McChrystal: "Impossible to argue" that the war on terror was worth it

In 2020, I asked Stanley McChrystal, the former Joint Special Operations Command and Afghanistan War commander, if the War on Terror had been worth it. “It would be impossible to argue that it was,” he answered. “The outcome just hasn’t been positive enough to argue that. I think that we can never know a counterfactual, we can never know what would have happened if we’d gone in and done things differently, so I can’t argue it automatically would have been different. I think the things that were done with good intentions, mostly. But no. We just made so many fundamental mistakes in how we approached it that the question is, which again, you and I can’t answer, had we gone in with a different mindset, a totally different approach, which would have been more of a counterinsurgency approach, building through the state, would it have worked? I can’t say it would’ve, but I think it would have been a better approach.”