WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials.
By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.
Those who complained about Donald J. Trump going to Mar-a-Lago are awfully quiet on Joe Biden’s 18+ trips to Delaware.
The drumbeat of warnings over the summer raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.
One report in July — as dozens of Afghan districts were falling and Taliban fighters were laying siege to several major cities — laid out the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a person familiar with the intelligence.
Intelligence agencies predicted that should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart. It is unclear whether other reports during this period presented a more optimistic picture about the ability of the Afghan military and the government in Kabul to withstand the insurgents.
A historical analysis provided to Congress concluded that the Taliban had learned lessons from their takeover of the country in the 1990s. This time, the report said, the militant group would first secure border crossings, commandeer provincial capitals and seize swaths of the country’s north before moving in on Kabul, a prediction that proved accurate.
But key American decisions were made long before July, when the consensus among intelligence agencies was that the Afghan government could hang on for as long as two years, which would have left ample time for an orderly exit. On April 27, when the State Department ordered the departure of nonessential personnel from the embassy in Kabul, the overall intelligence assessment was still that a Taliban takeover was at least 18 months away, according to administration officials.
One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified intelligence reports, said that even by July, as the situation grew more volatile, intelligence agencies never offered a clear prediction of an imminent Taliban takeover. The official said their assessments were also not given a “high confidence” judgment, the agencies’ highest level of certainty.
As late as a week before Kabul’s fall, the overall intelligence analysis was that a Taliban takeover was not yet inevitable, the official said.
Paul Plante says
This whole Afghanistnam fiasco has been bull**** from front to back, end of that story.
One more really *****-up political war managed by arrogant fools all puffed up with themselves because America has a lot of weapons of war, and they get to play with them.
It will be the making of a new series of books along the lines of FIASCO – The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks or Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Viet Nam by H.R. McMaster or The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam.
As to “intelligence,” if you ask any VEET NAM grunt, he will tell you that the term “military intelligence” is an oxymoron (a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction), which takes us to a story in the Independent entitled “US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says there was no indication from intelligence that the Afghan army would collapse in 11 days” by Eric Garcia on 19 August 2021, where we have Joe Biden’s top general, who has previously admitted that accompanying then-President Trump through Lafayette Square park to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020, was a mistake after authorities used pepper spray and flashbangs to clear the park and streets of largely peaceful protesters which prompted him to issue an apology days later, saying, “I should not have been there,” with “Corn Pop” back then criticizing Trump’s politicization of the military, saying “Trump] deployed the U.S. military, tear-gassing peaceful protesters in pursuit of a photo opportunity in the service of his reelection,” speaking on the record about the intelligence failures in Afghanistman that go right up to the top, as follows:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley responded to news reports that there were warnings of a rapid collapse of the Afghan army by asserting there was no intelligence to suggest Afghanistan’s army would deteriorate in just 11 days.
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Of course there was “no intelligence,” just as there was no “intelligence” about what was truly going on in VEET NAM, because in a political environment like Washington, bad news if very much frowned upon, and so it gets hidden away, which takes us back to that story, to wit:
Mr Milley spoke at a Pentagon news conference with Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, saying he wanted to respond to news reports about the supposed intelligence, adding that he had previously said at the same podium and in sworn testimony to Congress that the intelligence indicated multiple scenarios.
“One of those was an outright Taliban takeover following a rapid collapse of the Afghan security forces and the government,” he said, adding that other scenarios were a civil war or a negotiated settlement.
But he noted that the timeframe of a rapid collapse was widely estimated to be anywhere from weeks to months or years following the US exit from Afghanistan.
“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” he said.
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And of course they didn’t see it, because in their puffed-up arrogance, they would not have listened , nor heard, which takes us back to a Wall Street Journal entitled “Newly released U.S. government documents reveal military doubts about Afghan conflict” by Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold on Dec. 9, 2019, to wit:
A newly disclosed cache of government documents has revealed that U.S. and allied officials harbored doubts for years over the management and direction of the conflict in Afghanistan, America’s longest-running war.
The documents, released by a government office set up to monitor the U.S.-led effort to rebuild the country, includes notes from previously unpublished interviews involving key decision makers, including civilian and military leaders.
Many of the documents reflect views consistent with previously published accounts of the conflict, including the regular reports by the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, which compiled them and conducted the interviews.
But the blunt assessments of important decision makers are likely to lead to new scrutiny of the Afghan conflict and provide ammunition to critics of the U.S. effort.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, who as a three-star Army general oversaw White House policy in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013, speaking in one of the most hard-hitting interviews, conducted in 2015.
“What are we trying to do here?” Lute added.
“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
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So if that was printed in the Wall Street Journal, how come nobody in Washington, D.C. today seems to know about it?
Is Mark Milley playing too much golf?
Doesn’t he have time to read the news?
Which takes us to a CNBC story entitled “‘Intelligence failure of the highest order’ — How Afghanistan fell to the Taliban so quickly” by Natasha Turak, Abigail Ng and Amanda Macias on 17 August 2021, where we had as follows on the subject of “intelligence,” a quality sorely lacking in Washington, D.C., a city where moronic idiocy prevails, to wit:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The world was shocked this week by horrifying scenes of desperate Afghans swarming the tarmac at Kabul’s international airport, grasping at their last chance to escape a country now completely overrun by the Taliban.
After nearly two decades of war, more than 6,000 American lives lost, over 100,000 Afghans killed and more than $2 trillion spent by the U.S., the outlook for the country’s future was still grim, with regional experts assuming the Taliban would ultimately come to control most of Afghanistan once again.
But few expected a takeover this swift, with so little resistance from the Afghan government and Afghan National Army, the latter of which was funded and trained with $89 billion from the U.S. taxpayer.
end quotes
And what exactly does that have to do with anything, given we are training armies all over the world who can’t fight and aren’t worth a damn, like the ARVN’s in VEET NAM and the Iraqi army?
Getting back to the story:
“While the end result and bloodletting once we left was never in doubt, the speed of collapse is unreal,” one former intelligence official and U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan told CNBC, requesting anonymity due to professional restrictions.
“Why were the Taliban able to so quickly take over?”
“This is a masterpiece, frankly, operationally,” Michael Zacchea, a retired U.S. Marine who led the first American-trained Iraqi Army battalion during the Iraq War, told CNBC.
“Why were they able to take the country faster than we did in 2001?”
The question has been asked by Americans, Afghans, military veterans and international observers alike — and the answer, much like the Afghanistan conflict itself, is complex, multilayered and tragic.
But among the main causes, analysts say, are intelligence failures, a more powerful Taliban, corruption, money, cultural differences, and simple willpower.
Intelligence failure
The Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan, including its capital and the presidential palace, suggests that U.S. military intelligence failed in its assessment of the situation, according to Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“This is an intelligence failure of the highest order,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday, adding that it’s the “biggest intelligence failure” since the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, a campaign of devastating surprise attacks on the U.S. and its allies in 1968.
end quotes
WOW, dude, do you think?
Getting back to that story:
Roggio said the Taliban pre-positioned equipment and materials, organized, planned and executed a “massive offensive” since early May before beginning its “final assault,” while U.S. officials said the local government and military forces should be able to hold out for six months to a year.
Last week, Reuters reported that a U.S. defense official saw Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, falling in 90 days.
Instead, that happened on Sunday, less than 10 days after the first provincial capital of Zaranj was taken by the Taliban.
What’s key to note is that the Taliban did not have to fight their way into Afghanistan’s provincial capitals but rather brokered a series of surrenders, says Jack Watling, a research fellow for land warfare and military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
And when they began making headway in cities, many Afghan forces gave in to them, convinced that the government in Kabul would not back them up.
“The Taliban would infiltrate urban areas, assassinating key people like pilots, threatening the families of commanders, saying if you capitulate, you’ll save your family,” Watling said.
“A lot of people, because they lacked confidence that Kabul would be able to save them, capitulated.”
More and more people chose this route, “so there was very little fighting, which is why it suddenly happened so fast,” he added.
“The speed is not a reflection of military capability, it is a reflection of a collapse in will to fight.”
The news from the Biden administration of the full U.S. withdrawal sped this up, said Stephen Biddle, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.
“When the U.S. announced a total withdrawal, that sent a signal to Afghan soldiers and police that the end was near, and converted chronically poor motivation into acute collapse as nobody wanted to be the last man standing after the others gave up,” he explained.
“Once the signal was sent, contagion dynamics thus took over and the collapse snowballed with increasing speed and virtually no actual fighting,” Biddle added.
“The swift Taliban takeover shows how utterly dependent the Afghan state was on the U.S.-led coalition, materially and psychologically.”
“Even before the U.S. withdrawal, the Afghan government and security forces were fraying at the seams,” said John Ciorciari, director of the International Policy and Weiser Diplomacy Center at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Policy.
“Soon after the U.S. pullout began, Afghan troops and officials began jumping ship, either to appease the Taliban or to retreat into old ethnic militias.”
Afghan government corruption and military weakness
Had the Taliban engaged in a full military onslaught and faced resistance, the blitz of the country would have taken longer — but it still would have happened, Watling believes.
“I think the Taliban would have still won,” he said.
“And this is because the Afghan National Army is comprised of lots of units that are systemically corrupt, have no effective command and control, they don’t know how many people are in their own units, most of their equipment has been taken apart, stolen and sold off, and so they were a completely dysfunctional force.”
It’s also because the Afghan military is woefully underpaid, underfed and undercompensated by the leadership in Kabul.
The “soldiers in many cases have not been fed very well, very rarely been paid and been on duty for a long time away from home … and were not well led,” Watling added, a tactical failure that resulted in heavy casualties to the tune of about 40 soldiers a day for the past several years.
Many army units would sell their equipment to the Taliban for cash, and there were frequent desertions that went unaccounted for, leaving inflated troop numbers on the books.
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Again, how could Mark Milley and Joe Biden, alleging himself to be the best president the United States has ever had, as well as the protector and keeper of the soul of America be ignorant of any of that, given the Washington Post had a story entitled “U.S. taxpayers paid millions for Afghan payroll system that doesn’t work as intended, DOD audit says” by Aaron Gregg a year ago on August 23, 2019, where we learned as follows:
In 2016 the Defense Department began paying a Kabul-based tech company millions of dollars to create a new payroll system for the Afghan government, part of an ambitious effort to prevent fraud by tracking the flow of funds down to individual soldiers and police officers.
The system was created after four audit reports between 2014 and 2017 concluded that a disorganized payroll system for Afghan security forces was failing to adequately protect hundreds of millions in U.S.-funded payments from fraud and abuse.
There were concerns that U.S.-funded paychecks were going to “ghost soldiers” ― fake identities set up so that money could be fraudulently diverted elsewhere.
end quotes
A HOUSE OF CARDS defended by GHOST SOLDIERS paid for by the U.S. taxpayer with money borrowed from China and Japan was all the ****show ever was!
Pathetic is the only word for it, which takes us back to CNBC, as follows:
How little Americans ‘understand Afghanistan’
Central to understanding America’s failure in Afghanistan also comes down to understanding the country’s history and its culture — and how drastically it differs from any Western nation.
“There’s never been a central government in Afghanistan.”
“To think we could establish one was a fool’s errand,” said the former U.S. intelligence officer and Afghan War veteran.
“The ‘surprise’ at the Taliban regaining power shows just how little Americans, from top to bottom, understand Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan is a country of numerous tribes, languages, ethnicities and religious sects, and Washington and its NATO allies were attempting to turn it into a unified democracy premised on largely Western values.
“There was a fundamental failure to understand what the Afghans wanted,” Zacchea, who trained the first U.S.-led Iraqi battalion in 2004, said.
“We assumed they wanted what we had — liberal democracy, Judeo-Christian values …”
“And think they’d just automatically convert.”
“And that is not the case.”
Tribal alliances in Afghanistan very often supersede national ones, or loyalties follow money and power.
And part of the Taliban’s strength lay in the fact that as Pashtuns, they belonged to the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.
“Meanwhile,” the former U.S. intelligence official said, “we basically supported a hodgepodge of ethnic minorities, who never had the capability of unifying the country.”
“We did not understand the tribal dynamics, we never did,” Zacchea said.
“We think everybody wants what we have.”
“It’s cultural obtuseness, obliviousness to their reality and their lived experience.”
Paul Plante says
Here is Joe himself on the “intelligence” he says he received before cutting and running like hell to get out of Afghanistnam, only to have to go back in again, to wit:
Remarks by President Biden on the Drawdown of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan” on July 08, 2021:
Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.
Q Why?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.
It is not inevitable.
Q Do you trust the Taliban, Mr. President?
Do you trust the Taliban, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: You — is that a serious question?
Q It is absolutely a serious question.
Do you trust the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not.
Q Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not trust the Taliban.
Q So why are you handing the country over?
Q Mr. President, is the U.S. responsible for the deaths of Afghans after you leave the country?
Q Mr. President, will you amplify that question, please?
Will you amplify your answer, please — why you don’t trust the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s a — it’s a silly question.
Do I trust the Taliban?
No.
But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.
Q Mr. President, thank you very much.
Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true.
Q Is it — can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true.
They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.