Last weekend, for the first time ever, a long-term cease-fire deal in America’s longest-ever war went into effect. But on Sunday evening, viewers of 60 Minutes, America’s premier weekly news digest, were treated to a friendly interview with a war criminal who was pardoned by Donald Trump and now has an apparel line.

By any measure, the big national security news last week was that the United States, Afghanistan, and the Taliban signed a peace agreement that rapidly returns U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to Obama-era numbers, with an eye toward full withdrawal by fall of 2021. In return, the Taliban have vowed to cut ties with international terror groups and join the national political process. The cease-fire, struck Saturday in Qatar, is a consummate compromise, one that leaves all signatories bloodied and skeptical. To the chagrin of embattled Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, whose main opponent in a recent disputed election has formed a parallel government, the agreement requires Kabul to release some 5,000 Taliban prisoners from captivity. (Once upon a time, Republicans demanded the hide of a Democratic president for freeing one-thousandth as many Taliban prisoners in exchange for a single wayward American soldier.)

While members of the national security managerial class put aside their political differences to deride the accord as a dangerous step for the U.S., many more Americans have wearied of a war that has cost 2,300 American and nearly 50,000 Afghan lives. “At least three times over the past 19 years … the U.S. could have had such a deal, on terms at least as favorable to Washington as the one reached now, and likely better,” the Daily Beast’s Spencer Ackerman wrote last weekend, and he was right. Better late than never, but it still took 18 years and a conceited prig in the White House to reverse the natsec consensus against peace.

The agreement is a small, significant step toward peace, but the path forward is unclear. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t work for 60 Minutes: There’s no consensus view on it, so there’s no way to prepackage it in 12 minutes of lenswork.

On convicted (and pardoned) war criminal Eddie Gallagher, counterintuitive as it may seem, news directors seem to hold a consensus opinion: He makes damn good TV. It was made explicit in the opening narration of the 60 Minutes segment by David Martin, CBS’s longtime “big picture” reporter of national security news: “The trial of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher was a riveting courtroom drama, in which a decorated warfighter with four combat tours faced life in prison for crimes prosecutors said he committed on the battlefield.” SEAL … riveting drama … decorated warfighter … prosecutors said. Martin then began the interview by saying, “People either love you as an American hero ...” Gallagher finished his thought: “or despise me.” That’s TV gold. One suspects that if Gallagher didn’t exist, NCIS, CBS’s other undead television franchise, would have to create him.