategy. there is this aversion here in the u.s. in recent years about this concept of nation building, administrations constandly say we are not going to places to nation build. butac to an extent there has toe some sort of strategy as far as creating institutions when you go into a country like afghanistan that had been decimated by the taliban andn then the u.s.ma went in with na allies post 9/11.t it was seen very much as a legitimate effort to root out al qaeda from the mountai