Learning to Lob Ideals Over the Horizon.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Editor's Notes

* Aug. 20 was the day pundits flooded my email inbox with their opinions.

While Aug. 31 was the final day of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, that point 11 days earlier seemed to be when everyone came to the conclusion that America had lost a war.

So the condemnation inundation began.

Lawmakers and pundits. Right wing and left. Democrats, Republicans and libertarians. Think tankers, veterans groups, retired generals and colonels--everyone had an opinion about the 20-year war. Some wanted to score political points against the current administration. Some pleaded for the lives of Afghans left behind. Several armchair quarterbacks claimed to know exactly what went wrong.

They quoted the lives lost. They quoted the money spent.

I confess that I read few of these press releases. The subject line usually told me all I needed to know about their point of view.

There was one piece that stood out, though. It was a firstperson account of one retired Air Force special operator's experience in Afghanistan listening in on Taliban fighters as he circled them in an AC-130 gunship. Ian Fritz in The Atlantic provided several anecdotes from the 600 total hours he spent monitoring Taliban communications. Trained to speak Dari and Pushto and presumably outfitted with the best eavesdropping equipment available, Fritz listened to the everyday conversations of his opponents.

If I were to recommend only one article to sum up "what went wrong in Afghanistan," this would be it.

He concluded while circling the skies above Afghanistan that this was a foe who would be willing to wait out the United States if it took 10 years, 20 years or 50. They had an unshakable will to continue their jihad and retake their country.

I pair that article with my experience in Vietnam, which came two decades after the war there ended when I visited the southern part of the country.

As a journalist in Southeast Asia, I read every book about the U.S involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that I could put my hands on. One of the best I read was The Tunnels of CM Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate. Along witli interviewing the so-called American "tunnel rats" ordered to go into the structures, the authors spoke to many of the Viet Cong who built and lived in these tunnels, which were used to both hide from U.S. forces and to attack them.

The Cu Chi tunnels are now a tourist attraction, so I traveled there to see them for myself.

What I found was basically a military camp located...