Rachel Maddow was interviewed by Richard Engel over a decade ago. They replayed portions of it the other night on MSBNC. What struck me was their open acknowledgement that millions of dollars that was sent by us to build infrastructure for the Afghani people was instead used to build palaces that looked like Donald Trump decorated them.

Why did we keep sending money, for a full decade after this knowledge became public?

I also heard on MSNBC that the Afghan Army wasn't getting paid, even though we were supposed to be supporting them. Why did we continue to pay the government knowing they were not using those funds to support their Army?

And how can we now blame any of the Afghani soldiers for refusing to fight the Taliban?

This is complex and I don't want to minimize that, but as Lawrence O'Donnell said the other night "We never learned how to end a war."

We got in, but we couldn't get out. And now, I'm not sure many would argue that we should have stayed, but surely we could have started the process of removing those we knew would be in danger long before now?

This is what I think is most upsetting. It's not that we are leaving, it's that the folks on the ground who needed to organize the departure just waited too long and failed utterly to implement systems to make it less dangerous and chaotic.

Thank for this piece.