The United States spent “2 trillion dollars to train and equip the Afghan military over the past 20 years. They fell in a week.”
Together, with our NATO Allies and partners, we have trained and equipped over three hu- — nearly 300,000 current serving members of the military — of the Afghan National Security Force, and many beyond that who are no longer serving. Add to that, hundreds of thousands more Afghan National Defense and Security Forces trained over the last two decades. [...] After 20 years — a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans killed, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health — I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome. [...] And I said, "You know, the United States came here to make sure that we got this terrorist, Osama bin Laden, and that terrorists didn’t amass again to — to go after our country. And then we’re going to have to leave." And a young woman said, "You can’t leave. You can’t leave." It was — it was heartbreaking. "You can’t leave," she said. "I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. If you leave, I’ll never be able to be a doctor." Well, that’s why we spent so much time and money training the Afghan Security Forces to do the work of defending that. If every work —