[Music] i was in the state department the day of 9 11. and as soon as the second plane hit you knew you just knew that we would have to find out who did it and have those people pay a price i remember people being pretty honest about this new war on terror and they said yes we're going to go to afghanistan but terrorism of this sort was a movement it looked like a simple picture it was afghanistan it was bin laden al-qaeda the taliban it was just that but then it started to be about saddam hussein about weapons of mass destruction it became threats to north korea it became radicalism jihadism it became about isis it's hard to look at the last 20 years and think that the west's reaction to 911 hasn't made terrorism worse [Music] none of us had ever thought this would be a 20-year war we didn't think this was going to be a substantially different kind of war we'd experienced before the ideas of war happening in some country far away now entered a new world where these things could happen right there in our own neighborhood almost every single thing that i have done over the last 20 years has been either directly or indirectly related to what we now call the war on terror there was this great anticipation in washington you recall when the president went to ground zero and said basically the terrorists will hear from us and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon everybody knew what that meant and when you heard president bush talk about you're either with us or against it that's the thing that stuck out to me you're with us or against us what does that really mean is the war on terror against everybody who doesn't help us who isn't backing whatever it is we do is the war on terror against pakistan what is it exactly and that was never never defined carefully there was this real sense that al qaeda might already have quote cells were there other sleeper cells in the united states ready to take action there's been a surge in known al-qaeda operatives talking about attacking the u.s in october the seventh 2001 i was lying in front of the tv with my baby son on my chest fast asleep and the tv suddenly cut into a live broadcast saying that the bombing had begun in afghanistan on my orders the united states military has begun strikes against al-qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the taliban regime in afghanistan my wife all the kids we all bundled into the car drove to heathrow airport the last thing i said to my wife she asked me how long did i think i was going to be away for and i said a week maybe two weeks this could be a long trip i didn't get home for two months it was my first time in afghanistan i was in total shock at the country i'd never seen anything like it this was a country that was living hundreds of years in the past it was a spectacular journey through a beautiful country some incredible people who were very welcoming people who had no sense whatsoever of what it was that was happening in their country i remember first going into afghanistan and i went in with donald rumsfeld and we went all over when i look at the names of where we went and we went to mazaru sharif we you know we go to helm on and when i heard those names in the last few months and the taliban taking each of those places back that stung i remember walking in to do a story about one of the schools for the kids and all these little children of there were in an english class to learn english but their teacher could barely speak english it's hard for me to even think about how some of those children and women we did stories about it potentially going back to way it was before remember i reached out to a guy who was at my school who went on to be a reporter and i said what would you and he said the number one thing you have to remember is that any person you talk to you will be putting in danger someone will spy on them and report them to the authorities and that's their lives in danger remember that so do not take this lightly people always ask me if i'm afraid and and i think there's a little a little um probably gender stereotyping there like wait you're a woman and you're in this war zone and weren't you scared you've got isis in that factory right there yes ice is just there and we're leaving now in many ways you're less afraid at the moment in your mind you accept that something bad can happen i remember the first time and i was staying in baghdad at one of the old saddam hussein palaces and i know there's a rocket strike on the on the base there and got up startled but but then you just got used to it and you're like oh okay i'm okay everybody seems okay fine um go back to sleep i almost feel like the the body and the mind when you go to places to cover wars that are potentially dangerous places there's something that happens in the brain that keeps you from running in fear in afghanistan i almost felt like it was peaceful [Music] and i still remember that feeling of feeling the kind of the percussion wave hitting you for the first time that feeling of not just hearing what a bomb sounds like but just feeling it inside your body and it was terrifying the first time i'd seen a dead body first time you're seeing fighters dying on the side of the road first time you're hearing hit the heavy clashes of open gun fights i didn't set out to be a journalist syria made me into a journalist i was there to do my thesis on the arab spring and it was actually only a friend who said to me you do realize if you're in syria you should probably write for some newspapers because no one's allowed it in that's when the uprisings started and when i knew i had to be involved in some way in reporting what was happening in a country i loved in 2004 things are starting to fray around the edges there was an ambush of some first cavalry division soldiers and i said i have to talk to those soldiers i have to talk to those soldiers because it was the first they'd lost eight soldiers in one day in one day it was the largest loss of life for the first cavalry division since the vietnam war they had those soldiers lined up and those were the most powerful stories and remain that today that i had heard in that war there's one guy named sergeant robert miltenberger who looked like the last thing on earth he wanted to do was be interviewed and the moment i just said tell me what happened he started crying charlie company truck just like the one we're riding in rode down the road to us four flat tires engine on fire i think those were stories i felt like americans hadn't seen and if if you ask them what what they're fighting for it's just the guy that left my left my guy to the right that's what i'm fighting for that's what they were fighting for because in many places they didn't really know what they were fighting for well i think there was some sense that this was going to be drawn out and that this was going to be long if you really thought about what the intelligence and law enforcement officials were really saying the war on terror essentially allowed a lot of quote unquote secular regimes in the middle east to position themselves as allies of the west against muslim terrorism leaders like mubarak in egypt and assad in syria were able to say to the united states and europe look let me stay in power and i'll root out these terrorists who are a threat to you in the west syria became an enormous proxy war and in the end it became a a hellscape of a civil war that killed thousands and thousands of people people take a lot of risk over there there are a lot of journalists who've been who've been hurt and and bob woodruff of course is one of them and that story and bob story was intimately involved in on world news tonight attacked in iraq abc's bob woodruff and cameraman doug vote severely wounded in a roadside bombing especially in the beginning it was really hard for me to give up the possibility of going and reporting in in countries far away that were in the midst of conflict you know even violent conflict you know war conflict having bob injured changed me but but and realize that all those things you shove in the back of your brain for that to happen to bob changed me it sobered me this is what bob and doug were doing shortly before the attack they were riding in an iraqi armored vehicle they had two cameras one in doug's hands the other attached to the front of the vehicle my days of going out and covering wars are over because i promised to my wife and my kids that i would not cover wars anymore i told as a compromise can i go cover conflicts those i do the ones that at least seem to be safe to cover when president bush left and i went to crawford and talked to the president about him saying for so long we're doing well it's going well we're you know and i said to him why did you say that why did you keep saying that when you knew it wasn't when you knew it wasn't and he said to keep the morale up when you say we're winning you know what the american people here you know how that will play you can't have the commander-in-chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing it either it's not worth it or you're losing i said they knew if anyone knew they knew it it wasn't going well we just pulled out of afghanistan there's a lot of discussion about okay what does that mean for al qaeda does it reform isis is still a major threat how does this impact the war on terror that we're not in afghanistan and the way that we were it's so difficult to fight these ideologies and these ideologies are bred on the idea that the west has an imperial overreach and so really all we did was make ourselves more powerful and make ourselves more of a target and i think it's really hard to see how anything really has changed in the last 20 years there's been a desire to pull out of afghanistan for more than 10 years because no one thought this was going to last this long the us is tired of wars the ones that we fought in the middle east were not very successful in terms of benefiting our country of america except for keeping other terrorist attacks out of the u.s in that sense it was very successful so far but it's tiring there isn't a simple answer there isn't a simple solution there isn't a simple target the world unfortunately is just much more complex and unless we get to some of the root causes of some of the anger that feeds hatred towards us then things will never really change hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to download the abc news app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching