Epstein Secrets

Jackson Diehl September 12 -- Ryan Crocker sounds very far from Washington — and not only because he is talking over an uncertain phone line from Kabul. The U.S. ambassador is one of the great protagonists of the post-9/11 era, serving more than half of the last 10 years in Afghanistan, Iraq and P

once, after Iraq, but was coaxed back into service by Obama and Petraeus after U.S. relations with Karzai deteriorated to the breaking point. But Crocker has two simple points to make. First: Wanting the war against al-Qaeda to be over doesn't mean that it can be ended soon. "There are still a lot of

troops home." Remarkably, none of the other seven Republicans on the stage at the Ronald Reagan presidential library challenged that conclusion. Crocker gets it. "I know Americans are tired of war. I'm kind of tired, too," he said. In his years of service he has endured rocket fire; verbal barbecuin

ly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption," said Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012. "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright

and outright impossible to fix it. ... The corruption was so entrenched and so much a part of the lifestyle of the establishment writ broadly..." Crocker told interviewers from the government that he felt "a sense of futility": "I was struck by something [then-president Hamid] Karzai said and repeate

ly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption," said Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012. "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright

and outright impossible to fix it. ... The corruption was so entrenched and so much a part of the lifestyle of the establishment writ broadly..." Crocker told interviewers from the government that he felt "a sense of futility": "I was struck by something [then-president Hamid] Karzai said and repeated